#1043 - Arthur Brooks - 14 Habits for an Optimised Morning & Evening Routine

When it comes to well-being, what do you think contributes more psychological elements or physical elements? Because we experience our well-being psychologically, but we experience everything psychologically, including our physical well-being. When it comes to well-being, what contributes more psychological or physical elements? The answer is yes, because psychology is biology. Fundamentally, psychology is biology. That means that you cannot disconnect from your brain. Now, perhaps there's some external consciousness that people are experiencing, but the truth of the matter is that the functioning of the limbic system of your brain where you're having positive and negative emotions all day long. That's biology. That's a part of the brain that was evolved between two and 40 million years ago as an alert system to what's going on outside of you. You perceive things, threats and opportunities, you react, your brain reacts with negative and positive emotions, which then gives you a sense of being happier and happy at any particular time. And so that being the case, we should be very grateful for our negative emotions, but we also need to learn how to manage them. That's the great goal of life. That's a great goal of becoming a self-managing, self-leading person when you're in a state of suffering to understand why that is, how it can be productive, what you can learn, and how you can manage it. Such that it doesn't just regulate you, ruin your complete quality of life. So if psychology is biology, should we just attack the biology? Well, the way that we attack the biology is by understanding the psychology and actually acting in a different way. It really does sound like the human centipede. Yeah, it really is. It really is. No, my whole philosophy is sort of a self-looking ice cream cone, because no matter if you say biology, I say psychology. But the truth of the matter is that once, if you want to become a happier person, the first thing you need to understand is the science, which is the reason that I teach the science of happiness to my students, I don't go and teach woo-woo and say, "Here's, why don't we all try to manifest some sort of happiness?" No, this is what's going on in your brain. When you're feeling sad, what's happening is that the dorsal anterior singulate cortex of your limbic system is highly alerted to the fact that you're perceiving a loss. And that loss in your life of a person or something that you love is a very normal reaction in the ancestral environment, where we lived in bands of 30 to 50 individuals, to be rejected, to have a breakup, to have a schism with somebody else in your band, meant that you were at a real risk of walking the frozen tundra and dying alone. You need to be really averse to that. That's why you feel grief when you're disconnected from somebody that you love, and you have a part of your brain that's evolved to make you feel that grief. And that's completely normal. That's the most normal thing that could possibly happen. And people find a lot of comfort in saying, "Oh, there's nothing wrong with me. There's not something I need to cure." That's actually evidence that my brain is working the way that it should, and I'm going to be okay. To most people need more happiness or less unhappiness. That's such a good question. And the answer is it really depends on who you are. Okay, so let's back up a little bit. You made a very important distinction right now, which is that happiness and unhappiness are not opposites. They're not. People, for the longest time, thought that unhappiness was an absence of happiness. It's like a single spectrum with happiness on one end and happiness is yet. And it's not true. It's like darkness is the absence of light, but unhappiness is not the absence of happiness in the contrary. The emotions that are behind happiness and unhappiness, and again, happiness isn't emotions. Emotions are evidence of happiness. But they exist in different, they're produced in different parts of the brain for different reasons. And so the result of it is that you can be a very happy person and also a very unhappy person. Oh, wow. That's interesting. And that means you're a high-affect person. I have a test that I give. It's a test of affect. And that is to see the intensity of your positive and negative emotions. A quarter of the population is above average positive and above average negative. What's the rest of the split? The split is of the other four quadrants. So if 25% of that were what's the rest of the 75% constructed by? Oh, it's the other three profiles, which is above average positive and below average negative, below average positive and below average negative and above average negative and below average positive. And that's evenly split 25, 25. Yeah, because the median is not the means. Right. And so it's by construction. It's those quarters. Now, that doesn't mean that it's not overrepresented among podcasters and entrepreneurs. You know, that's going to be 75% high, high. You're a very high-affect guy. You're the mad scientist. That's what that quadrant is called. And so am I, by the way, I'm 95th percentile in positive emotion. I'm 90th percentile in negative emotion. And so what does that mean? It goes to show that it's not a single spectrum. Exactly right. And so, and I know a lot of people who are low-low. Those are called judges. Those are people who make really good surgeons. They make really good, you know, nuclear reactor managers. There's some people who are above average positive and below average negative. Those are the happiest people. Those are the cheerleaders. They have very intense positive emotion, a very weak negative emotion. They're great to be around. They make terrible bosses. Because they can't stand negativity and they can't give criticism. No bad vibes. No bad vibes, man. And then there's low low, right? I mean, sorry, there's high negative low positive. Those are the poets. And we know actually a lot of the neurobiology of a poetic temperament is a matter of fact. We actually understand kind of what's going on in their brains. And they're the unhappiest, but they're unbelievably creative and romantic. And it's what we find. And the reason for that is there's this funny little part of the limit system called the ventral lateral prefrontal cortex that makes you ruminate. That's your rumination organ effectively. And so if you're a sad ruminator, like which most people who have a little bit of depression, they ruminate a lot. That's the same part of your brain that you use when you're ruminating on a business plan, or a poem, or a symphony, or on another person when you're falling in love is really, really active. And so that's why poets, they tend to be depressive, romantic, and creative. It's the same part of the brain, psychology's biology. But the whole point is you ask what's more important to manage happiness or unhappiness. The answer is what's the bigger challenge for you. So for you, you need to work more on your unhappiness because you're a mad scientist. Me too. You know, happiness is really much more important to work on if you're a poet or you're a judge. You need to lift that happiness as opposed to moderating, managing the unhappiness. Okay. What are the big movers for the judge or the poet compared with the mad scientist or the, what was the fourth one? The cheerleader. Yeah. Well, I guess the cheerleader is just the cheerleader. No, they're doing great except the cheerleader has weaknesses and the cheerleader doesn't recognize. Now, I'm just resentful. You know, I'm just jealous. And I'm married to somebody who's more of a cheerleader than I am. And it's really interesting when you match these profiles because it turns out that certain marriages work better than others with respect to these temperaments. So people go to my website and they take this a lot with their partner. They take these tests a lot with their partner. So they can find out what their temperament is, what their, what their partners is. The best marriages for people who are really metacognitive, really in tune with their relationship are ones where they balance each other. Someone that's maybe a little bit less negative. Yeah. So if you're a, for example, if you're a judge, you do really well with a mad scientist. So a really high-effic person can do really well with a low-effic person. If it's too really high-effic people, it's going to be daggers drawn. It's going to be trouble because you're going to spin each other up or bump each other out a lot. So you have to be really aware it's kind of how this works. So, so the challenges are really different. Now people who have high negative affect, they tend to manage their negative, unless they have science, they know what they're doing. They tend to manage their negative affect in a destructive way. The most common way that high negative affect people manage their negative affect is drugs and alcohol. Because it's unbelievably effective, alcohol in particular cuts the connection between the amygdala, which is the fear and anger part of the Olympic system, and the prefrontal cortex. So you're all stressed out, but you don't know it. That's what alcohol does. So two martinis and you're like, life's okay. And so if you're an anxious person, that's why you got to be super careful with alcohol. And that's why CEOs have more alcohol problems than people who are unemployed. No way. Yeah. OECD data shows that highly successful, highly educated, high earners. They have more trouble with alcohol than people on the other end of the spectrum. There was an interesting, maybe one of yours. I don't think it was. I remember reading this really great article that explained some of the justifications for why drug use among children from wealthy families is higher than those from low income families. You might think, well, maybe it's because they've got the money to access it, but that's that's not right. Maybe it's because they go to these sort of like posh parties when they're in their teenagers and everybody else has got access. And they think that the rules don't apply to them and they may be a little bit. But the explanation that I thought was really, really great is that if you grow up as the child of somebody who has already set the bar incredibly high, the pressure that's on you to be able to beat your intergenerational competition theory is unreal. It also explains one of the reasons I thought this was such a fucking great psychological explanation that I'd never heard of. The higher rates of admission for children from wealthy families into prestigious higher education institutions. Maybe it's because of the prep, maybe it's because of the access, maybe it's because of legacy admissions, maybe it's because they are so fucking terrified of falling behind the standard that their parents set, that they are prepared to drive themselves in a manner that somebody who doesn't have that degree of pressure over the top of them wouldn't. Yeah, fear of failure. I thought the explanations were just so random. Yeah, and there's almost certain. So there's kind of two reasons. Most of the literature is on alcohol, right? I mean, and in 20 years from now, we'll have more literature on cannabis, for example. I think we can, the rules of alcohol pollute it across on the cannabis relatively well. Yeah, yeah. Same thing different. They're self-medicating euphorics for the most part. There's kind of two kinds of people to get in trouble with alcohol. People who have trouble with boredom and people have trouble with anxiety. So either you're a bored drunk or you're an anxious drunk. Those are the two problems that people have. And so the answer to these addiction problems are different in these two cases. If you're an alcoholic or you're drinking too much because you're bored, you need to crowd out the drinking by doing something interesting. That's why you take a kid and who's drinking a lot and partying a lot in high school and make him do something unbelievably hard and interesting. And they'll be like, I don't want to drink that much because drinking is not as good a party as whatever this thing is that I'm doing. Anxious drunks are a different problem because anxiety is so unbelievably effectively dealt with by alcohol. It is so incredibly efficacious. And that means you need to deal with anxiety in a proper way. And drugs now call it not the way to do it. Workaholism is a terrible way to deal with your anxiety. If you have a high, if you have high data of affect, this high. What's workaholism's point of intervention if the link between the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex is being severed from alcohol. What is it that workaholism is doing at a biological level? Distraction. So the amygdala is funny. So with little kids, you're going to see this when you have your children. That your two-year-olds can be having a freak out because they're freaking out all the time. That's what two-year-olds do all the time because they're a completely dysregulated amygdala. And so they're fearful and angry and they cut the crust off their little PB and J. Sam, which the wrong way, they totally freak out. That's because they're amygdala lights up like a Christmas tree, right? The way that you get them to not freak out. And young parents never figure this out, right? They're going to be like, "What? Use your words!" Or something like this. No, no, no. Distract them. Because the amygdala is in charge of distraction actually affects the amygdala. Attention is something that highly implicates the amygdala. So if you change their attention, so you do a little two-year-old, you're like, "Oh, oh, oh, do you see what I brought home from work today?" I brought home something you really got to see and pull something out of your briefcase. Bullshit. Totally. Because they never figured out. Because they're an idiot. But what happens is that you stop the activity, the amygdala, that's leading to the freak out and you put it into attention. So that's basically what's going on, you're distracting yourself through workaholism, through a reliable way to distract yourself. That's what it was about. That's so great. I remember my therapist last year said to me, pay attention to fleeting thoughts. There's this line that she had. The whispers that sort of come. Rick Rubin would call them whispers. These little transient little things, little bits of smoke. And if you're living in chaos, everybody go back on tour this week. I mean, you've got three shows and three states in four days. Awesome. You know you're low. It's great. I love the chaos. But if I've got something that I've been trying to hide in the fog for a while, "Oh, there's a five piece of piss." I've got lobby call at 9am. We're going to go on the flight. I'm going to go skiing in Salt Lake City. Then I've got the soundtrack. I've got Soundcheck. I'm going to do Soundcheck. Then by the time we get there, someone brought a cake. Look at this cake. Isn't this nice? And then you just Mannyana, Mannyana, Mannyana. And I think that this is why chronic touring musicians have problems with alcohol. I had Aron Gillespie from Underoth here. And he said, I don't know how many times, like hundreds, hundreds of times, he checked himself into the ER on tour because he was sure he was having a heart attack. He got to the point where he knew the exact tests that they needed to run on him to disprove his own fear. Because he had just been drinking his medicated. He just kept going. Funny that you said that thing about the two-year-old as well. So, kind of beaten from Man Talks, who you need to meet. Fucking fantastic. We did a pod recently and we're in the car. He was going to give me a left home. We're in the car and he's like, "I got to ring the kids first. I got a four-year-old, four-year-old, and a bit-year-old, and a one-and-a-half-year-old." And this wife gets on the phone and the one-and-a-half-year-old sees him. Smiles for about three seconds. And then just screams. And just starts screaming. And he's fucking about it for breakfast this morning. And he was like, "Yeah, the one-and-a-half-year-old, she's just at the stage now where she screams. She just screams, but he screams all the time." He said, "The one thing that we can do if we need either of them to shut up and stop. If I come into the kitchen and I just have a moment with the animal wife, if I pick her up and hug her, my son four-years-old just runs over and wants to get in between us, like in with us." And the one-and-a-half-year-old just stops. Stops and hugs. Just change the rhythm. The reprogram, the Immigrant. So cool. So that's, unfortunately, distracting yourself with work. And man, I've been on tour since I was 19. I've got the bug. I got it. I mean, I quit drinking when I was 38. A year older than you are now. I had to quit drinking. I mean, it was just not doing anything good for me. And it goes to dark places in my family and the whole thing. But the work of health tendency. I mean, that's the go-to, man. That's the go-to. Well, because it's publicly praised. Yeah. I mean, nobody ever said, "You know, dude, you drank an entire bottle of vodka last night." That was awesome. Nobody ever said that, right? But you worked nine, 16-hour days in a row and made a bunch of money. And people praise you for that, for that highly addictive, dangerous behavior. It's also a secondary addiction. The primary addiction is an addiction to success. And one of the things that I sort of specialize in, successful people in talking to and doing a lot. I mean, I teach at the Harvard Business School. These people are going to be the masters of the universe when it comes to business. And what I find is that the pathology actually of people who wind up workaholic. It starts when they're kids in this funny pattern. And you're going to be able to respond to this because my guess is that you've seen this maybe up close. I mean, friends, right? Maybe closer than you might think. They get the attention and affection of adults when they do stuff. When they bring home a good report card, when they make the baseball team, when they make first chair in the orchestra. That's when they really get praise. And so they make the connection as children that love is something that's earned. Now, love is a free gift freely given. It's a grace. It's not a gift. Graces and gifts are different, but they learn that it's a gift that you get that's. sorry, it's an earned thing. And so the result of that is that they wire their little brains or prefrontal cortex is highly plastic. And they grow up thinking that they have to be special. This is what leads to the cult of specialness, which is a real pathology because that leads to a success addiction. And literally, their brains don't actually get sufficient dopamine unless they're winning. Unless they're having an outlandish experience, unless they're getting praised and they're admired by strangers. It's pathological. It's not normal at all. And most people don't actually suffer from this, but by the way, they become billionaires. Before we continue, I've been drinking AG1 every morning for as long as I can remember now. Because it is the simplest way I've found to cover my bases and not overthink nutrition. And that is why I partnered with them. Just one scoop gives you 75 vitamins, minerals, probiotics, and whole food ingredients in a single drink. Now, they've taken it a step further with AG1 next-gen. The same one scoop, once a day, ritual, but this time backed by four clinical trials. In those trials, it was shown to fill common nutrient gaps, improve key nutrient levels in just three months, and increase healthy gut bacteria by 10 times even in people who already eat well. They've upgraded their formula with better probiotics, more bioavailable nutrients, and clinical validation. Plus, it's still NSF certified for sport so you know that the quality is legit. Right now, when you first subscribe, you can get a free bottle of D3K2 and AG1 welcome kit. Plus, bonus AG1 travel packs and, for a limited time, US customers also get a sample of AGZ and a bottle of omega-3s. Just go to the link in the description below or head to drinkag1.com/modernwister. That's drinkag1.com/modernwister. Do most people not suffer from this is habituation to success, not something that's kind of in for everybody. Is that not the whole game of happiness, the habituation thing? Habituation is success. It depends on what success means. If success means it's really in these worldly terms of money, power, the admiration of strangers, it's very different than the success that people actually have in having a family life where your kids and your wife love you. And most people, actually, they sense success along these ordinary lines. That's success at it. Most people. Yeah, they really do. And it's possible and it's funny when you look at surveys of public opinion, people really admire the most worldly successful people to be sure. And they think, well, wouldn't that be great? They look on social media and they think, wouldn't that be great? But that's not my life. And so I guess I'm just going to go to the park and play with my kid. And they're pretty happy as a result of that. I mean, there's an old axiom in my business, which is woe be to the man whose dreams come true. He will find he had the wrong dreams. Why? Because the dreams that come true, the dreams that come true that are. that people praise you for, the people envy you for, are the worldly idols. The worldly idols. Aquinas talked about the idols game of money, power, pleasure, and fame. Those are the four idols. And if you make them your instrument, those goals more than instrumentally, if you make these the ultimate goals of your life, you will find unhappiness. That's good modern social science, but it's as old as Aquinas who was lifting it from Aristotle. Those are the. As a matter of fact, I have a game I play with my students called What's My Idol? You want to play? Sure. Let's find out what Chris's idol is. Okay. The way that this game works is psychologically you don't just say pick one of the four. You eliminate the ones that is not. That's how you get much better fidelity in anything like this. So Aquinas suggested, and modern behavioral science validates the idea, that we're attracted to four worldly things, and they won't make us happy. But our animal impulse is that we need more, more, more. This is the hedonic treadmill of more and more money or resources, right? Power, which is influence over other people. It's not my level, it means that people do what you want them to do. You're the top dog, you're the king of the mamba. Number three is pleasure, and pleasure manifests in different ways. For some people, it's like feeling good. For some people, it's comfort. For some people, it's security. Like people who check their stock portfolio every day, they have a security idol, which is in that pleasure. Like that is the alleviation of discomfort. And last is honor, not in serving with honor. It means honor as the honor of the world. It means fame, prestige, admiration of other people. Those are the four idols, and everybody has one in particular. And when you know what it is, you'll say, yeah, that's why I always do the things that I regret later. This will be the source of your future regret, if you know this gives you power. Okay, so money, power, pleasure, and honor. You have to get rid of one, which means that not that you don't have it. What it means is that you have a population average in it, which for a super striver is torture. Being normal, it must be normal, right? So one of the four, you've got to get rid of and you've got to go to normal population average, which in the United States, you know, is pretty freaking great. So which one do you get rid of, Chris? Money, power, pleasure, honor, or fame. Or fame or the admiration of others, the adoration of the crowd. Power. Tell me why. I tend to not use it much. I tend to not try, I tend to not influence other people, certainly not directly. I'm an only child. So solitude, a pretty small circle. Right, you don't dream of being a big CEO. No, no, no, no. So I will make a prediction. You hate it when people have power over you. Yes, basically. That sounds the thing. Here's the interesting thing. When you look at, it would be dictators. You know who they admire? Dictators. You always admire the people who have the idol that you have. Who are successful in accumulating the idol that you have. Of course, because you see the currency more clean. Right. So if you see a politician in the UK or the United States and they admire dictators, you look out. Look out. Don't vote for that person. You know what I heard? Put a pen in it for the second. It's about unraveled on the substect. Fucking great. So wonderful. She's just got engaged. She wrote this article, which I think is so true. She said, extreme crushes are just misplaced ambition. Basically, we see in our deepest romantic crushes the ones that we do and don't date traits that we wish that we had ourselves and that in the acceptance of us by this person, that is us finally validating the lack that we feel we have had all along. We see in them, oh, they're so charismatic. They're so confident. They're so popular. They're so talented. They're so resilient. They're so whatever, peaceful, whatever it might be. And that's what I feel I don't have. So it's an interesting inversion of this idea. But I, from what I can see, I think that that holds true too. Because something that you think would complete you, they have something that you think would complete you. And if you can't get it yourself, then you're going to rent it in somebody else. What a wonderful way to put it. Okay, so I've gotten rid of power. Which means you have the normal amount of power. Yeah, which is basically not. Yeah. Well, I mean, everybody's got influence. And you're going to have children and you're going to have power. As long as I can boss them around. Stop screaming. I pick your mother up. Which won't work. Okay, so you've got money, pleasure and honor. Which one do you get rid of next? Money. How do you know? Or I should say why? I don't have a particularly lavish life. I don't have expensive tastes. Right. I've developed slightly expensive taste for flying in business class. If that counts, which I'm sure it's like the first thing that everybody that gets money goes to. Right. It's also a little bit-- It's better. Yeah, well, it's the most immediate way to like spend your money and I better. But also, it helps you--it's like a very publicly acceptable way to spend-- It's not a PJ. No, no. It's a fuck. PJ is 10X. Correct. No, no, no, no. I've never fucking Scott Galloway. He's fucking cornered me at South by Southwest. We went out for dinner and he got me by the collar. He's had a couple of beers. He's like, Chris, do you know what the only reason to get riches? Private jet. It's the only reason to get rich. It's the only reason that you need money. It's like, after private jet, there's nothing. It's like the only difference between you and any future is you and a private jet. Okay, man. I thought he was really cute. But he's kind of--left leaning capital. I like the Venn diagram before he comes into that. But no, I've read him money. Yeah, okay. And you probably--I mean, you've made plenty of money because you're successful. You've figured out that there's not that much fun you can have with it. It's not that great. No. I mean, I--there's two paths, I think, that people who don't come from money. I did not come from any money. I grew up in the most working class town in the UK that was--the only title it had was the widest high street in the UK and the highest teen pregnancy rating. And then it lost that. What town? Stockton, Stockton. It's Northeast. It's Northeast just below Newcastle. And you're the same town as--or you went to university with Mike Thurston, right? I did. Yeah. So he's from Leeds. He's from a little bit lower down than me. Yeah. But yeah. Two directions. One is I never had money. Wow! Like, look at all of this, like, spare money that I've got. I really don't know how to use it. Maybe someone will coach me, like, how to make more of it or whatever. But I still have a bit of a puritanical work kind of ethic thing. And like, oh, like, the Bill Perkins archetype, right? The diodes. You need to read diodes zero, like, fucking 20 times and learn how to spend some money. Yeah. And then the other side, which is I never had money. Woo! And it's just like a rollercoaster all the way down. That gets all. Yeah. But that's the NBA player at that time. Yeah. That's right. And when you get married and have children, then that's, you know, then it's a different kettle of fish because you start thinking about intergenerational wealth and how you're building your family, and your philanthropy, and all that kind of stuff. But I completely believe you that the next thing to go is money. Now it's, of course, more difficult because the two that are left are left for a reason. And that's pleasure and fame. And fame can mean different things. You can mean fame in the eyes of the right people. So academics is like, I don't care about that. Yes you do. You want to walk into the-- Eheration deck. You're obsessed with Eheration deck. That's Professor Williamson. Yeah. He wrote the paper on, you know, the new string theory paper or something like that. Like, on what? Who cares? The point is that prestige is prestige. Or the really kind of disregulated one is, is adoration in the eyes of millions and millions of people on social media. Which is a really disregulated-- The ranged version of it. Well, there's a real problem with it because fame is the only one of those that you can ever only be happy in spite of. You can be happy very easily with money. I can teach you how to be happy with a lot of money. But I can't teach you how to be happy with a lot of fame unless you do a lot of work. I mean, I know, like, my co-authors Oprah Winfrey, and she's very, very famous, and she's an extremely happy person. But the only reason is because she realizes, soulfully, that her acclaim is a gift that she can help other people. That's the only reason. And we would throw on immediately if she were to stop doing that in her view. Which is an incredibly healthy way to see it, which is why she's actually done well. Okay. Comfort, or I should say pleasure, your version of pleasure, or fame, which one do you get rid of? So, we've done this before, but the last time I didn't hear you talk about security or comfort. That's a big deal to me. That's a huge deal. Partly because you grew up with that money. The money thing was, it wasn't like we had poverty anxiety. It was more so a pretty big feeler, and chaos doesn't agree with me. Like intensity agrees with me, but complexity doesn't agree with me, ambiguity and uncertainty really do not agree with me at all. That's a good thing for us to work on, actually. Let's put a pin in that, because we need to come back, because that means you're an anxious person. Anxiety is unfocused fear. And there's a way to fix that. Okay. There's a way to fix that without benzodiazepine drugs. Okay. Well, I imagine that lots of other people are feeling the same here. What would they say? Given where I'm at right now, I would actually say that the next one that could go would be fine. Yeah. And that I would keep myself with safety, comfort, security. I think that that would be the top of the tree for me right now. Yeah. So that would mean that the acclaim that you actually get from what you do for a living right now would go to the population. Which would mean that you'd have to do something else for a living. That would suck a lot. That would kind of suck, right? Yeah, but I would have 100 out of 100 security, comfort. I don't know. I mean, maybe this is me speaking from my ivory tower, maybe what's changed. Just to go with the top three podcasts or something in the world. Yeah, yeah, yeah. By the time that this comes out, Spotify will have released a 2025 rap, which is Modern Wisdom's eighth on the planet. Dude, that's unbelievable. I got the, I got the press release. That's sweet today. Yeah, it's fucking crazy. I'm on top of Jay Chetty, a position I've always wanted to be in. And actually, I'm the power bottom just below Andrew Cuban. So I'm in a Jay Chetty Andrew Cuban three way, which I imagine the internet has just been waiting for. This is what the world's been hoping for all along. That's great. Congratulations. That's a really wonderful thing. And the problem is that you're in a business that requires a claim, that requires fans, that requires followers. It requires people who recognize you and trust you. And so that kind of, in a way, to say, I don't really care about it, is not meaningful. Because you actually, to do what you're able to do, it has to be something that's important. I think, do you know what I think it is, if I was being completely honest? And I think maybe other people, as they've played along at home, may have felt the same thing. There's two worlds. There is, what is it that I functionally, what am I driven by right now? Right. And what do I want to be driven by? Right. Like what do I feel like my highest self, like if I was being incongruence, if I was coherent? Yeah. It's what you want and what do you want to want? And so what do you want to want is a really important exercise. I adore that. You know the first ever essay that completely broke my brain. It's called Kyle Eschenroder. It's no longer available. His website got hacked and taken over by some, like, one of those fishing porn websites. So you can't even say, but I've got the PDF saved and it's what you want to want. And it was 20,000 word essay and it snapped me in half in like 2018. It was so phenomenal. So it's really, you know, I'll ask people to answer a bunch of questions for their effective mission statement for life. And then I'll have them write their ideal mission statement. And the difference between the two is what you want and what you want to want. And that's the essence, the Buddha's essence of right desire. Because what we want is right desire. The problem is not what you want. The problem is that your desires aren't right. You don't want the right things. For all of misery pretty much can be summed up and not wanting the right things. You don't need to do something differently. You need to want something differently. Well, Kyle's argument was that you'll want to define your path at least resistance. And if you can get yourself to want what you want to want, then you get to row with the tide. As opposed to rowing against it. And when you work with couples that are having trouble with infidelity, for example, the problem is in the infidelity. It's the desire for infidelity. That's really what it comes down to. And what you need to do is to actually engineer a different kind of desire. That's how you fix problems. That's how you fix problems in yourself and in your relationship. That's how you is really getting into the whole concept of what you want. Is making sure that what you want and what you want to want are congruent. That's a lifetime goal. So what we've established is that comfort is important to you. Or security is important to you. And that you've built a life. You've built a career that requires a lot of a claim. And so these are the things to keep an eye on. These are always the things to keep an eye on. That you'll make decisions in cut corners because you're trying to feel more secure. And that you'll hang on doggedly to a claim. And never hold it lightly. You won't ever hold it lightly because this is an asset. The claim that you have is a really, really important asset professionally for you. But it's also kind of who you understand who you are. I mean, I know the story of this podcast. You didn't start with millions of listeners. No, it took 450 episodes to hit 250,000 subscribers. And I moved to America with 250. So the first half of the show was like 5% of the subscribers. The first half of the show. To the fledgling podcast is out there. If you're expecting quick success, it is not. It's a really important lesson. It took four years. It took four years and four years. I remember hearing you early on as a matter of fact. This is really good. This is going to be really good. And it turns out it was true. Well, game recognizes game, as they say. So anyway, this is all this is really super important self-knowledge. Because once you understand what baguials you, you can manage yourself in a more effective way. Always a more effective way. We'll get back to talking in just one second. But first, if you have been feeling a bit sluggish, your testosterone levels might be the problem. They play a huge role in your energy, your focus and your performance. But most people have no idea where there's R or what to do if something's off. Which is why I partnered with function because I wanted a smarter and more comprehensive way to actually understand what's happening inside of my body. Twice a year. They run lab tests that monitor over 100 biomarkers. They've got a team of expert physicians that analyze the data and give you actionable advice to improve your health and lifespan. And seeing your testosterone levels and tons of other biomarkers charted over the course of a year with actionable insights to actually improve them gives you a clear path to making your life better. Getting a blood work drawn and analyzed like this would usually cost thousands. But with function, it's just $499. And right now, you can get $100 off, bring it down to $300 and $99 bucks. Get the exact same blood panels that I get and save that $100 by going to the link in the description below or heading to functionhealth.com/modernwister. That's functionhealth.com/modernwister. Talk to me about the anxiety and certainty things. It feels like that based on a lot of the people that I speak to, the hyper vigilance that people have from maybe an uncertain atmosphere growing up. Maybe communication wasn't super transparent and they needed to be able to detect the micro movements of exactly what was going on and read into sentences. Maybe love was contingent. On performance, maybe the nervous system just didn't feel soothed. Maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe. I think that that, based on the conversations that I have at the live shows as well, the people that come up and do the meet and greet, or the questions that I get that I've done at the Q&A's afterward, so many of them are basically around, I really fucking struggle with the uncertainty of the future. I got a tolerating ambiguity, uncertainty, unpredictability, feels like some weird personal curse. Uncertainty is a problem. Risk isn't, by the way. Risk and uncertainty are different. People use them interchangeably. Uncertainty means you don't know what might happen, so you can't assign probabilities, so you can't manage contingencies. Risk is that you know what might happen, so you can assign probabilities, so you can manage contingencies. That's the reason that people feel better when they buy insurance. Insurance is a happiness business. What it does is it converts uncertainty into risk, and it no longer becomes a source of misery. That's why anybody who buys a life insurance policy feels better after they do it, because they've just churned their uncertainty into risk. Uncertainty is a source of fear, and that stimulates the amygdala. Because the amygdala says it makes you hyper-vigilant, and when there's a lot of uncertainty, you're more vigilant than you would have been otherwise, and that's a source of negative emotion. So you're feeling this constant sort of negative emotion. Why is vigilance a source of negative emotion? Because you're vigilant against threat, and this is the possibility of threat. When you're uncertain, it's funny, because there's all kinds of uncertainty that we don't worry about at all. Uncertainty, things might be great. You're not worried about that. It's funny, because I do a lot of stuff on waiting, waiting is a funny thing. There's waiting that's wonderful. That's like I'm waiting for Christmas. And the reason that Christmas lights go up in America after Halloween is because we want to savor the season longer, because we want to wait longer, and that's positive. There are certain things that might happen and might not. And so we're anxious about it, but anxious in kind of a happy way, in an optimistic way. There are certain things that might go wrong, and might be okay, but might be terrible. It's like tests from the doctor, and that's real anxiety. And then there's the one that you know it's going to be bad, that's dread. And so there's a whole range of different uncertainties. When it comes to waiting an uncertainty for sure. So when people say, you know, I'm really worried about uncertainty, they're worried about threats. And threat vigilance is really part of human evolution. The species has survived because of threat vigilance in the way that we're vigilant in the face of uncertainty. The problem is it's really dysregulated. It doesn't work the way it's supposed to. We're supposed to be occasionally really fearful, and then have a sudden burst. The HPA axis goes bonkers, and we're going to start running in climate tree. But that's supposed to be occasional and super intense, and not very frequent. How, just on that, how likely do you think it is that the ancestral evolutionary zebras don't get ulcers' explanation for it comes and it goes, and you shake it off. Do you think that that was ancestral accurate? You think that that was like. I think it was. I don't think they didn't have Twitter. And so they weren't sitting around gone. I wonder how that tweet did. I understand that. But what about the chronic that guy in the next cave keeps eyeing up my misses? And this has been going on for a long time. Male parental uncertainty, the fear of abandonment from a male partner from a new mother. Those things. Those things have always existed for sure. And would that not cause this sort of chronic stress? It not chronic stress in the same way. It was a much sort of simpler under stimulated kind of environment where you could. I mean, when you live in bands of 30 to 50 individuals, it's a lot easier for you to have situational awareness. Now we live in an environment where you have no situational awareness because it's just too multidimensional. What's going on all the time? Something can be happening and you won't know about it all the time. It's really what it comes down to. There's the big threats in, you know, 250,000 years ago. A neighboring band of homo sapiens comes in, takes all your animal skins and flints and kills you. That's really, really scary. And then there's the smaller threats that you'd find where you're falling in the. And you're falling in the hierarchy in your band for some particular reason. Now it's everything all the time. Everything all the time is stimulating the amygdala. And we're getting this little drip of cortisol and, you know, people get these panic attacks. You know, it's like. It's not that long ago, by the way. I mean, I'll tell you what the, you know, grandpa, Williamson never said to grandma, Williamson. I had a panic attack behind the mule today. No, it wasn't a thing. What drives panic attack? It's an over. It's a flooding of the HPA axis. Is the, you know, the adrenal system goes berserk. It becomes incredibly dysregulated. And, you know, when you have a lot of time without devices and you're doing a job this relatively repetitive and your brain is working the way it's supposed to. So the default mode network is on. When the right hemisphere of your brain is properly activated, which is the part that questions mystery and meaning the why questions in your life, you're not going to be freaking out all the time. And that's what people are doing. Is they're freaking out all the time because they're constantly distracted and they're overstimulated. That's what it comes down to. Is this an argument to chop wood and carry water? More. Yeah. Well, it's an argument to live more like Grandpa Williamson, actually. But which is not ordinary anymore. That's the problem. You didn't have to think about it. But we do. Grandpa Williamson did also, I think, he went to the Falklands War. He wanted to cause some tropical disease in the Falklands War. So. He fought the Falklands War. I think it was the Falklands, yeah. That's really. I mean, that was a real source of meaning for these guys. They did these things. They did these hard things. And he wasn't looking at his phone the whole time. No, that's true. And he wasn't posting his Falklands War pictures to Instagram. I mean, his life was, in a way, more simpler. I mean, the pulsatile nature of life is like real interesting to me. Yeah. And the sort of flattening and the spreading of the curve. Right. We've seen this really great demographer, dude, Stephen J. Shaw. He's the best on it. As far as I can see, he's the best on the planet for birth rate decline. He's the best on the planet. He's the demographer. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, he's self-trained, but he's been obsessed. He created the birth gap documentary. Brad Wilcox is also fantastic on this one, Lyman Stone. And also fantastic on it. Nick Hebristad. Yeah. Nicholas Abistad and his wife as well, although she's a different beast. Mary. Yeah. Fucking animal. Isn't it so fortunate that we get to live in this time with all of these cool people? It's great. It's unbelievable. Because, you know, you live in the ideal world. In the ideal world, it's like an unbelievable sporgasport. Infinite. Anyway, he's got this idea about the flattening of the vitality curve. So in the past, if you were 21 and you met a 21-year-old, the likelihood that they're ready to have kids right now is pretty high. As you flatten this curve, you can imagine that there is a left to right, there is a time, and then height is what proportion of the entire population is ready to go at that time. You have both moved it rightward, and you have flattened it down. And when you flatten it down, it means that if you, the likelihood of you finding someone that is ready at the same time that you are ready, is actually low. And as you know in some of the research, if you stick about in a relationship with somebody for more than five, more than seven years, and no kids have come along, it is really, really tough to hold that together because your ancestral programming, your brain, says to you, there is no world in which reliable contraception existed in paleo times. No kids have arrived, maybe it's her, maybe it's me, but it's definitely one of us. And if we break up, if I just find the way that she used to sip her tea and I thought was cute now, fucking horrendous and driving me up the wall, I just feel like we just fell out of love. We're not really too sure. And the people hate to hear this because we're enjoying ourselves, we're bonding, we're doing all the rest of it. Like I get it, I get it. But like there was a psychology, there are some physics of the system that are risky to roll the dice against, I'm not saying it can't be done, many of my friends have, but more of my friends have. I mean, you and I have talked about this a lot, about the evolution of desire and about David Busce's stuff and about the fact that the king, he's the king of this, he's really great. You know, I don't even know him personally and I cite him constantly. I got to meet him. We should have gone outside. I know, we should, we should, anyway, but the whole point is that there's this, it's funny thing in relationships. There's this, they talk about the seven-year-age, it's actually a five-year-age in relationships where you're most likely to break up after five years. And actually that's a divorce rate, so that's after you get married. And part of the reason for that is that the tension, the honeymoon is over and people get angry with each other and people start to have higher negative affect in their relationship. But that's when you start to, for example, fertility cues and resource cues go from positive to negative. So, for example, women, they tend to admire their husbands less if their husbands are not doing well and it's five, at the five-year mark, they're starting to think, "Cut my losses?" Even if they don't know they're thinking that. And men, if there's fertility issues, as you suggest, around five years, they start thinking, try someone else? That's the big problem. Um, ultimate motives, clash up against the much more publicly acceptable proximate motives of things. Like, "Oh, well, you know, we just didn't really feel the same way about each other." We didn't really, it's like, "I wasn't sure that he could provide for me and my family." Right. Or, "I wasn't sure that RMH level was actually where I needed to be in order to be able to keep this thing going." Yeah, and part of that is just because propaganda tells us that we're not biological creatures, that we don't have an evolutionary impulse behind us. And that's nonsense. The more that we actually understand how we're biologically wired, the more that we're actually able to stand up to our biology and live in our space of moral aspiration. The prefrontal cortex of the human brain is an incredible moral. And it actually allows us. The fact that it's 30% of our brain by weight allows us to make decisions consciously that the dog can't. Your dog's prefrontal cortex is way for thin. That's why all it has is animal impulses. We, on the other hand, have moral aspirations, but you're not going to get beyond your animal impulses into the space of your moral aspirations unless you understand those animal impulses. That's why I teach about the animal impulses so that you know enough that you can reject them. Stop from the bottom of the brain, stem up. Absolutely. The fact that if you don't actually understand how you're wired and what your impulses make you want to do, you're unable to stand up to it and say, "I choose to behave differently." Yeah, it's a weird blessing, but also a burden or an obligation, perhaps. You're obliged, if you want to capture all that is available up here, there's an entry price that you have to pay for this weird inheritance that you've got. This cosmic, cognitive inheritance that you've been given. If you want to make it work, you're going to have to. If you just live like your dog, you can have the same moral goals as a squirrel, and a lot of people do that. You know. Peterson had a great line about this. I was a live event of his in like 2018 and the show had been going for six years. Someone stands up at the end like they do in my Q&As and he says, "The depth of my consciousness causes me to suffer. Is it a blessing or a curse to feel everything so deeply?" And I was like, "What a wonderful question. Give that guy podcast." And. What did Jordan say? I thought for a moment, said the only way out is through. You take more of the thing that poisons you until you turn it into a tonic that girdles the world around you. You can try and regress back into a more animalistic state, say it's too bloody late for that. It's too bloody late for that. And I thought it was such a very apocalyptic on brand, but I thought it was such a wonderful answer. Yeah, that's an ancient answer, actually. That's an ancient answer. Jordan and his in the fourth century said, "The glory of God is a man fully alive." That means a man is suffering. You need to be fully alive because that is your teacher. It's interesting because you know, the Buddhists have this math with his suffering is pain multiplied by resistance. And you can go to the therapy industrial complex in the Western world today to try to lower your pain or you can try to be fully alive and lower your resistance. And so doing what happens is that the suffering ultimately declines because you've turned it into learning. You've turned it into generativity. You've turned it into growth. And that's what Jordan means by you got to go through. In other news, you've probably heard me talk about element before and that's because I'm frankly dependent on it and it's how I've started my day every single morning. This is the best tasting hydration drink on the market. 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Plus, they offer free shipping in the US. Right now, you can get a free sample pack of element's most popular flavors with your first purchase by going to the link in the description below. I think to drinklmnt.com/modern wisdom, I remember this Daniel Kahneman idea, I think it's so great. I wonder if you've ever used this analogy in your work. Imagine that you have a spring and on both ends, you're pulling this spring. Your goal is to get the mid point of the spring to go in one direction. Now you can either apply more pull to one end or you can reduce more pull from the other. The difference, the thing that I thought was so clever about it was that if your solution is to hit the gas rather than to take your foot off the brake, yes, you move the center of the spring but you have way more tension in the system. I thought that would. It's stuck with me. I think that's such a. It's a nice analogy. Great analogy. Because you pull more, yes, you're overriding it and you are pulling it through, but there's so much more tension in the system. That's right. And you're having to work harder. That's why the Zen Buddhists, it's an attitude of non-resistance, an attitude of non-resistance. Look, when it comes to suffering in general, and this is a lot of what I write about now, and part of the reason is because the most important teacher of the meaning of your life is your suffering, the most important. And one of the greatest ways for you to miss the meaning of your life is for you to try to avoid your suffering. Give me an example. So, nobody ever said, "I really figured out what I was made of that we could debit you in Ibiza." Now, they talked about when my mom died, when I almost lost my business, when I flunked out of college, when I got really sick, when I was truly scared, and I made my way through it. When I understood, and I went through, that suffering was my teacher about who I am as a person in the meaning of my life. What you find is that in large groups of people, you find that when you ask them to talk about the meaning of their life, they always talk about their terrible times. They always talk about their suffering. Always. That's the way it is. And if we have a culture that tries to get rid of pain, you have a culture that gets rid of the meaning. It's not only get rid of pain, it's resistant. Right. Yeah, well, it's more resistance is bad, and just as getting it is trying to lower pain is bad. So, you have a culture of that. That's what the therapy culture really is, the therapy of the culture is about getting rid of pain and not resisting anything, et cetera, et cetera. That's a really big problem, because ultimately in the day, what that is, is that's antithetical to finding the meaning of your life, to finding the significance of the purpose and coherence of your life. So, what we need is we need a culture of the Spartan fight, as Ralph Waldo, Emerson put it. There's the best essay on this, by the way. You've read it. But everybody who watches Modern Wisdom needs to read Self-Reliance by Ralph Waldo, Emerson, 1841. It's like, read it tonight. It's an essay. It's like, I'm Rand, but not creepy. I liked what I said recently, there's a real capoam on the shortness of life. Yeah. Fucking fucking. Yeah, yeah. Talking about walking through some madness. Being is we need a culture that embraces the inevitable suffering that is part of the human existence that says, you know, so I ask my students to repeat after me. My suffering is sacred and it's like a really fun teacher, right? And it's have a little mantra at the beginning of the day, so I'm truly grateful for the happy things and the fun things are going to happen this day. But I'm also grateful for the trouble I'm going to have, because therein lies my growth, bring it on, and to face it, to face up to it. It's a really wonderful thing. It's actually one of the reasons that people get happier when they're older. That people start to get happier in their 50s and 60s. And almost every, it's like I tell my students, because almost everybody's happy to, happy as declines in their 20s and 40s. But almost everybody from early 20s until about 50, they're happy as declines. And they think it's going to go a lot, because their success and money, et cetera. Their dreams are going to come true. They are. The problem is that you're going to get less enjoyment and it's going to be trouble. Almost everybody gets happy. So I tell my students, that's a good news, bad news story. So the bad news is that you're happiness is declining. The good news is that I'm getting happier. I'm old. See? 50s and 60s. Almost everybody is happier. And part of that is because you start to understand suffering for the first time. And you're like, oh, oh, I'm not going to be suffering about this tomorrow. So I'm going to get a head start feeling better today. You understand yourself. You understand the nature of the experience. It's the sort of transient nature of these things. There's a big sort of lesson for me that I really struggled earlier on. I still struggle with now, which was, this is going to be the way it is forever. And it causes you to not savor things that are good, that are happening. And overly fear things that are bad, that are happening. When the world's on top of you, it doesn't last for as long as you're worried about. And when you're on top of the world, it doesn't last for as long as you hope. Right. That's the hedonic treadmill. I mean, the fact that emotions are transient because emotions are not there to give you a good day. Emotions are there as a signal that there are threats and opportunities in the environment and that you need to avoid them or approach them. That's all your emotions are. They're just neurobiological signals to you. People have emotions, fear, anger, disgust, and sadness, there's only four. And they're in response to four different threats. Thank God for those threats. They keep you alive. But when you understand them as particular signals, then you can met a cognitively manage them by understanding them better. And that's one of the great, that's one of the reasons that people get remarkably less neurotic. It's one of the ways that personality reliably changes as people get older. They become more agreeable. They become more conscientious. They don't become more open to experience. But they almost always get less neurotic because they have a better understanding of the fact that life is suffering. When it comes to negative experiences, what are the most reliable levers to lower negative feelings? The most reliable is anything that's metacognitive. It's understanding of negative emotion. Okay. So there's two different questions here. Number one is, what will actually help you with negative emotions? Number two is, what is the technique in your life? And so the least productive ways are drugs and alcohol and workaholism like we talked about. We mindless internet use or something like that. Which is. Yes, sedation through distraction, etc. So it kind of goes into those categories. The techniques that work really well and are extremely productive because they make you better through your suffering and actually alleviate a lot and they're not resistant in their way. Number one is, is a religious activity and number two is picking up heavy things running around. So people ask me, do I get happier when I go to the gym? No, you get less unhappy. If you have naturally low negative affect, if you're naturally a very low intensity unhappiness person, which is to say that you're a cheerleader or you're a judge, you're not going to be able to stay in the gym because you're not going to feel better. You're going to be like, it just hurts. So you saying that as we look around the gym, the more jacked people are, the harder they find life generally. Yeah, that means they have high intensity and negative affect. That's the reason you love the gym. They're being alleviated. Yeah, and then you get lots and lots of, you get a lot of relief when you go to the gym of your, from your intense negative affect. So jacked guys are sad guys. Jacked guys are guys with issues. If you're a 61 year old and you look like you go to the gym a lot, it means you're, you used to. Hey. Okay. But the other thing is religious activity and religious activity is really important. And that's part, by the way, it's one of the reasons that I, that my own morning protocol starts with number one, I get up a 430, 445 to 545 in the gym every day of the gym in my house. Then I go to mass every day, with Catholic mass every day because it goes body and soul because I have a negative affect problem. You saying that you're using church and religion as a performance enhancer for your happiness? That's right. And it's completely legal. Yeah. Wow. Okay. So take me through your, if you were to create an evidence-based morning routine, maximizing well-being, what would it look like? So I maximize both well-being and productivity. So this is really, really important because I have, I'm in a creative profession. I got a right, think, speak, teach, I got to work every day on, on having creative output because I have a weekly column and I write books and I have to give talks, et cetera, et cetera. Your output's terrifying. And, and it's a, and I have a podcast. I mean, it's like you, and it's, it takes a lot of work in this whole thing. So I need to be super productive and that means my brain has to be optimized for that. And I want to alleviate high levels of negative effect. So number one is the problem of Horta, which is in Sanskrit means the creator's time. That has been around for 6,000 years. And the whole idea is, if you get up before dawn, you've already won the day. Because that actually gives you better concentration, better focus, and better creativity. If you get up when the sun is warm, you've already lost the first battle. And now, a lot of people are like, yeah, my chronotype, I'm a night owl. No. I used to think I was a night owl. Two, I was actually just a musician who drank too much. Morning larks. The chronotype is probably 60% environmental, and it's only about 40% genetic. So everybody can be a morning lark. It's harder for some. I never get up with that in the warm clock, ever, ever, ever, ever. And year after year after year, I still have to. I would sleep in if I could. But that's the first battle. And that's really a big swinger in improving your neighborhood. You've really started off with a difficult one, especially if you're in summer, somewhere or anything. Oh, that's 40. No, no. Of course. If you're in Helsinki in July, you're not going to do it. No sleep. I don't sleep. That's right. You got to get up before you went to bed. So I mean, your results may vary. You got to figure it out. I mean, you never make the perfect example of the good on this. The second part of that is what you do first thing. And that's substantial physical activity. Exercise is really important. You guys will write to me. 22-year-old guys graduate from college. Feel aimless. Don't know what to do. Feel really depressed, living with mom, whatever. I say, OK, you don't have to go to the gym and pick up heavy things and do something insane, like your routine. I recommend getting up a half hour before dawn and walking for an hour with that device is outside. Walk. Not under treadmill. Outside. Here's the crunch of the gravel under your feet. No devices. This will give you a sense of transcendence. It will wake up the right hemisphere of your brain, which is what you need for a sense of meaning and mysticism. I mean, it's great to listen to modern wisdom, but not during the walk, right? And doing that while the sun comes up has special benefits. Uberman talks about that in awful lot, but it's very well studied that this is really important. OK, so combine these two for me if you're saying that it's great to pick up heavy things and some people like to pick up heavy things, but you're also saying it's great to be out on a walk outside. Right. Those are incompatible unless you're working out outside. I know. Right. And that's great. If you've got an outdoor gym because, you know, your lift ATX, shout out lift ATX in Austin, Texas. Venice Beach, whatever. Yeah. Yeah. So, but so you got to make choices along those lines. I have a gym in my house, so I go downstairs to the basement from 445 to 545 every day. I get about, I take about one, one day off per month because of travel. I'm on the road a lot. Then I clean up and I go to mass every day. And that's important to me. These are my religious beliefs. And by the way, I go with my wife, we go to 630 mass every day when I'm home. And I'm home about half the time. And here I'm in Austin, Texas. I'll go to mass tomorrow morning at 630. There's a church nearby. Mine. It's like being Catholic is great. It's like Starbucks. It's a complete franchise system. It's the same every place. There's one in every corner. It's unbelievable. Exactly what you're getting at. Yeah, exactly right. So, but that's important to me. But the whole point is not Catholicism. My path is not the only path. The point is transcendence and transcendence by getting smaller and making the universe larger. For some people, the post on a meditation works really, really well. But that's getting soul in line with body. First thing in the morning. And there's a lot of neuroscience research that talks about why that's so important. Because I'm driving toward high, high well-being and high productivity. Those are the twin goals. And doing this alignment really works, really helps a lot. Because by seven, then you're ready to -- and I haven't taken any nutrition yet, except for, you know, 15 grams of creatine monohydrate and electrolyte, something salty, and so I'm not getting any calories. That's when I apply the second stimulant. That's when I apply the caffeine. Because you don't want to use caffeine to wake up, you want to use caffeine to focus. We all know about how the A2A-identicine cycle works in the brain, no doubt everybody in your show knows about this. I piped on about it. Look, I got a ton of shit because for a long time, element that's been a great partner on the show and I fucking love them -- They're terrific. My big pitch was, for the first 90 minutes of the day, your adenocene system isn't what's in charge. Your adrenal system is. And salt acts on your adrenals, and it does -- if you want to fuck about what caught is all and you want to increase that using caffeine. But so many people have a mid-afternoon, early-afternoon slump and then need to crank the caffeine lever again. They crank their caffeine too early. Correct. Yeah, just -- I'm telling you, New Year's Resolution, push it back by two hours, by three hours and just see what happens, especially if you're using something like Neutonic as well, because the L-thiening is going to smooth out or just take L-thiening, you don't need to use Neutonic. Take L-thiening capsules with your morning coffee. And if you are really, really tired, you can go harder on the coffee, but the L-thiening will smooth out that as well. And then, if you add 10 plus grams of creatine in, you're in good shape. Because the creatine, monohydrate, the newest research says it's neuroprotective. It's not just good for muscle protein synthesis. So creatine is one of the most studied supplements -- Super product. Super product. And I take up multivitamin, and I do all the stuff that sensible people do. Okay. So you're up before the sun? Yeah. Up before the sun, hard work out, which is 75% resistance, 25% zone two, and then I'm going to be active for the rest of the day. So I get another five miles of walking over the course of the day, the rest of the day, which is important. Go to my ask, go to church, which is, or my meditation file is like 10,000. That's 10,000 stuffs. I just don't like saying 10,000 stuffs because it's so hackney, you know. Okay. You're going to do it differently, don't you? I got to be different. I got to be me, anyway. So I come back from, once we come back from church, that's when caffeine. That's when caffeine is entered into the picture. And I use about 350 milligrams of caffeine a day. It's usually- That's not a small amount. It's not a small amount. It's in one bullet. I grew up in Seattle, dude. I grew up near the only Starbucks in the world. Okay. Yeah. So I'm used to burnt coffee. For me, the best coffee is like hot water through charcoal briquettes. You know, it's like, if you made something called Indonesian ashes, I would buy it. Okay. Anyway. So then, and then I take first protein, I try to get between 60 and 70 grams of protein, first thing in the morning. And that means way protein with Greek yogurt and berries and- to get the micronutrients with the berries and the nuts in there. And that's all I've- that's the only nutrition I take until the middle of the day when I get another bowl of the protein. But that Greek yogurt has a ton of triptophan in it. And triptophan is real good for mood management. What's your favorite brand of Greek yogurt for this? Well, I like, well, Phaya's great, Chobani's good. Chobani's lovely. Oh, it goes so nice. Okay. So there's not like, there's something that you found that doesn't have the- Unflavered, fat-free Greek yogurt, it sounds joyless, but you know, when you put in some delicious berries and nuts and it's the best thing. Like, if we make some good protein powder in the tube. Yeah. For sure. And you spike it with protein powder. You get up to 70 grams of protein. And that's a big bowl of protein. So you're getting the right, you know, acid that you need. And all of that is really good for focus. And so I get four hours of an appropriate amount of dopamine in my prefrontal cortex, equivalent to what I would- if I were taking metaphenyl, I mean, if I equivalent to taking an ADHD medication. And you can't get four hours of, I mean, if you're doing creative work, generally speaking, you can expect two hours a day. You can extend that by about 100%. If you design your protocol to make your brain chemistry work the right way. I'm happier and productive. A quick aside, you've probably heard experts like Dr. Ronda Patrick talk about the benefits of omega-3s. They reduce- hello. Omega-3s? There they are. They reduce brain function. No, they don't. They support brain function. Maybe I should take more. 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Right now, you can get 35% off your first subscription and that 30-day money-back guarantee by going to the link in the description below or heading to livemementus.com/modernwisdom and using the code "modernwisdom". A checkout. That's livenemementious.com/modernwisdom and modernwisdom. A checkout. This is the happier and productive thing is an interesting, non-trade-off that you're making work. So it makes me think about varicose seal surgery, so I'm going to bring this back. Wait. So most interventions, the increased testosterone decrease fertility. If you go on TRT, if you start taking PEDs, your fertility reliably drops. The firm count goes down, fertility morphology, also usually not too great. LH and FSH, just super-spressed, but one of the few interventions that I know, which is varicose seal surgery, which is to improve the blood flow to testicles, make both go up. They see a mean change, I think 120 points on test, which is for a lot of guys now, going to be between 25% and maybe even 50% of 40% something like that. And you also see improvements in sperm count and motility modeling. Basically, it makes your boys younger. Correct. It makes everything work a little bit better. I don't know if you've got varicose seal, obviously. This is one of those few interventions where having a bit more of a global perspective. So, for instance, it's one of the reasons that we designed the newtonic drink. It felt like when I was drinking energy drinks, usually, I was borrowing health from tomorrow for today. Right. And I didn't want that. I wanted something that felt like, oh, this is good. This is compounding over time, and this is contributing to better performance. And that's what you're talking about here, too. Yes, that's exactly right. Yes. Exactly right. You can turn back for clock in a lot of ways, because you're doing exercise. I mean, Peter and Tia talk about this a lot. Exercise is the single best medicine. The single best longevity drug you can get. What are you piecing your energy, your exercise routine around what's that look like to you? So I've been, when I was in my late 30s, when I changed-- You look fucking fantastic. That's great. Well, thank you, Chris. I appreciate the lot. I was going to come in here. It's like with a tank top or something. Nobody needs to see that. So when I was in my late 30s, I changed my life up a lot. I quit drinking alcohol because I had to. It wasn't going no place good. And I recognized that if I didn't exercise, that the future, I was going to be broken down. I just looked at a lot of people that were in my profession. I was an academic professor in those days, looking at a lot of people who were in their 60s. And it was grim. So I started doing what I do with everything else. I started studying the science of the exercise science, which when my 30s was way less advanced than what it is now. But we still knew a lot. You didn't have to get your science through muscle and fitness. There were papers. You could on PubMed that you could actually understand what the proper exercise protocols looked like. But I did actually something that was more important than that. I started-- every place I was going, I was starting to tour a lot as a lecturer. And every time I was in a city, I would find the oldest iron gym I could find. Because that's where the old guys hang out. That's where the guys in the 70s hang out that are still kind of-- they're still pretty shredded. And now I'm one of those old guys, right? My wife says sleeping with me is like holding a leather bag of ropes. Yeah, thanks. That's nice. Anyway. Back of ropes. That's exactly what my ambition was. But now I go to these old guys and I say, give me advice, how do you not get hurt? How do you stay shredded? What do you eat? And I started just copying these old guys. I was just collecting data. But they're not necessarily the healthiest. They're not necessarily the healthiest, but that's why I wanted the oldest guys. That's why I didn't go for the youngest shredded guys. Because you know, when you're 29 years old, you can look at the portrait of health and have, you know, you can have a right ventricular, hyperplasia or say, who knows, you can get something like hypertrophy of your ventricles because you're taking performance balancing drugs. You can be on death's door when you're-- Fuck, right. You look like-- and you're unable to have children and-- but if you're 75 years old and you're still picking up heavy things in the gym, a lot of things are going right. That means your back doesn't hurt too much and your joints are pretty healthy and you're keeping proper muscle mass and you're keeping proper body fat. And what it did was it started me on a set of protocols that I've been adjusting and adjusting and adjusting. I'm still adjusting it, by the way. I mean, I'm down. I'm 15 pounds lighter than I was five years ago because I adjusted way up my protein content and my exercise protocols. And what it comes down to is basically this, you need a proper balance of zone two cardio and resistance training and the older you get, the less heroic you need to be under the weights. And so I hate it. I don't want that, right? I still want to do heavy squats and I can't do that anymore because I'm going to hurt myself is what it comes down to. But you can maintain a lot of muscle mass and so you can actually get rid of it. You can maintain sub 10 body fat and keep muscle mass. That's absolutely wild. And part of this is genetics that I'm thin, right? The part of this, you can do a lot just by having good protocols, by being a really, really disciplined person. Also helps entering alcohol. Well, it's not, okay, so the alcohol thing's a big part. And what you're doing with a structure and a framework is you're trying to not rely on discipline, trying to just follow the program. I mean, if I could give, one of the things that I did that was graded, lots of things in my 20s that were fucking ridiculous, especially to do. You're a club promoter in your 20s. I was. I spent a decade and a half sniffing random bags of an unpronounceable white powder from dudes called Greg that were in the bathroom of some fucking like unpronounceable nightclub in the northeast of the UK. This should be fine. Well, I mean, I'm made of rubber magic. What's it going to do? That was my point with COVID. When COVID came along, my main takeaway was that COVID should be scared of me. Not be me scared of COVID. Like, if you get into his blood, he's like, what the fuck is inside of this? I get us. I know way. No, thank you. I'm leaving. But the thing that I'm super happy with is that I started training in the gym, me, Mike Thurston. He was one year younger than me. We trained at the Centre for Sporting Excellence in Newcastle University. And I have been four days a week, three days a week, on average, compliance, like since I was 18 years old. It's so good. And the point is, if you are in your 20s, even if you're in your 30s, what you're doing is it's kind of like an investment into a future bank account. It's, me, me, me, it's about health, it's fucking, forget that bit. Forget the attire. You're not going to fall over. You can pick your kids up when you're 70. That doesn't matter. What it means is that when you get to 37, or probably even 47, you can maintain a beach-ready physique on two training sessions a week. You can do less than everybody else and look better than everybody else. And not have to work as hard. So it's all, and you look great now, right? And it's good for your health. And it's good for your mental. But like all of those things, but the main one that I can see is I am like an inheritor of shit that I did. And it means that now I just, I don't have to work as hard. And it's like, well, every, it's this weird side effect that every gym bro didn't ever intend to doing, but realizes as they get a bit older, I just, I don't really need to train all that much. And look, I'm never going to be as shredded as I was when I was 25, but I, I hold on pretty fucking. My wife doesn't go, yeah, we take a shirt, but it's also, as you get older, you find that you want to do more days in the gym. And part of the reason for that is because of mood management. It's so incredibly effective as a means of mood management to pick up heavy things and run around. So how do you seven days a week? How are you splitting the resistance training and how do you? Yeah. So it depends on the day and actually where I am or what I'm doing. So if I'm, if I'm someplace where I'm going to be relatively sedentary, then I'll do a lot more zone two, first thing in the morning. So I just plan it out according to that. If I'm in more pain for whatever reason, because I'm stiff, I'll actually do more stretching, more yoga is what I'll do. So I, I apply it in particular ways. If I'm under an ordinary routine, then on the weekends, when I'm actually walking a lot with my family, with my wife, then I'll actually do 100% will be resistance. I'll have a, you know, big pole day and a big push day, for example, for an hour of push and an hour of pull. And it's a lot. So it's a, but, but I'm not using the kind of weights and I'm not putting the, I'm not having the impact on my joints. So I'm spreading things out enough that I'm actually not getting hurt covering, which is the great thing about being older. What are your favorite zone two? My favorite zone. I haven't elliptical. I'm, I'm, I'm a weak. Oh man. It's just, you know, my, dude, honestly, I did this at the start of the year in Mexico as we're in a trip in Mexico and, uh, just put the treadmill at 15 degrees, yeah, three miles an hour. And you will just hold, I mean, people that way better than me probably would be fine, would need to push it between three and three point four, something like that. And you will just hold like 140, 150 BPM, and you can text, you can think, you can, yeah, no, it's good. Like, dude, and I'm like, oh my god, 45 minutes of that a couple of times a week. No, it's great. And my, my daughter, who, I, we have a treadmill too, because, you know, my, my kids are two of my three kids are complete gym rats. I mean, absolute gym rats. They're military. Good. And the second lieutenant Marine Corps right now, she's four foot 11, she's 100 pounds. She just said that the treadmill's not going to make it well, she'll put it up at 30 degrees or some crazy thing like this, like, practically, it looks like it's straight up. And then she'll put on a pack that's 70 pounds on her 100 pound frame and, and go for an hour. She's an animal. So that's, I mean, that's hardcore. But then again, you know, she's 22 years old. Mom. Okay. But eating a routine is a little bit different because what you want is mood management and sleep. That's not mood management or productivity. You want mood management and sleep. And so that's a, that's a slightly different routine. And that routine starts at dinner. And one of the mistakes that a lot of people make is that they eat dinner too late. And, you know, I lived in Spain for a long time. I've lived off in Spain for 35 years and, dude, no, 10 p.m. I'm sorry. I mean, it's like, oh, it's so great in life style. That's unhealthy. I'm sorry. That's like, los siento mucho, pero no se puede haber esto. It's like in Spain, it's not good to do that. So when we moved to the United States, that was a hard transition for my wife, who is from Barcelona. Oh, that's interesting. Yeah. I've always thought that one of the worst incompatibilities that you could have with somebody that you loved was bed times. Yeah. You want to go to bed at nine and they want to go to bed at two. Yeah. That would be difficult to navigate. I hadn't accounted for the fact that somebody could want to eat dinner at six and somebody else could want to eat dinner at 10. Exactly right. That was, you know, we got through it, man. We married 34 years, but now we both eat at six. And part of the reason is because, you know, when are 60s and so we actually need an evening protocol that actually works and we have to get up early in the morning. She doesn't get up at four, 45, but she gets up at six o'clock. She sleeps more than I do. I need about six and a half hours of sleep. She needs closer to eight. So to actually be, have her biology work in the way it's supposed to be working. So it starts at six o'clock. And what that means is, you know, your last protein rich meal, really your last meal should be a couple of three hours before you go to sleep. For all sorts of reasons that Rhonda Patrick talks about a lot and a lot of people talk about that. Yeah. Exactly right. So, and it shouldn't be your, your heaviest meal and there's a lot of things that go into that. Now, having never any caffeine with dinner, never drink any caffeine with dinner. I mean, you can actually get away with it better when you're younger, but let me tell you Chris, when you're, when you're 61 like me, it's like, I just looked at this. This is so delicious. What you gave me has 120 milligrams of caffeine in it. I'll be up like cleaning the garage tonight or something. The fact that you opened it in the same room as yourself is, I know, it's like, I smelled that thing and I'm not sleeping at night, but it's you become way more, the metabolism of caffeine changes a lot with age and almost everybody. So that's why benzodiazepine drugs is the same kind of thing that you have to, you have to titrate what you use for, you know, for going to sleep or waking up very differently as you get older. And a lot of people will have insomnia when they're older because they're drinking an afternoon coffee and they don't realize that that's what's happening. That's, that's a really common thing. So no caffeine. I recommend no alcohol in the evenings for anybody, even for people who can drink appropriately not doing that because that will, that just messes up your sleep architecture. And the hardest one for me is sweets. I have a huge sweet tooth. All former drinkers all love sweets because your metabolism is the same way. And the result of it is that I want sedative. The big chunk of sugar is the same like, so good. It's so good, but it's just not good for your sleep architectures and whether that works. Of the three sweets are a little less bad than the other two is what it comes down to. Then actually walking right after you eat is really important. And so we walk 30 to 40 minutes after dinner every night when I'm home and I'm home about half the time. I have to do that. And that's really good for you because it's actually the way that you, that we are insulin response and your glucose, et cetera, et cetera. So just much better for your sleep and, and mood management later on. And then getting to sleep, actually going to bed, going to bed is really important. And if you're sleeping with your partner, this is the best thing ever because you can actually work on your, both your mood management and your relationship by going to bed early, but don't go to sleep early. The thing to do is to actually have about five minutes of hard core oxytocin release by staring into each other's eyes in bed. This really, really, really works. Now, this is more important for women. Women have about three times as much oxytocin as men. That's why women need more eye contact than men. Men need more touch than women. Women need more eye contact than men. Hold hands while you stare into each other's eyes deeply for five, ten minutes and you're having a real conversation. You can save most marriages, by the way. By holding hands more and always looking at each other in the eyes when you talk. This will save most marriages. And I can add a couple more things in like having more fun and praying together or something, but eye contact and touch is super important. ABT, always be touching, always be touching is what it comes down to and never be not looking at each other in the eyes when you're talking. That's in bed or out of bed. But in bed, that's a really good way to do it. Reading to your partner is an incredibly good way to work. Reading to your partner. Yeah, or being read to. And there's a whole bunch of really interesting studies on this, but it's like, for me, it's like narcotics. If you read to me in a feminine Spanish accent in bed, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And so, you know, we've been reading Psalms and Love Poetry and things we read to each other a lot at night. It's a really, really, really good thing. It's a funding experience. Yeah. And then actually getting to bed on time, getting to bed at a reasonable time. And so you're managing your blood sugars and your blood chemistry, your blood glucose, et cetera, through your activities, et cetera. And then you're doing what, actually, your brain needs, which is connection and relaxation in a really, really healthy way. And these are the protocols that, when I'm home, at least, we use pretty regularly, it's helped a lot because I'm an insomniac. So I need to be really rigorous about my sleep hygiene. Is there a risk of people over optimizing well-being to the point of neurosis? Oh, for sure. And that's the reason that, you know, wearables can be a real curse for a lot of people. What do you use for wearables? Whoop. Use whoop. That's great. Those guys will. Well, Amen. It's a great company. Sad in that seat. He's a terrific entrepreneur. Fantastic. Fantastic about what they do. But I understand the health anxiety. Yeah. And all right. The same thing. Yeah. And so you have to be real cognizant of that. And some people like my wife doesn't use her wearable when she's in bed, because she doesn't want to know how many minutes she slept and how many minutes she was awake and what her sleep score. She doesn't want those data. Her life is better when she doesn't have those data. So you got to figure out how much data you need, and not to gorge on it in such a way that you become really, really neurotic. Some people are. And so I have to be, you know, pretty careful about that. But what I find is that when I take, I take the cognition, the conscience, the conscious business, out of everything, and I just turn it into what I do in a wake-up in the morning, what I do before I go to bed at night, that my life is better because I'm able to use the cycles. Well, you've got a system to system on this, right? Yeah. You've got to go, okay, and this is why, you know, when I first started the show and it's one of the great things about having a ledger of proof of work, where you were at at what time. The first two or three years of the show was me being a productivity bro. It was me talking about morning routines and pdc, brown, make it stick, learning how to learn and ebbing house for getting curves and space repetition and anky note cards and like fucking ever note external brain. It was all that because you have to go through this sort of big, over complicated, is the solution over here or over there or is it this thing? And you go really hard and deep on this and then you move on to the health and fitness thing and then you move on to the, for me, the sort of relational thing and then you move into the culture thing and then my current era is like the emotions thing, like the emotional thing. Right. And you get below the neck. That's right. But below the neck is still above the neck because psychology is biology. All right. Fucking. All right, professor. The realization is you're going to have to do a much more obsessive version of this first. Yeah. You're going to have to do a very deliberate. Yeah. It's going to look super nerdy. It's going to be really clunky. You're probably going to hate it. Half the shit that you do is going to fall away. Right. Because for you, the person just doesn't work, but mass may or mass just doesn't work. But breath work does. Yeah. Whatever. Like you're going to find your permanent flavor of what it is and that's going to take time. Yeah. So I think that everybody needs to go through a productivity grow phase and I was fortunate that I did basically five years of like this obscene morning return, maybe competitively yours, it's comparable. Like this big, you know, opulent two and a half hour monstrosity, this cathedral of stuff that I would do. I get up and I walk and I come back and I sit down and journal and then I would do breath work and then I would meditate and then I would read and then I would do Yin yoga and then I would prep my food and then I would go to the gym and then I would come back and it would be midday and I'd have got up at seven AM and I'm like, well, I've done so like all of the things I want you to do, I've done and that was me trying to reach escape velocity from the adult infant that sniffed around the bags of drugs for 15 years. Yeah, I got it. I got it completely. And, you know, that ultimately is not the solution. What that is is gaining information. That's not the solution. So as a matter of fact, when it comes to the person that you want to be, that's not a problem you can solve. That's a problem you can understand. There's two kinds of problems. There's the solvable problems in the understandable problems. There's the complicated problems of life and the complex problems of life. Complicated problems you can solve with enough brain power and enough discipline and enough computational horsepower and enough information. That's like a jet engine or making a toaster or, you know, that's actually figuring out how to put together a podcast as a complicated problem. Complex problems are super easy to understand, but they're impossible to solve. You can only live them. That's like a football game. It's very simple. One team has more goals than the other. But the reason that you care about it is because you can't solve it in advance. You can only live it in a real time. My marriage is the ultimate complex problem. I can't solve it. I'll never, Chris, I'll never solve it. My wife before I came over, she said, I love you. She texted me. We text all the time. And when I finish this, she might be super pissed off at me. I don't know. Well, I don't know. She's Spanish and that's part of the complexity, but I mean, that's why I love my marriage. That's why I love my cat and not my toaster because my toaster is complicated and my cat is complex. That's why all the things you really care about are complex. Your life, you, the Christmas, is a complex problem. You start off as a, as a, as a bro, trying to treat Christmas as a complicated problem. And what you do find at the end of the day is the complexity therein to understand it and actually live your life. Talking earlier on about the, do people need more happiness, less on happiness? What are the experiences in life that give people the most pain? What makes this miserable the fastest, reliably? This sadness is what is the hardest thing that people can actually bear. And what's sadness? Sadness is losing something or someone that you love. That's what, that's what reliably brings you the most pain is, is loss. Is that grief? Yeah. Well, grief is an extreme form of sadness. And you know, that's the, when, when somebody's removed from your life, that's the most pain that people actually go through. That's the negative emotion that's most intense. And part of the reason is because that is on its face the most catastrophic of the occurrences. That's why you're the most diverse to it. That's why you have the most pain from it. You know, there's a, this, this little place in your brain, this dorsal enter, your singular cortex in your brain, that little thing in your limbic system. That gives you what's called affective pain. Pain has two parts, sensory and affective. Sensory pain is really the stimulus from the nerve endings when you burn yourself on the stove or something that has to do with inflammation. Negative pain is where it hits your brain and you say, "I hate this." Right. So there's ouch and I hate it. So when you physically hurt yourself, that's what happened. That's a good distinction. Yeah. And there's two parts. And it's, you know, it's, and working in different parts of your brain. So brain, the pain has two parts. When you have mental pain, like rejection or loss, that's only the affective component. And that's worse. That's worse. Now, interestingly, acetaminophen, which you, Brits called paracetamol, I think, that's Tylenol. That works on the affective component of pain. Whereas as Advil, you know, ibuprofen, that works on the sensory component of pain. So that lowers inflammation, nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs. They work on inflammation. Whereas Tylenol works on the affective component. Tylenol actually doesn't make you feel less pain, it just makes you care less. Is that right? Yeah. That's why when you take Tylenol and ibuprofen, when you take acetaminophen and ibuprofen together, it's a potent thing. It works on the two parts of pain, really effectively. Actually, that mix is better than opiates. That actually is more effective than opiate drugs in managing pain. But here's the point. When you're really, really, really sad, and there's a study of college students who are in bad breakups, and some of them get Tylenol and some of them don't. Those who take Tylenol, of course, of Tylenol are about a third less heartbroken. No way. Yeah. Wow. But did you not say earlier on that we want to embrace our suffering? Yeah. Of course. What you want to do is manage it, and so what you don't want to do is eradicate it, but there are times when it's good to manage it. How do you know when it's time to manage it and when it's time to do it? When you want to know when it's there, but you don't want it to actually interfere with your ability to live your life. That's usually at the therapeutic line where they, when they talk, and that's one of the reasons that over the counter, anal g6 are fine, but opiates are bad for most people. And one of the reasons that people will take opiates is because they're trying to use them as an anal g6 against the pain of life, just the pain of life, the pain of life, and that's a really dangerous business. Why do breakups hurt so much? Because they're a signal to you that you're going to be cast out of your tribe and walk through Savannah and dialogue. That's a, it's a, it's a, it's that you're going to die alone. That's when, that's why breakups hurt so much, because they say, there'll never be anybody for me. I'm incapable of falling in love. You catastrophize because your brain wants you to avoid that. Your brain wants you to not break up. And so it's going to make you feel like this is the end of the world so that you won't break up. It's not the end of the world. But if you knew it wasn't the end of the world, you'd be like, whatever, what else? That's why you won't leave a crummy relationship because you're afraid, you're not afraid of the breakup, you're afraid of the pain for the breakup. You're not afraid of failing, you're afraid of how you'll feel about yourself if you fail. You're afraid of their emotions, they're not afraid of the catastrophes is what it comes down to because the emotions are so aversive and that's what they're evolved to do. So once you understand that and you say, look, this is a crummy relationship. This is an unhealthy relationship. This is not going anywhere. 10 years from now, this is not going to be better than it is today. I've got to do that. And then with the knowledge, this is going to hurt, but it's going to be temporary pain. And that's a normal biological process. You can handle it. That's how knowledge is power. It's what happens in the brain when you put off the breakup. When you end up in a relationship with the relationship with the breakup and you're constantly ruminating and thinking and pushing off. You're not getting, you're actually, the inevitable is still inevitable, but you're just elongating the suffering that leads up to the inevitable. That's a problem. Now, if you don't know, you don't know is what it comes down to. If you're trying to just avoid doing something as difficult, firing that employee, saying that difficult thing, facing up to the fact that the business is not going well, then you're just going to suffer and suffer and suffer and suffer and suffer about it and then the inevitable is going to happen. That's why the band-aid right off is usually the right approach. You know. What's the gold standard for how people should deal with the breakup? So the gold standard, and there's a bunch of interesting protocols that actually show up in literature, the breakup protocol. There's a bunch of stuff that not do, too. There's two do's and there's two don'ts. Number one is, take some Tylenol, perhaps. Why not? I mean, obviously, check with your physician. This is not medical advice on modern wisdom, but there are a lot of other things to do. One of the things that you find is that when people actually, they want to curl up and cocoon when they're in the midst of a breakup, actually having more fun is really important. Distraction is extremely important. Distraction is something that you enjoy with people that you love as a critically important day. Go ride your bike with your friends, even though you don't want to. Doing that is a very effective way for you to actually start to heal. The second is to consider not the things that you're missing, but the things that you're not missing. It's actually focus in a relationship. In every relationship, you broke up for a reason, right? If you have a breakup, you broke up for a reason. Focusing on what was good about it is actually going to prolong the grief. Focusing on the reason that you broke up is really, really important because that actually aligns. That's metacognitive. It aligns your prefrontal cortex with your limbic system. I broke up for a reason. What did I break up? I broke up because this wasn't going to go any place, and here's the reason it wasn't going to go any place. Focus on that. For women, for example, they get into these relationship with these terrible dark triad guys, narcissistic Machiavellian psychopaths, which is, by the way, 7% of the population. It's your first husband, right? Focus on the reasons that you had to get away from that guy, not the reasons that you missed that guy. Last but not least, there's a really interesting study that actually talks about the effects of sad music. It's like you wouldn't put on a marching band after you break up, even though you think I should improve my mood. The reason is that you're trying to, when you're sad, you're trying to understand your feelings. You're making a real effort to understand your emotions. Your emotions are very confusing to you in a period of high negative effect. When you listen to sad music, sad music, literally, because it expands, it stimulates the right hemisphere of the brain, where you process aesthetics, where you process beauty. It helps you to understand your emotions better than you did before, and understanding your emotions is part of the healing process. Some Lewis Capaldi would be one of your favorite sad songs. One thing that you said that was really interesting, this sort of odd duality that people are in when they go through breakup of prior to the breakup, thinking about all of the reasons that they should break up, and then as soon as the breakup is done, thinking about all of the reasons about why they shouldn't have broken up, what's the switch that seems to be happening in lots of people's brains then? When switch such that they actually pull the trigger? No, the switch that prior to the thing, prior to the breakup, he were all of the things that are bad. Because we focus on losses, because we're always focusing on losses. We focus on losses when you're in it, and we focus on losses when you're out. That's the negativity bias inherent in homosapiens. We're always focusing on the negative, because the negative emotions and attention to threat is what keeps us alive. Thinking about what's good doesn't keep us alive, that's nice to have. That's why you have literally more brain space dedicated to negative emotions than to positive emotions. You're always looking for the bad side of whatever's going on. I found myself saying the other day, first-class in the United Airlines has really gone downhill. It has. Was it transatlantic or domestic? It's all of it, but yeah, it was something domestic. It was like East Coast to West Coast. That sucks. It sucks. But I mean, I'm getting there in five and a half hours for Pete's sake, but that's how we're wired. When you're in the relationship, you're focusing on the negative part of the relationship. When you're out of the relationship, you're focusing on the negative part of not being in the relationship, because we have a negativity bias, which can be overridden metacognitively. If you're in a relationship and it's till death to your part, you're going to have a lot of negativity. You're really going to have a lot of negativity. The thing to do is to focus consciously and systematically and therapeutically on what's right about your marriage every single day. Everything thanks for what's actually in your marriage. If you have to break up with your partner and you do, then the thing to focus on is not what you're missing, because that's the negative stimulus, but to be focusing on the reason that you did it and the fact that it was the right thing to do and the things that are actually giving you relief. I'm not screaming at somebody today. I'm not jealous about something today. I'm not wasting another year of my life in a relationship that's unproductive today. So focusing consciously, as opposed to focusing unconsciously on the negative, that's the reason we do that. Do you think the modern freedom has made happiness harder, not easier? Yeah, I do. I actually do. And I think that that's actually escalated a lot in the last 30 or 40 years as a matter of fact. And the evidence of that is that in the UK and the United States that happiness has declined since about 1990 has been consistently declining. And part of the reason is we make just tons of errors. I don't think, you know, I'm not of the view that we have too much freedom or we have too much abundance or we have too much affluence. I think that what we have is a tendency, well, we have kind of a climate and a weather problem with happiness. The climate is that in modern society, we've gotten away from things that we took for granted, which are faith, family, friends, and work. Those are the four habits of the happiest people. They're serious about their faith or life philosophy if they're not religious. They have serious family life. They have close friends and they pay attention to the meaning of their work. And all those things have been in decline for the past three years. The weather problems are screens, hatred, political polarization, and COVID. Those are the three big storms of unhappiness that have come our way. We're rising that anybody who's managed to make it through the last half decade. But, you know, we do. We're tough, man. People are really, really tough. And the way that we do it, by the way, is by having personal protocols that fight against those tendencies. This is okay. Yeah. I mean, the life is making it less likely for me to worship or practice the philosophy of life. I'm being distracted constantly by those due dads and googas and stupid nonsense on the internet. I know. I'm putting that down. I'm going to study the holy book or whatever it happens to be. Yeah. I mean, the life says that you're tied down, that you're losing your freedom if you get married and have kids. Wrong. Get married and have kids. It's with the secret of happiness for most people. Most of them get married to the right person. Yeah. Kids with the right person. For sure. For sure. But it's interesting to do it with the wrong. Your show is, you know, the reason I always, I was like a show because modern wisdom actually is ancient wisdom. That's the twist. Well, the thing that's been fascinating about it is the mismatch, because you would say any evolutionary psychology, the mismatch principle, that a lot of the systems that were built to protect us or keep us effective, ancestrally, maladaptive in the modern environment. Or the maladapted. Yes. A lot of the time. Yeah. Yeah. So it's, you know, there's nothing wrong with resource cues and fertility cues. The problem is the way that we melt their maladapted in modern culture and the extent to which we believe the propaganda that they don't exist. Do you ever look at Seth Stevens' Davidowitz' work? Oh, no. So he is a, he used to be a data scientist at Google. He wrote, first book was Everybody Lies and then his next one was Don't Trust Your Gut. Oh, yeah. I've seen that. Don't trust your gut. It's fucking money. It is so, I can't believe that he managed to like, he danced through a minefield of political incorrectness and just got away with it somehow. I don't know why. It's because of the way he presents, he presents this sort of slightly nerdy, slightly Jewish guy. But he, he fucking crushed it with that book and he highlighted what are the traits that people optimize for to click on and what are the traits that are actually reliable for who you'll click with. What predicts long-term relationships satisfaction and happiness versus what are the things that people tend to optimize for unturned. And the two are totally different. I mean, he did some, in that book did he did some really spicy shit. He did some stuff around sex and race and which ones are most preferred by each sex and race and one of those crossover trebles. And he's taught, he was like, "Hey, Asian guys and black women, like you guys have got a tough end of the deal at the moment because it seems like certain groups from that." And he's, I'm like, how? Did you get away with that? Fuck. Did you write this book and put this out there and it just, people just so it's very interesting, isn't it? If I, because it was in the middle, I think this came out in 2020, 2021, but this could not have been more in the bullseye of like exactly how this is going to work. Park ellipses upon us. Oh my gosh. Yeah. And you know, like real, real harsh brusque insights. Yeah. Here's how you do it. So here's how you do it. So I've been, you know, I've been in the business of saying, you know, unspeakable thing. Yeah. You can, if you use the truth as a weapon versus if you use the truth as a gift. If you bring the truth in love or you bring the truth in hostility, do you say these things about race and sex because you're trying to score a point, you're trying to make someone silly or you're trying to do it because you love people and you want people to live better happier lives? It's the motive. I mean, you can still get canceled with a pure motive, but the truth of the matter is that motive matters a lot and people know your motive. Someone, I watched this video online about comedians and they were talking about how, I can't remember, the comparison was between a couple of comedians and they said about how one of them, you just didn't believe that he was doing it to be nice. Yeah. It was saying that thing because you kind of maybe had a secret axe to grind. And this other one, you go, yeah, I mean, it's kind of the same group that you're punching at or whatever, it doesn't feel as, this doesn't feel the same. Yeah. It doesn't feel like we have a hundred ways to discern that, hundred ways to discern that. So many ways to below our level of consciousness when you know, to know whether somebody's friend or foe. And somebody can say the same thing. You can criticize somebody. I mean, if you criticize me right now, I'm going to take it as an expression of love. I'm going to take it as a way that you want me to be better because I know you will my, my good. To love, according to Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, is to will the good of the other as other, to will the good of the other as nothing about your feelings, nonsense, to if I will the Chris is good as Chris. And when you believe that I have love in my heart for you like that, I can say hard things. You're going to be like, thanks, man. It's amazing, actually. And so that's what we need to work in. This is the one I want. This is the right desire. If you have to, if we want to be interesting people in the world, we have to have right desire which is love for everybody else. Just be full of love. And then it's like, it's funny because Saint Augustine, it's like, it's very biblical in its way. It's very Buddhist in its way. It's very biblical in its way. So, you know, you get the Ten Commandments and the young guy comes up to Jesus and he says, I said, a lot to remember, Lord, can you boil it down? Something I can remember. He says, yeah, I mean, there's really just, you know, love the Lord your God and love your neighbor as yourself. You know, and they said, okay, that's great. So Saint Augustine was asked, you know, can you boil it down? Saint Augustine said, love and do what you will. So, we're really good at the do what you will part, but we're really not good at the love part. So, this is the important thing for everybody watching us and for us to live, we're going to do what we will. And that's great. I love living in a society in which we have all these opportunities to have conversations like this and get paid, it's insane. But if it's not based in love, it's bad. If it's not based in love, it's a problem. It's making life worse and you're going to get in trouble is what it comes down to. But if it's based in love, you can be pretty confident because people are going to know that. I can't. Arthur Brooks, ladies and gentlemen, dude, you're great. I love you to bits. What have you got going on at the moment? I got a big book coming out in March called The Meaning of Your Life Finding Purpose in an Age of Emptiness. We got to talk about that again. Can't wait. Me too. Thank you. Podcast. You've got a podcast. It's Arthur Brooks. It's brand new. It's doing really well. It's crushing. It's super fun. I mean, it's like, it's a lecture. It's not. I'm talking about behavioral science and in front of the camera. It's cool. Unreal. Appreciate you, man. Until next time. Thank you. If you are looking for new reading suggestions, look no further than the Modern Wisdom Reading List. It is 100 books that you should read before you die. The most interesting, life-changing, and impactful books I've ever read with descriptions about why I like them and links to go and buy them. And you can get it right now for free by going to chrisswillx.com/books. That's chrisswillx.com/books.