Thrive: The Third Metric to Redefining Success and Creating a Life of Well-Being, Wisdom, and Wonder

by Arianna Huffington

well-being, wisdom, wonder, and giving.

“Darling, just change the channel. You are in control of the clicker. Don’t replay the bad, scary movie.”

how quickly can we get back to that centered place of wisdom, harmony, and strength. It’s in this sacred place that life is transformed from struggle to grace, and we are suddenly filled with trust, whatever our obstacles, challenges, or disappointments. As

So we might as well live life

as if—

everything is rigged in ...

Have you noticed that when we die, our eulogies celebrate our lives very differently from the way society defines success? Eulogies

And it is very telling what we don’t hear in eulogies. We almost never hear things like: “The crowning achievement of his life was when he made senior vice president.”

“She never stopped working. She ate lunch at her desk. Every day.”

“While she didn’t have any real friends, she had six hundred Facebook friends, and she dealt with every email in her in-box every night.”

“His PowerPoint slides were always meticulously prepared.”

Our eulogies are always about the other stuff: what we gave, how we connected, how much we meant to our family and friends, small kindnesses, lifelong pa...

And yet we spend so much time and effort and energy on those résumé entries—entries that lose all significance as soon as our heart stops beating.

Anyone with a smartphone and a full email in-box knows that it’s easy to be busy

while not being aware that we’re actually living.

Socrates said, “the unexamined life is not worth living.”

ease with which the big crises can wipe out the small ones that seemed so critical just a moment before. All of our small anxieties and trivial preoccupations evaporate with the sudden recognition of what really matters. We are reminded of the impermanence of much that we assume is forever and the value of so much we take for granted.

And every day, the world will drag you by the hand, yelling, “This is important! And this is important! And this is important! You need to worry about this! And this! And this!” And each day, it’s up to you to yank your hand back, put it on your heart and say, “No. This is what’s important.” —IAIN THOMAS

“habit breaking.” Each day for a week you choose a habit such as brushing your teeth, drinking your morning coffee, or taking a shower, and simply pay attention to what’s happening while you do it.

What study after study shows is that meditation and mindfulness training profoundly affect every aspect of our lives—our bodies, our minds, our physical health, and our emotional and spiritual well-being. It’s not quite the fountain of youth, but it’s pretty close. When you consider all the benefits of meditation—and more are being found every day—it’s not an exaggeration to call meditation a miracle drug. First, let’s look at physical health. It’s hard to overstate what meditation can do for us here, and the medical uses for it are just beginning to be explored. “Science—the same reductionistic science that is used to evaluate various drugs and medical procedures—has proven that your mind can heal your body,” Herbert Benson and William Proctor write in their book Relaxation Revolution. Indeed, the authors recommend that mind-body science be considered as the third primary treatment option in medicine, right along with surgery and drugs. They write how meditation can impact nausea, diabetes, asthma, skin reactions, ulcers, cough, congestive heart failure, dizziness, postoperative swelling, and anxiety: “Because all health conditions have some stress component.” The authors conclude, “It is no overstatement to say that virtually every single health problem and disease can be improved with a mind-body approach.” It’s the Swiss army knife of medical tools, for conditions both small and large. A study funded by the National Institutes of Health showed a 23 percent decrease in ...

How does it do all this? It’s not about just distracting us from pain and stress; it literally changes us at the genetic level. Researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, and Harvard Medical School found that the relaxation response—the state of calm produced by meditation, yoga, and breathing exercises—actually switched on genes that are related to augmenting our immune system, reducing inflammation, and fighting a range of conditions from arthritis to high blood pressure to diabetes. So with all these results, it’s no surprise that, according to another study, meditation correlates to reduced yearly medical costs.

It also physically changes our brains. One study found that meditation can actually increase the thickness of the prefrontal cortex region of the brain and slow the thinning that occurs there as we age, impacting cognitive functions such as sensory and emotional processing. Dr. Richard Davidson, professor of psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin and a leading scholar on the impact of contemplative practices on the brain, used magnetic resonance imaging machines (MRIs) to study the brain activity of Tibetan monks. The studies, as Davidson put it, have illuminated for the first time the “further reaches of human plasticity and transformation.” He calls meditation mental training: “What we found is that the trained mind, or brain, is physically different from the untrained one.” And when our brain is changed, so is the way in which we e...

And meditation boosts our creativity. “Ideas are like fish,” wrote director and longtime meditator David Lynch in his book Catching the Big Fish. “If you want to catch little fish, you can stay in the shallow water. But if you want to catch the big fish, you’ve got to go deeper. Down deep, the fish are more powerful and more pure. They’re huge and abstract. And they’re very beautiful.” Steve Jobs, a lifelong practitioner of meditation, affirmed the connection between meditation and creativity: “If you just sit and observe, you will see how restless your mind is. If you try to calm it, it only makes it worse, but over time it does calm, and when it does, there’s room to hear more subtle things—that’s when your intuition starts to blossom and you start to see things more clearly and be in the present more. Your mind just slows down, and you see a tremendous expanse in the moment. You see so much more than you could see before.”

As Gregory Berns, author of Iconoclast: A Neuroscientist Reveals How to Think Differently, writes, insight and discovery are most accessible to us when we break up our routine. “Only when the brain is confronted with stimuli that it has not encountered before does it start to reorganize perception. The surest way to provoke the imagination, then, is to seek out environments you have no experience with.”

We need to liberate ourselves from the tyranny of our fight-or-flight mechanism. And yet much of our life has actually been structured so that we live in an almost permanent state of fight-or-flight—here comes another dozen emails calling out for a response; must stay up late to finish the project; I’ll just use these four minutes of downtime to return six more calls.

also took another cue from Cindi, who devised a plan to treat her bedtime like an appointment—with the same urgency and importance that we give all our work-related appointments. It is, in effect, a meeting you’ve scheduled with yourself. She calculates what time she needs to be up, counts back seven and a half hours

How many times have you experienced a sense of joy in a stale conference room while half listening to an endless PowerPoint presentation?

Psychologist Laurel Lippert Fox has taken the idea one step further and conducts walking sessions with her patients.

Animals help us be better humans. Quite often, they show us how to be our best selves. Always in the moment, sticking their noses into everything (literally), they see a world that we take for granted, one we’re usually just hurriedly passing through on our way to lives we never quite reach.

At HuffPost we developed a course-correcting free smartphone app called GPS for the Soul.

We all have within us the ability to move from struggle to grace, whatever the challenges we encounter. When I’m in that “bubble of grace,” it doesn’t mean that the everyday things that used to bother, irritate, and upset me disappear; they don’t, but they no longer have the power to bother, irritate, or upset me. And when the really hard things come our way—death, sickness, loss—we are better able to deal with them instead of being overwhelmed by them.

The Oxford clinical psychologist Mark Williams suggests the “ten finger gratitude exercise,” in which once a day you list ten things you’re grateful for and count them out on your fingers.

intentionally bringing into awareness the tiny, previously unnoticed elements of the day.”

Gratitude exercises have been proven to have tangible benefits. According to a study by researchers from the University of Minnesota and the University of Florida, having participants write down a list of positive events at the close of a day—and why the events made them happy—lowered thei...

Robert Emmons of the University of California, Davis, and Michael McCullough of the University of Miami, have established is that “a life oriented around gratefulness is the panacea for insatiable yearnings and life’s ills.… At the cornerstone of gratitude is the notion of undeserved merit. The grateful person recognizes that he or she did nothing to deserve the gift or benefit; it was freely bestowed.” Gratitude works its magic by serving as an antidote to negative emotions. It’s like white blood cells for the soul, protecting us from cynicism, entitlement, anger, and resignation.

The Power of Habit that scientists at MIT have, in essence, mapped the habit genome. What they’ve found is that the nucleus of a habit is made up of a neurological loop, which has three parts. It begins with a cue that sends the message to the brain to switch on the automatic mode. Next comes the routine—what we think of as the habit itself, which can be psychological, emotional, or physical. And last is the reward, the cue that tells the brain to reinforce this process. This is the “habit loop,” and it’s easy to see why as time goes on it becomes more and more automatic, more and more difficult to break. Of course, our primary goal shouldn’t be merely breaking bad habits as much as replacing them with new, healthier habits that help us thrive.

For Marcus Aurelius, the quality of our day is up to each one of us. We have little power to choose what happens, but we have complete power over how we respond.

It all starts with setting the expectations that make it clear that no matter how much hardship we encounter—how much pain and loss, dishonesty, ingratitude, unfairness, and jealousy—

we can still choose peace and impe...

Meditations, Marcus Aurelius did not sugarcoat life: “When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: The people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous and surly. They are like this because they can’t tell good from evil. But I have seen the beauty of good, and the ugliness of evil and have recognized that

the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own—not of the same blood or birth, but the same mind, and possessing a share of the divine. And so none of them can hurt me.”

So much of the time, what is standing between us and satisfaction is … us.

we can control how much we’re controlled by things outside ourselves.

Agrippinus put it, is not to be “a hindrance to myself.”

Seneca said, “Once we have driven away all that excites or affrights us, there ensues unbroken tranquility

Sometimes people let the same problem make them miserable for years when they could just say “so what.” That’s one of my favorite things to say. —ANDY WARHOL

everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” To Frankl, “Every day, every hour, offered the opportunity to make a decision, a decision which determined whether you would or would not submit to those powers which threatened to rob you of your very self, your inner freedom.”

Without suffering and death human

life cannot be complete.”

sine qua non