Build the Life You Want - by Arthur C. Brooks, Oprah Winfrey
Published:
Build the Life You Want - by Arthur C. Brooks, Oprah Winfrey
Read: 2024-10-21
Recommend: 8/10
This book offers a lot of practical advice on how to be happier. The most helpful part for me was the guidance on how to deepen my friendships.
Notes
Here are some text that I highlighted in the book:
The macronutrients of happiness are enjoyment, satisfaction, and purpose.
Pleasure is animal; enjoyment is completely human. Pleasure emanates from parts of the brain dedicated to rewarding us for certain activities, like eating and sex, that in earlier times would help keep us alive and passing on our genes. (Today the things that bring pleasure—from substances to behaviors—are often maladapted and misused, leading to all sorts of problems.)
Enjoyment takes an urge for pleasure and adds two important things: communion and consciousness.
Pleasure is easier than enjoyment, but it is a mistake to settle for it, because it is fleeting and solitary. All addictions involve pleasure, not enjoyment.
To be happier, you should never settle for pleasure, but rather make it into enjoyment. Of course, that involves a certain cost. Enjoyment requires an investment of time and effort. It means forgoing an easy, effortless thrill. It often means saying no to cravings and temptations. Sometimes, getting enjoyment is hard.
Happiness is a combination of enjoyment, satisfaction, and purpose. To get happier is to get more of these elements, in a balanced way—not all of one and none of another. But if you were reading closely, you noticed one funny thing about all three: they all have some unhappiness within them. Enjoyment takes work and forgoing pleasures; satisfaction requires sacrifice and doesn’t last; purpose almost always entails suffering. Getting happier, in other words, requires that we accept unhappiness in our lives as well, and understanding it isn’t an obstacle to our happiness.
Positive and Negative Affect Schedule, or PANAS.
two lessons we’ve already learned: First, that it’s about happier—a relative, contextualized, fluid condition, not some perfect fixed ideal of nirvana. And second, that happier is not a state of being, but a state of doing—not a thing you wait around and hope for, but an achievable change you actively work toward.
“Your emotions are signals to your conscious brain that something is going on that requires your attention and action—that’s all they are. Your conscious brain, if you choose to use it, gets to decide how you will respond to them.” Once more for good measure: Your emotions are only signals. And you get to decide how you’ll respond to them. The emotion is the tap on the shoulder, the elbow nudge in your side. What you do about it is completely your call.
As you read, I humbly offer you two Oprah-isms to keep in mind: feel the feel, then take the wheel. And happierness.
This is the most basic argument for being thankful for bad feelings. Next time you are regretting negative feelings and wishing you didn’t have them, think about this. They aren’t fun, but that’s the point. Getting your attention and making you act is how they protect you.
During the day, take a few minutes every hour or so, and ask, “How am I feeling?” Jot it down. Then after work, journal your experiences and feelings over the course of the day. Also write down how you responded to these feelings, and which responses were more and less constructive. Do this for two weeks, and you will find you are feeling more in control and acting in more productive ways.
The reason your memories change is that you construct stories of past events from fragments of memories in accordance with your current self-narratives.
Your shifting memories aren’t necessarily inaccurate; rather, they are assembled from partial sets of details, and the exact details you remember change each time you dust a memory off. You and your sister might simply remember different aspects of that Thanksgiving dinner that reinforce your different current circumstances: she says the day was ruined by Aunt Marge (and currently isn’t on speaking terms with Aunt Marge); you (who love Marge today) say there was a minor disagreement at the table, but no harm was done.
Metacognition requires practice, especially if you haven’t ever thought about it before. There are four practical ways to get started.
- First, when you experience intense emotion, simply observe your feelings.
- Second, as we touched on briefly before, journal your emotions. Journaling is in fact one of the best ways to achieve metacognition, because it forces you to translate inchoate feelings into specific thoughts, an action that requires your prefrontal cortex. This in turn creates emotional knowledge and regulation, which provide a sense of control.
- Third, keep a database of positive memories, not just negative ones.
- Fourth, look for meaning and learning in the hard parts of life.
Try methodically to see how such painful memories help you learn and grow.
It is important to note that caring about and paying attention to others is very different from worrying about what others think about you. The first is helpful and good; the second is often egocentric and destructive. In fact, to manage emotions, almost all of us need to work to care less what others think about us. That’s even harder than getting rid of all your mirrors, though. Just think of the last time some random person criticized you—someone you would certainly not invite into your home for a conversation, but whom you invited into your head as you stewed about the criticism. Maybe it was a sarcastic barb on social media or a belittling remark at work. You kicked yourself for even caring—but you did care nonetheless. In fact, for most people, a source of stress is what others think of them. Many of them are deeply wounded by criticism, go to extraordinary lengths to gain the admiration of strangers, and lie awake nights wondering about others’ opinions of them.
But family, friends, work, and faith are the Big Four on which almost everything else rests.
To get more complementarity into your love life, here are three things to do.
- First, seek out differences in personality and tastes.
- Second, focus more on what really matters. Too many couples get hung up on differences that are frankly ridiculous, like political issues. If you need to, make a list together of the ten things in your life you both agree are most important.
- Third, if you are dating, let humans make your matches instead of machines. One of the most robust trends in meeting potential mates over the past three decades has been the move away from dates set up by friends.
For a lot of people, the way to avoid negative emotional contagion is to avoid an unhappy person, like you would any communicable disease. But in the cases where love transcends the trouble—when the unhappy person is a spouse, a parent, a child, a sibling—and you choose to stay in the same house, research yields four lessons on how you can help while not allowing it to take over the culture.
First, as we’ve shown throughout this book, “put on your own oxygen mask first.” Work on your own happiness and unhappiness before trying to change your family’s. This might seem to contradict the research saying that you should attend more to others. This is different—you need to protect yourself precisely so you can help others. Say you are living with or near an unhappy parent. Start each day by tending to your own happiness hygiene: exercise, meditate, call a friend. Give yourself an hour or two of space from the unhappy person, if you can, and focus on what you enjoy and are grateful for. This will give you the happiness reserves you need to lift up someone else.
Second, don’t take negativity personally, if you can. Whether there is conflict or not, thinking that someone else’s unhappiness is directed specifically toward you is only human. Personalization of negativity and conflict is one of the most powerful ways that unhappiness spreads. Psychologists studying this tendency find that taking negativity personally can lead to rumination, which damages your mental and physical health and ruins your relationships by encouraging you to avoid others and seek revenge.
If you care for an unhappy family member, or even just spend time in the same room as them, remind yourself each day, “It’s not my fault, and I won’t take this personally.” View unhappiness in the same way you would a physical malady. The afflicted person might lash out and blame you because of sheer frustration, but you wouldn’t likely accept this blame unless you’re the one who injured them.
Third, break the negative culture with surprise. Helping others to be happy is not straightforward.
It is much better to get the unhappy person to engage in an activity that you know she likes. Research has shown that actively engaging in an enjoyable activity improves mood more than doing nothing, suppressing the bad mood, or envisioning good times.
Even if you ordinarily enjoy riding your bike, it can seem like a chore when you are sad or depressed. Yet if a family member shows up for a spontaneous ride, you might just say yes—and be more likely to enjoy it.
So far, the advice here has been geared toward someone who wants to help an unhappy family member. If you are the unhappy one, remember that your loved ones want to help. Doing so might make them happier. More to the point, people who love you don’t want you to suffer. Isolating yourself or pretending to be happy just to make other people more comfortable won’t benefit anyone. Instead, actively communicate with others to help keep your relationships healthy. Perhaps this means telling your sibling, “I want you to know that although I am going through a hard time right now, it’s not your fault.” Or maybe it involves strategic avoidance during particular parts of the day if you tend to feel down at those times. The bottom line is that while you may not be able to will your feelings to improve, you can choose how you talk to and treat others, which will give your loved ones more energy to help you when you need it.
In 2018, scholars identified four successful forgiveness strategies that family members use to heal a relationship after a transgression or conflict has occurred: discussion (“Let’s talk this through so I can let go of the hurt”), explicit forgiveness (“I forgive you”), nonverbal forgiveness (such as showing affection after a fight), and minimization (which involves classifying the transgression as unimportant and simply choosing to disregard it). Researchers have found that all four of these strategies can be effective, and the one chosen typically depends on the severity of the grievance. For example, discussion is most often used for the worst offenses, such as infidelity in a marriage; minimization and nonverbal forgiveness are most often used for the least problematic issues, such as showing up late for dinner. Explicit forgiveness is probably best for conflicts somewhere in the middle.
Meanwhile, extroverts should learn from introverts how to establish and maintain a few deep friendships. This isn’t so easy for extroverts, because of their love of crowds, audiences, fresh contact, and excitement. Research shows that extroverts tend to have a lot of low-depth friendships with other extroverts. Extroverts should set a goal each year to deepen one friendship. The way to do this is by organizing your social life specifically around one-on-one conversations about profound things, instead of insisting on congregating in groups. Avoid trivial subjects like hobbies and politics, and move toward deep issues like faith, love—and happiness. This will deepen some of your friendships, and in other cases show you in a hurry that you should look elsewhere for depth.
take honest stock of your friendships. A convenient way to do this comes from none other than the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle, in his Nicomachean Ethics. He argued that friendships can be classified along a kind of ladder. At the bottom rung—where people are least connected emotionally, so the commitment is weakest—are the deal friends based on utility to each other in work or social life. These are colleagues, partners to a transaction, or simply those who can do each other favors. Higher up are friendships based on pleasure—something you like and admire about the other person, such as their intelligence or sense of humor. At the highest level are friendships of virtue, or what Aristotle called “perfect friendship.” These friendships are an end in themselves, and not instrumental to anything else. Aristotle would say they are “complete”—pursued for their own sake and fully realized in the present.
In contrast to these real friendships, deal friendships—those at the lowest level on Aristotle’s ladder—are less satisfying. They feel incomplete because they don’t involve the whole self. If the relationship is necessary to the performance of a job, it might require us to maintain a professional demeanor. We can’t afford to risk these connections through confrontation, difficult conversations, or intimacy. Unfortunately, societal incentives push many of us toward deal friends and away from real friends
Most of us work with other people, so during the workweek we have less time for our family than for our colleagues, let alone for friends outside of work. In this way, deal friends can easily crowd out real friends, leaving us without the joys of the latter.
Start by going back to your list of ten friends. Next to each name, write “real” or “deal.” Some of these will be judgment calls, no doubt. That’s fine—just do your best. Then, next to the “real friends,” ask yourself how many people know you really well—who would notice when you are slightly off and say, “Are you feeling OK today?” How many of these people are you comfortable discussing personal details with? If you struggle to name even two or three, that’s a dead giveaway. Even if you can, be honest: When was the last time you actually had that kind of conversation? If it has been more than a month, you might be kidding yourself about how close you really are.
Idealistic but unrealistic beliefs can do a lot of damage to your relationship. Take the idea of romantic destiny, or “soul mates”—the belief that two people are deliberately brought together by unseen forces. Research on hundreds of college students has shown that such expectations are correlated with dysfunctional patterns in relationships, such as the assumption that partners will understand and predict each other’s wishes and desires with little effort or communication because they’re a cosmically perfect match. In other words, a belief in destiny leads to a belief in mind reading.
You shouldn’t be afraid of arguing, but you have to do it right. Researchers studying couples’ arguments have found that those who use “we words” when they fight are apt to have less cardiovascular arousal, fewer negative emotions, and higher marital satisfaction than those who use “me/you words.” You might have to work on this, especially if you have built up bad habits over many years. Instead of saying “You don’t try to understand my feelings,” try “I think we should try to understand each other’s feelings.” Make we your default pronoun when talking with others. If you like staying out late but your partner hates it, say “We prefer not to stay out so late” when you turn down a ten p.m. dinner for your partner’s sake.
treat your arguments like exercise. Something every inveterate gym-goer will tell you is that if you want to make fitness a long-term habit, you can’t view working out as punishment. It will be painful, sure, but you shouldn’t be unhappy about doing it regularly, because it makes you stronger. For collaborative couples, conflict can be seen in the same way: it’s not fun in the moment, but it is an opportunity to solve inevitable problems collaboratively, which strengthens the relationship. One way to do this is to schedule time to work through an issue, rather than treating it like an emotional emergency. Look at a disagreement as something we need to find time to fix, instead of as me being attacked by you, which is a disturbing emergency.
Friendship is incorrectly seen by many people as something that just occurs naturally, without conscious effort or work. This is false; like everything else important, friendship requires attention and work. It must be built on purpose. The big challenges we have covered in this chapter can become opportunities by remembering five lessons.
- Don’t let an introverted personality or a fear of rejection block your ability to make friends, and don’t let extroversion prevent you from going deep.
- Friendship is ruined when we look for people who are useful to us for reasons other than friendship itself. Build links that are based on love and enjoyment of another’s company, not what she or he can do for you professionally or socially.
- Too many deep friendships today are spoiled by differences of opinion. Love for others can be enhanced, not harmed, by differences, if we elect to show humility instead of pride—and the happiness benefits are enormous.
- The goal for long-term romance is a special kind of friendship, not undying passion. Companionate love is based on trust and mutual affection, and is what old people who still love each other talk about.
- Real friendship requires real contact. Technology can complement your deepest relationships, but it is a terrible substitute. Look for more ways to be together in person with the people you love the most.
So how do we set goals to achieve intrinsic rewards at work while we make a living? One answer might be to try and find a job that follows the advice of commencement speakers, who always seem to say, “Find a job you love and you’ll never work a day in your life.” This sounds like the right intrinsic reward is to have a job that is a total blast every day. We’ve never seen that job in real life. Furthermore, you might be a little suspicious of that advice, given that it always seems to come from unbelievably successful people, who, if you look into their backgrounds, absolutely killed themselves early in their careers, often paying an enormous personal price in their relationships to get to the top. They certainly didn’t take their own advice.
Rather than relentlessly pursuing a “perfect match” career, a better approach is to remain flexible on the exact job, while searching for two big things. The first is earned success. You can think of it as the opposite of learned helplessness, a term coined by the psychologist Martin Seligman to denote the resignation that people experience when they repeatedly endure unpleasant situations beyond their control. Earned success instead gives you a sense of accomplishment and professional efficacy (the idea that you are effective in your job, which pushes up commitment to your occupation, which is also a good measure of job satisfaction). And this leads to the second, related intrinsic goal, which is service to others—the sense that your job is making the world a better place.
There is compelling evidence that some people treat their emotional problems with work as well. This can lead to its own kind of addiction. Many studies have shown a strong association between workaholism and the symptoms of psychiatric disorders, such as anxiety and depression, and it has been common to assume that compulsive work leads to these maladies. But some psychologists have recently argued reverse causation—that people may treat their depression and anxiety with workaholic behavior. As the authors of one widely reported 2016 study wrote, “Workaholism (in some instances) develops as an attempt to reduce uncomfortable feelings of anxiety and depression.”[
People who struggle with workaholism can easily deny that it’s a problem, and thus miss the underlying issues they are self-treating. How can work be bad? As the Stanford psychiatrist Anna Lembke, the author of Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence, put it, “Even previously healthy and adaptive behaviors—behaviors that I think we broadly as a culture would think of as healthy, advantageous behaviors—now have become drugified such that they are made more potent, more accessible, more novel, more ubiquitous.” If you are sneaking into the bathroom at home to check your work email on your iPhone, she’s talking about you. What’s more, when it comes to work, people reward you for addictive behavior. No one says, “Wow, an entire bottle of gin in one night? You are an outstanding drinker.” But work sixteen hours a day and you’ll probably get a promotion.
program your leisure. Don’t leave those downtime slots too loose. Unstructured time is an invitation to turn back to work, or to passive activities that aren’t great for well-being, such as scrolling social media or watching television. You probably have a to-do list that is organized in priority order. Do the same with your leisure, planning active pastimes you value. If you enjoy calling your friend, don’t leave it for when you happen to have time—schedule it and stick to the plan. Treat your walks, prayer time, and gym sessions as if they were meetings with the president.
Make some friends who don’t see you as a professional object. Many professional self-objectifiers seek out others who admire them solely for their work accomplishments. This is quite natural, but it can easily become a barrier to the formation of real friendships, which we all need. By self-objectifying in your friendships, you can make it easier for your friends to objectify you.
Like happiness, love isn’t a feeling. As Martin Luther King Jr., put it in 1957, “Love is not this sentimental something that we talk about. It’s not merely an emotional something. Love is creative, understanding goodwill for all.” Love is a commitment, an act of will and discipline. Love, like getting happier, is something that you get better at with practice. It becomes more automatic with repetition. It becomes a habit over time. And when it does, everything else falls into place.