Harvard Professor: Why marriages fail & the science of happiness w/ Arthur Brooks

At Edward Jones, we believe rich is about taking care of what gives your life meaning. That's why your financial advisor personalizes your plan to help you preserve your progress and create something that lasts. Let's find your rich. Edward Jones, member SIPC. Does marriage make you happier? For the big majority of people, marriage makes you happier. A bad marriage doesn't. A crummy marriage doesn't make you happier. You could save most marriages just by eye contact and touch. Before you go to bed at night, stare at each other and have a conversation every night. Your feelings are liars. Psychology is biology. Emotions, all they are, is your most reptilian brain. Women need a lot of things from their husbands, right? But the one big thing that if they don't have, it'll wreck their marriage. They need to be. Today on Unplanned, we sat down with Dr. Arthur Brooks, a Harvard professor, New York Times bestselling author, and happiness expert. Now, this dude's written books with Oprah, so I just knew that we were going to have an amazing conversation with him, and we did. We talk about why the most successful people are happy. And what you can do to manage your unhappiness, all on today's episode. What got you so into happiness? I'm just so curious, because it makes me think that maybe there was a time in your life where things weren't so good, and you got obsessed with happiness and the idea of being happy. Is that true? That is completely true. I don't do research. I do me-search. And anybody in the happiness field, you got to go, right? There's a reason. And I know all the people who specialize in happiness, and there's a lot of truth to that. And what happened was that, you know, about half of your natural happiness is genetic. It's true. You know, your mother made you unhappy. Literally. Literally. And we know this because we have studies of identical twins that were separated at birth and adopted into separate families, which is this unbelievable natural experiment. Because statistically, if they're reunited at age 40, and you look at the similarities and differences between them, you know what part is genetic and what part is environmental. And about half of your natural happiness is genetic. And what that means is you need really, really good happiness. And if you're not happy, you're not going to be happy. And so, you need to have really good habits. And you need to understand, if you're behind the eight ball, because you come from gloomy stock, you got to do a lot of things right. And the truth is, you know, I have great, wonderful parents, you know, really, really well educated and artistic and intellectual parents. And I'm so grateful. But, you know, they struggled. And it looked like my fate. And I struggled with happiness, just, ugh. And I married a happy person who, you know, and I was bumming her out. And finally, she said, when I was, you know, retiring from my, you know, my, you know, third career, I was like, what do we do? What do we do? And we were walking the Camino de Santiago. Do you know what that is? That's that hundreds of mile walk across northern Spain, which Christians have been doing for hundreds of years, more than a thousand years, to find their calling and to find God's purpose for their life. And I was 55 doing this with my wife, you know, hand in hand praying, you know. And, you know, guide my path, guide my path. What's the next career, right? And Esther said, you know, you should use your PhD for something true. And I said, well, I'm going to truly useful. And I said, what? She said, happiness. It's what you need. It's what you want. Why don't you actually understand the science, which I thought I did, but bring it to masses of people and serving other people. I think you'll find it yourself. And so on that long walk, I dedicated the rest of my career to lifting people up and bringing them together in bonds of happiness and love. And I said, well, I'm going to do it. And she said, well, I'm going to do it. Using science and ideas. And that's what I've been doing ever since. It's clear that you have that mission statement so ingrained in you. And that's really cool also that your wife was able to kind of like say, hey, like this is something that'd be good for you and you can use it for good. And she's my guru. And that's what we're supposed to do for each other. That's what you're doing for each other. That's why you're on earth. I mean, this is, this is the, we're not supposed to be alone for the most part. I mean, there are people who do really well with a single vocation to be sure, but most people don't. But why? I mean, what's the why? Why of your marriage? I mean, there's a lot of practical whys, you know, raising children together, it's a good thing and all that. But fundamentally you're put together to perfect each other, you know? And how do you perfect each other? By saying, man, Matt, this is what you need. I think this, I'm the person who knows you best. I think this is what you need. I mean, you're growing up together effectively. And sometimes it's, you're making a mistake and I'm the only one who can tell you, Abby, you're making a mistake. And you get this whole life together from 20, 21. Until 100. And you get to actually figure it out together. That's the whole point. That's marriage. Isn't there a lot of data about marriage and how you live longer if you're married and you're happier? I think if you're married, does marriage make you happier? Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. It does? Okay. Now, a bad marriage doesn't, you know, a crummy marriage doesn't make you happier. So what you find is that for the big majority of people, marriage makes you happier. And for the minority people who are really unhappy and staying married, it makes them much unhappier is what you find. Yeah, for sure. Because, you know, living with somebody who's driving you completely insane, that's not that great. That's one of the reasons that people figure out that, or they decide that they've made a mistake. The five-year point in marriages is always the dangerous one. You know, the culture says there's a seven-year itch. It's actually a five-year itch. And that's when dissatisfaction tends to peak. And if you, and then what successful marriages have in common is that they have the peak of dissatisfaction because you're going from passion to companionship, which doesn't sound hot. I know, right? Like doesn't, but companionate love has tons of passion in it. And once you actually understand that this is a lifelong, you know, we're walking into the future hand in hand, it's just you and me. And you understand each other and you understand the complementarity between men and women, then from five years on things for most couples tend to get better and better because that companionate love gets deeper and richer. Does that include like, like from the start of marriage or like you first met and like started dating or is it kind of generally around that mark? It's you. Well, so that this is measured because there's so much variance in how long people take to get married. That's usually measured from the beginning of a marriage because that's something that's really tangible. It's like, boom, that's the starting gun. But, but for a lot of couples, I mean, you would, you would measure it from a different point. Is there something that you would like one piece of like practical advice for a couple hitting that five-year mark? Like what would you would recommend? Yeah. I mean, I'll tell you what I see is the big reason that they don't make it. I can tell you the real reason that they intend not to make it. It's that the husband and wife don't understand the one thing the other one needs. They think that the other one needs the same thing that they do. And that's wrong. We're men and women are different. That's the fun. I mean, that's, that's like, that's awesome. Right. And that's because we're complimentary. We don't substitute for each other, which is why you shouldn't compete with each other. You're complimentary to each other. And, and a lot of what men and women need is based in evolutionary psychology and evolutionary biology, which is how they're going to get there. And I think that's how we develop to be complimentary to each other and as men and women. And, and what you find according to the evolution is that women need one big thing from their husbands. They need a lot of things from their husbands, right? I mean, they require respect and they require responsibility, et cetera, et cetera. They need to be adored by their husbands. And the evolutionary reason for that is that women, they make a big investment. I mean, being pregnant and, and, you know, and being, and feeding a child. I mean, that's a huge investment and that requires, that requires commitment and protection from the mate. And so the way that that's shown is adoration. Like baby, I would fight a tiger for you and only you. That's adoration, right? And if they don't feel it, it's a huge problem because that signals a huge lack of commitment. And that's where, when a marriage really starts to falter. If they don't feel the adoration, the unique adoration from the husband. The husband needs admiration from his wife, uniquely from his wife. And that's basically he'd fight a tiger. But what he needs to hear is that is the biggest gazelle that anybody who's ever dragged into this cave. You are so big and strong. That's going to feed our family for three weeks. You're amazing. That's what he needs to hear because, because evolution made him into the hunter, the provider. Now, again, women provide and men take care of kids. Don't get me wrong. I'm not getting into these like retrograde gender roles. None, none, none, none, none, none. But fundamentally there is a wiring to this kind of thing. And men who don't feel admired by their wives, they stop adoring their wives. And women who stop feeling adored by their husbands, stop admiring their husbands. And the cycle goes, no admiration, no adoration, no admiration, no adoration. And that peaks at five years and then it goes down from there. And the couples that really have this together are the ones where, man, she, she really, again, mutual respect and understanding that we live in the modern world. And, you know, and, and my wife has always done all kinds of stuff to support our family as well. And I've done all kinds of things that I take. I changed a lot of diapers in my time. I live with my grandkids now. I'm changing diapers still, which is the best actually, because now I actually enjoy it, you know, but the whole point is if you break the admiration, adoration cycle, you're going to struggle. Wow. That's so good. How do you reverse that? You reverse that by deciding to be the person you want to be now. I give a lot of advice to young dudes and they say, so what do I do? What do I do to stay in love? And the answer is number one, adore her. I don't care how you feel, adore her and be admirable because it's hard to admire somebody who's not admirable, right? And then you have me saying, yeah, but it's really hard to adore somebody who's not adorable. True. But you decide to adore her and you decide to be an admirable man. And that means being impeccable to your morals, impeccable to your word, impeccable to your work. I love it because what you're saying is so counter-cultural feel like what we hear in the media on, on social media, especially, which is like, if you don't don't feel this like you know maybe it's time for the relationship to like part way like maybe there's not a good fit like if you don't if you don't like it's all about your feelings and if it feels wrong if it's hard like you know i mean i i loved i was listening to a podcast and you were talking about how yeah it doesn't necessarily feel good when you work out but it's good for you so why do we look at marriages and relationships differently absolutely and as a matter of fact marriages grow through suffering because we all grow through suffering suffering is your is your teacher suffering is your teacher you've suffered i mean you've talked publicly about your suffering that's your teacher if you didn't have any suffering you wouldn't actually understand many many important things about life and you wouldn't be able to help anybody else you'd be terrible parents be the worst parents ever it's like it's like i don't know lifestyle's been really good for me so i don't know what's wrong what's up with you junior i mean it wouldn't be helpful and so understanding that a great part of your growing up together is the suffering that you get along with each other and the difficulties that you actually have that you need this and so the idea of like i'm not feeling it good that's your opportunity to love each other more deeply notwithstanding your feelings your feelings are liars your limbic system lies to you all the time feelings all they are emotions all they are is a processing of signals that you're perceiving in the exterior from around you so your most reptilian brain um at the you know what's more than 40 million years old you have in common with snakes and lizards it perceives you as a creature it perceives stuff it sends data to the the newer part of your brain called the limbic system which is still pre-human and that translates these signals into emotions all emotions are are your perception signals of what's going on around you below your level of awareness you have four negative emotions fear anger disgust and sadness only four and all of them have been involved to give you signals about different threats do they come up with those from the movie inside out i'm inside out it's a great movie we should base yeah everything off this it turns out that maybe the movie got it from it but anyway either way i'm sad but that's the first thing i know i know yeah and that was a really useful movie for that too and there's some there's you know there's some argument about what the basic emotions are but generally speaking the four negative emotions just are what they are the positive emotions are a little bit more contested there's a little bit more argument among neuroscientists but they're generally uh uh joy right of interest and surprise most of surprise is like surprise i mean there are bad surprises like your lawyers on the phone i mean that's but but most of the time surprise is like all humor is based on surprises there's a little tiny thing in your in your limbic system called a parahippocampal gyrus and it's all how you resolve surprise and it makes you laugh so all jokes you flick that parahippocampal gyrus you hit it too hard you're like that's bad taste you hit it too softly and you're like that's a stupid dad joke but you hit it just right and that's all based on surprise so you see i mean it's all this is all the psychology is biology and if you understand the biology then you understand that all of these negative emotions that they have a reason for existing and they're very important and so what are we trying to do we're trying to develop emotionally such that we can manage these emotions grow from these emotions and they're not managing us when you say i don't feel it anymore with somebody i used to love and i'm going to walk away from my marriage because of my feelings you're basically saying my limbic system manages me whoa and that's not very evolved that's like saying i'm a i'm a reptile i'm a monkey like i just i just follow my emotions yeah yeah yeah it's like somebody who decides that their goal in life is pleasure you know pleasure all that's doing is flicking a little part of your uh your limbic system called the you know the what is it called the ventral tegmental area and the ventral striatum these two little places in your and your limbic system that make you feel and you can get it from you know somebody says i love you or you can get it from a bump of cocaine because we have very thrifty brains but if you're going to live just to try to hit the ventral tegmental area again and again and again and again you're not gonna be happy you're gonna be in rehab recently i came to this realization where i finally understood there's never going to be like a moment where i look back on my life and i'm like wow i made it i don't know you you accomplish the thing that you always dreamed of and then after you you have that moment of happiness and then you're like okay what's next like it's just you know we're wired for that absolutely and and part of the reason is because when you hit a goal you get positive emotions but positive emotions are not there to give you permanent satisfaction they're there to say good now keep running that's what they're for i mean the the joy that you get from hitting a goal will wear off immediately and turn into some sort of disappointment for something that's not going right today and that's because your amygdala does two things attention and fear and anger and so what happens your your limbic system exists out there for you to perceive stuff threats and and and opportunities all day long and and so the result of it is that we think that when we actually make our goals or wonderful things happen that we're going to get satisfaction that hangs around wrong that's not right that's not right that's no way to live that's why olympic athletes typically suffer from a clinical depression in the months after winning their gold because they thought it was going to be awesome but it isn't because their brain doesn't work that way when it comes to social scientists i heard you on a podcast mentioned something about social scientists in india tend to be buddhists and social scientists and you know some of the your colleagues you said were jewish right and and you're a christian i'm curious with like all the different religions what are the similarities you see across happiness when it comes to religion and the the different belief systems because i'm sure there's a lot of similarities but there's also some differences a lot a lot and i've studied a lot of comparative religion i've worked a lot in india actually with religious leaders and religious leaders around the world i'm really really interested in this now to begin with most social scientists are not religious i'm in the middle of the world i'm in the middle of the world but i'm in the middle of the world i'm in the middle of the world but i'm in the middle of the world but i'm in the middle of the world i'm in the middle of the world religious at all okay now physical scientists are more religious so you find that more than half of of members of the american academy of sciences are are they believe in a higher power right at least and and the younger they are the more actually religious they actually are so my father was a biostatistician as a phd biostatistician he was a lifelong christian and a lot of mathematicians probably a majority of mathematicians are actually religious it's just social scientists and the reason is because there's this belief in behavioral science that everything is a is a reaction to or an accommodation of what we find and so most social scientists say the belief in god is a way that we manage our terror of not understanding non-existence there's a funny thing about about about death most people are not really afraid of dying they understand that only 20 percent of people have a phobia of death it's called thanatophobia 20 percent of people you're probably neither one of you is like i mean i'm gonna die the problem is that the human brain can't understand can understand not being physically alive but can't understand not existing those are two fundamentally different cognitions and so we have to find some way to resolve dying but not being able to understand non-existent and that creates that cognitive dissonance creates terror and so social scientists say the way that we resolve that terror is by create by inventing god by inventing heaven and so they say it's got to be an adaptation and so they say it's got to be an adaptation and so they say it's got to be an i don't see it that way i don't see it that way at all i see it more in terms of of of a a holistic understanding of creator and creation you know i have all kinds of data about human behavior and neuroscience and that's my stock and trade i mean looking at experiments and brain scans and data and statistical experiments but i don't have that data for god that for that i have faith and that's that for me that's completely consistent in much the same way that if i were an art historian specializing in picasso i'd need to know two things i need to know all about picasso's paintings and i need to know all about picasso and i can't find anything about picasso the man by staring at one of picasso's paintings there are two different ways of understanding creator and creation but you're not a good intellectual unless you understand both that's my view and that's how my faith makes my reason better and my reason makes my faith better but i'm not trying to use my reason to understand creator and creation i'm not trying to use my reason to understand my faith right i mean i'm not actually actually what i should say is i'm not trying to use science to find evidence of god because that doesn't work they're different in the same way as picasso the man and picasso the painting so that's how i see it i'm shocked that you said that most social scientists aren't religious at all because i just assumed that most were based off of like you know learning about you and your colleagues tell me about how do you do you guys ever like get into uh like how does that work like what what does all that look like so not really very many debates um people are pretty nice and people are pretty tolerant you know i teach at secular university i teach at harvard university and nobody's like oh wow that's a bastion of you know orthodox christianity no one ever said that right it's like oh all those catholics you know no um and and i'm sure a lot of social scientists are like yeah brooks has got that like a hang up he's got his whole christian thing going i'm sure right i'm sure but people are super nice to me and my students are awesome and they know i mean they know that i have a deep christian belief but i'm also not you know up there pounding the podium saying you know repent or die because i want them to find their path i find it interesting because there's been a ton of like new information coming out at least at least from my awareness about spirituality and happiness yeah it seems like there's a big correlation yeah that was your question before and so so what's the relationship between you and your colleagues and what's your relationship between between religion and happiness and it's really strong it's really really strong Happiness, probably the correlation is between a sense of the transcendent and happiness. So it's not the specific path that people have. And again, this is not a judgment on metaphysical truth. I mean, I have a belief on metaphysical truth. I mean, you know, I'm practicing Roman Catholic. It's what I do. It's my gig, right? And so I have a belief that it's awesome and right. But that's not what we're talking about. We're talking about the difference between well-being and religious belief. And there's a very strong correlation between the belief that it's not just about me and there's something bigger than me. And I can actually stand in awe of something bigger than me. And there are many ways to actually get that happiness that's not just traditional religious belief. So a lot of people are watching us who are not religious believers. You can get the same happiness effect through a Vipassana meditation practice, for example. Or walking in nature before dawn without devices for an hour every day. That's the best. Oh, yeah. Watching the sun come up. We used to live by the mountains. And I would take my boys on a bike ride like around sunset. And just the awe. Just like the privilege. Purple. Like here in Arizona, we get purple in the sky when the sun sets. And I would just be like, holy crap. I can't believe this is real. That's the best. And it's because you're having a transcendent experience. Yeah. Then the transcendent experience is what really gets you out of the me self. Into observing things that are bigger than you. You can get this by studying the works of Johann Sebastian Bach, the greatest composer who ever lived. Or whoever your thing is, but something bigger than yourself. Or studying the Stoic philosophers. My friend Ryan Holiday, he gets huge transcendence actually from studying the Stoics. And for me, it's my traditional Christian faith that actually gives me that sense of the transcendent. But if you're stuck in the psychodrama, me, me, me, me, me, you're going to be miserable. That's the bottom line. So that's the connection between happiness and religion. And then there's other benefits of religion too, of course. But the happiness benefit really comes from transcendence. That's so good too. Because like that, you're saying like the psychodrama of me, me, me, me. I feel like that's everything that like our devices often are trying to get us to focus on more. Oh, completely. Our devices, they distract us from finding the meaning of our lives, right? And there's a reason for that. The meaning of your life is only perceived in the right hemisphere of your brain. The right hemisphere of your brain is all the mystery that goes beyond language. That's really a right hemispheric experience. That comes from the work of Ian McGilchrist, who's a neuroscientist at Oxford. This is a thing called a fancy word, hemispheric lateralization, which has a simple idea that different halves of your brain do different things. Right. We put fancy titles on simple ideas. That's how we get tenure. I appreciate that you use like very dumbed down language so that. It's not dumbed down, it's just English. Yeah, just basic English so I can understand. Yeah, of course. You were using fancy language in a podcast I was listening to and you were like, "I'm literally just talking about the two parts of your brain." And I was like, "Thank you." I was like, "I don't know what the fancy words were that you said." I know, I know, I know, I know. And it's just the right side does meaning and mystery and happiness and love, and the left side of your brain does. Tasks and analysis and efficiency and technology. That's what's going on in the left and right. You need both. You need to be able to get to work, but you also need to know why you're going to go to work. Yeah. You need to know how to actually figure out how to be a decent human being who can marry your soulmate. But there's a reason you want to. And the two halves of your brain need to work together on the why and the what and how. Do you believe in soulmates? Oh, well, I believe that there are lots and lots of people who could be your soulmate, and then you have to do the work to make sure the person is. And that's what I believe. That's so cool. Yeah, of course. Look, it's unambiguously true. Yeah. I mean, as far as I'm concerned, right? I mean, in a lot of the people who say there's actually your twin flame or the whole thing, it doesn't stand up. Wait, what is the twin flame thing? The twin flame is a phenomenon in which there is only one person for you in the whole world, and woe be unto you if you don't find her. But I feel like that idea is dangerous because if you're in a relationship and something isn't going well for a time being, you're in a season of hardship. Yeah. And then you say, I don't know, you're in a newborn stage with a baby, and you're like, how do I, like, what am I doing, right? It's so easy to go into that idea of, oh, clearly, I missed my soulmate. Yeah. Totally, yeah. Clearly. And I think that can be a very harmful idea. Yeah. People who have that superstition in their religions are way more likely to have disappointment in their relationships. They're way more likely to engage in ghosting and other kinds of unethical behavior. Interesting. It's like, yep, it is what it is, man. So they feel morally. They feel like they have. They have a moral space to actually treat people with less respect and love because it wasn't their soulmate to begin with. And so people who have that sort of superstition, they're way unhappier in their relationships. They're less likely to have. Way less likely to have successful relationships. They're way more likely not to make it past that five-year mark, and they're way more likely when they're dating to engage in unethical, harmful, and the kind of behavior that hurts other people. Okay. I've got to ask it. I've got to ask it. I've got to ask it. I've got to ask it. I've got to ask it. I've got to ask it. I've got to ask it. I've got to ask it. I've got to ask it. I've got to ask it. Okay. Okay. I've got to ask it. I've got to ask it. I've got to ask it. I've got to ask it. I've got to ask it. I've got to ask it. I've got to ask it. I've got to ask it. I've got to ask it. I've got to ask it. I've got to ask it. I've got to ask it. I've got to ask it. I've got to ask it. I've got to ask it. I've got to ask it. I've got to ask it. I've got to ask it. I've got to ask it. I've got to ask it. I've got to ask it. I've got to ask it. I've got to ask it. Okay. Okay. Okay. some scientists did with rats and they had like rats that were just able to drink like regular water or uh water laced with uh what was it um methamphetamine or something yes yes it wasn't meth but it was what was it that you had in the hospital when fentanyl fentanyl it was actually an opiate yeah yeah and then they and then so obviously the rat would go to the fentanyl every time but then when they brought the rats into rat park where they could you know have sex have community have friends you know yay they're in community have fun now the rats don't care about the fentanyl they're drinking the water just as much as they're drinking the regular water and that's one of the reasons that that you know 25 of active duty military in vietnam were addicted to heroin which is one of the reasons the united states was functioning poorly in vietnam is abundant cheap heroin there and they're like there's gonna be a huge public health crisis when they all come home between five and ten percent depending on the estimates that you believe were addicted after the first day at home why because they were addicted to heroin and they were addicted to heroin and they were addicted to heroin and they were addicted to heroin and they were addicted to heroin and they were reunited with their loved ones and that's what their brains wanted that's the reason that a lot of heroin addicts say that that being high on opiates feels like pure love because it's actually affecting the brain in much the same way yeah and when you get real love it's what you actually want so when you're shearing the rewards off from the actual love it's a problem yeah that's a problem so that's number one is you don't get that's why pornography doesn't lead to enjoyment and therefore is unrelated to happiness on the contrary at least to unhappiness it's really bad and dangerous yeah it's really bad and dangerous thing satisfaction so sex is related to satisfaction to the point that it's it's leading you to the goal of going deeper with a person so it should be something that's why you should you should be having sex with somebody you're in love with yeah right that's that's the important thing that's why casual sex is not a good thing yeah it's a bad now when i say not a good i'm not making a moral point i'm making a point about happiness yeah that's what i'm coming down to so it's like people can figure out their own morals but i'll talk about the science of happiness and most of all most importantly within within a marriage it leads to meaning yeah this is a memorialization of the part of the meaning of my life the depth of my life as i've made a commitment to have a union one flesh with one particular person that's how that comes about so it's fun it's pleasurable but that goes through the enjoyment channel it actually leads to the goal of my life which is to be with somebody and make a life with somebody that's satisfaction and it helps me understand who i am as a person which is fused to this other person which leads to more meaning and that's how we need to understand sex we got married when we were 20 and 21 we were very young very much in love it was so exciting i was just like obsessed with abby for three years basically i was like i'm gonna marry this like we we did everything we possibly could to make the money that we needed to be financially independent from our parents and have our own place we worked at a pizza restaurant sharing a car together so that we could you know live together before you're married we didn't actually so yeah we waited to live together until we were married we waited until marriage not to be all weird and vulnerable for a second but you know it's all right it was really hard we yeah we waited i don't know where he's going with this we waited we waited for three years after like a year or two it was like i felt like i was going effing crazy it's like i love this person but we're not biologically you have a particular appetite yes and what you're doing here is this you're telling me an incredibly important thing here if you were a dog you wouldn't await it and that's because you have nothing more than animal impulses yeah but you're a man and that means you also have moral aspirations the prefrontal cortex of the brain which is the purely human part the executive part of the brain which is the prefrontal cortex of the brain which is the only 250 000 years old it allows you to defy your animal impulses and live in your moral aspirations your happiness comes from getting into your moral aspirations and not giving in to animal impulses that's why this works that's what you're telling me and look i don't want to toot my own horn here because i'm not perfect like we it's not i'm not like we waited till marriage but like we weren't like completely perfect like we didn't just hold hands the whole time that we were dating but i guess i guess my question is i'm made of stone i'm just like what do you because like we have kids now and we're gonna have these conversations with them and from like a scientific standpoint what makes sense because people are saying oh your brain's not developed to your 26 if you're a dude 24 when you're if you're a girl 21 actually yeah 21 women women are well it's the connection between the limbic system and the prefrontal cortex so that you can manage your emotions and you're not managed by your emotions okay some people are worse at that and some people never actually get that connection complete but when you're a kid you absolutely don't have those connections which is why your little kids my grandkids they freak out all the time they're freaking out all the time like stop stop screaming you're killing me why are you screaming all the time and that's because their limbic system is in charge yeah right and and that's why teenagers do really really irresponsible things it's because their limbic systems are giving these super heavy emotions and their prefrontal cortex is not managing those emotions and so they're being managed by their emotions and doing crazy things like driving at 90 miles an hour or or or you know taking drugs or whatever it happens to be that's why adolescent behavior is so irresponsible and can be so dangerous it's because you can't have that connection with your emotions you can't have that connection with your emotions limbic system in charge that's why you need parents right and rules and again we all make mistakes don't get me wrong and what i'm talking about like what we're talking about with like sex or whatever yes these are the ideal states you know and the truth is that nobody actually very very few people live the ideal and it's a mistake to think that if you don't hit the ideal you're wrong what you want to do is to be the do the best you can and then always trying to be doing better that's the goal in life is to do your best and try to be better and and and recognize that yeah you know it's like i shouldn't eat eating the whole pizza so tomorrow i'm not going to eat a whole pizza that's progress yeah that's progress and when it comes to your sex life or whatever happens to be you're just trying to be better i guess i have two questions that i think i can concisely narrow down one is from a scientific standpoint how long should you wait according to science to have sex in a relationship with your partner and how long should you wait according to your relationship and then number two according to science like when is the like how long should you wait to get married right yeah because we technically got married before our brains were fully developed right yeah so reckless so those are two different those are two and and the first question there's no answer to that because it's not there's not like good science on that how long you should wait um there is pretty compelling work that shows that living together isn't great and and for the longest time people thought you got to live together because you practice your is that typically the reasons for living together are different between the woman and the man and and there's a bunch of estimates that suggest that up to 95 of cohabiting relationships end in disillusion not in marriage interest 95 okay so 95 yeah yeah so 19 out of 20 couples wind up not getting married and one of the 20 gets married and that's that's what i've seen and again this is all over the map because this is not the kind this is not like settled science like this but there's a reason why you would tend to why it tends to be so important to have sex with your partner but there's a reason why you would tend to but there's a reason why you would tend to be a mistake when a couple lives moves in together in their mid-20s for example typically and again everybody's results may vary i'm not speaking for everybody i'm just looking at the broad patterns the woman thinks it's a step toward marriage and the man thinks it's a bulwark against breakup and that difference is really really dangerous so they're like we're gonna we're gonna move in together because otherwise i'm gonna get an ultimatum from her and i don't want the ultimatum from her like marriage or bye-bye and he doesn't want to break up because he loves her and she thinks that this is actually a step toward marriage and if he's doing it to not break up that's not a step toward marriage it isn't and so that's a misunderstanding and now we're living together and that can go on for a really really long time and lead to some big problems you know you live together for six or seven or eight years and she's like so when are we getting married when are we getting married when are we getting married he's like at least we're not breaking up that's not the basis of a stable relationship at all so that's one of the reasons that for a lot of couples is better not to live together you also find that that your likelihood of actually having a successful marriage go down after having lived with more than one person in other words you don't get better at it things actually tend to get worse a lot of this is from the work of brad wilcox who's a sociologist the university of virginia and he runs this great program called the institute for family studies pure social science no moral judgment just the patterns now to your question though we do know the the age range where people are most likely to stay married okay and that's when they get married between 28 and 32 interesting i know way older than you and way older than my kids yeah we're both not even i know you're not even and you know my kids i have three kids they're 22 25 and 27 my 25 and 27 year old they got married at 22 and 23 respectively wow and they started having their kids at 23 and 24 so they're 27 and 25 and they have four kids between them right and and it's and they married you know young like you i mean they more or less like you a little bit little a year older than you and so the reason for those data is not they're not prescriptive it's not that 28 to 32 is the magic zone it's just that culturally that's where most people they feel like they have a mature attitude toward marriage you can be completely different because you can have a much more mature attitude toward marriage much younger if you decide to do so yeah i think the bigger problem in our society today is marrying too late not marrying too early now if you've gotten married at 16 i'd be like i don't know it's like you know running off to you know some state where it's legal i don't know that's that's not the or or you know like her dad her dad is behind you with a shotgun or something you know it's like but you know 21 22 if you've got your act together and you're understanding what this is all about and you have a supernatural understanding in particular of what this union really is that's not too young i've heard you say a couple times like successful marriage and it has me questioning like what how do you measure a successful marriage so a successful marriage i mean technically it means it's you're staying married yeah because it's kind of a zero one deal where zero is not married and one is married so successful marriage you look at my marriage i remember yesterday was my 34th wedding anniversary and so you know congratulations that's obviously successful marriage because it's like there's there's no chance that that i'm gonna be like honey it's been great but let's face facts i mean there's like no way that that's actually going to happen i mean it's it's going to be till death do us part no that's it's going to be till death do us part no that's it's going to be there's an explosion in my field and what's called gray divorce gray divorce is when you break up after 25 years that's been going through the roof in the last 10 years yeah yeah and and there's tons of speculation and it's just really really early days and the research on why people are breaking up later and later and later later than they had been before um you know there's it's probably because it's more and more socially acceptable for people to call it quits and say i never liked you anyway or whatever it is it's like enough is enough 25 years so that is actually increasing but the truth is the longer you're married the the higher the likelihood is that you're going to stay married until one of you dies right maybe it's the empty nester phase there is a lot of that and actually this is what i see in a lot of gray divorces and this is the danger and this is what you need to be paying attention to as a couple that more and more and more the what you have in common is the kids and the one thing you talk about is the kids and even when you're alone at dinner you talk about the kids you gotta have more than the kids because when the kids grow up and leave you're not going to be able to have you're going to be going blink blink blink and so we got nothing in common we grew apart now good you're working together that's good right i mean that's a i mean it can be good i mean not every couple should work together either but you you have to have you got to be a unit this is and and couples that struggle with this are couples where the kids can get between the parents a lot never let your kids get between you if she's wrong she's right if he's wrong he's right the kids are wrong it's you against them we've said that before we've been like it's us against them totally and you're gonna have more you're gonna have more you see like and they're gonna they're gonna outnumber you you better have you better have complete yeah yeah that's right and my my wife and i we've never never had disagreements about this i mean we've been it's like we we understand perfectly that we're a team is team team parents and team kids they're not a very good team they don't work together very well we work together great they can't beat us they can't beat us our kids try like we will put one of them like you're like you're gonna break right now and they'll yell for the other one they'll go brother and they think that their brother can get them out of yeah no way i don't understand no way that's like i know i mean i like this i like the intuition that they've got there but you know they're just they're gonna lose every time we hug each other and we're like we love each other so like i'll be like mommy loves daddy daddy loves mommy and then they'll go hug each other and i'll go like i love augie and then they'll like hug and then yeah i told my three-year-old that my wife was my crush i was like yeah my mama's my crush he's like oh augie's my crush okay well good fine whatever works for you it's weird like they see us doing like hugging or kissing they want to hug or kiss each other yeah i know and just be careful to not slap your butt in front of the kids because they've started doing that it's like it's not yeah there's some there's some fences on this whole thing he did tell him this morning he's like that's not i was like that's just for daddy's griffey that's right they'll figure that out fortunately there's a lot of evolutionary psychology that will help them along the way right that's a little scene you know and they're not just social taboos you know you're not you're not interested romantically in in your blood relatives for a reason you know we're built to be like yeah yeah right for a reason yeah and so they they do you know it's the way that by the way one of my kids is adopted same deal you know it's like it's just you know if you're growing up together your your your brain is wired to not think that way about your kin which is this is why we think it's so abnormal when people do weird things like that right yeah so anyway that's obviously not something to worry about as you grow older as a couple here's a key thing to keep in mind there are two really bad habits that people get into they stop looking at each other in the eyes when they talk and they stop touching so that's super important why because you need a connection there's a there's a neuropeptide in the brain called oxytocin that women have three times as much as men and there's another one called vasopressin that men have more than women you both have vasopressin you both have oxytocin oxytocin is a is a binding molecule it's a molecule of that makes you bind bound to each other as kin that's the the connection the love molecule as it were people often call it that and then vasopressin is one especially where men feel like loyalty and and defense for the family like i'm gonna take care of her yeah right i'm gonna take care of her i'm gonna take care of these people but especially my wife you get that through eye contact and touch and so you could save most marriages by having them like before you go to bed at night stare at each other and have a nice every night and every time you're talking always be looking at each other not like doing other stuff and cleaning up to catch in and talk no no talk to each other and look at each other because you're saying you're mine you're mine you're mine you're right your brain is registering that and you when you were in those first three years where you're obsessed with abby like every time you looked at her you're like right now and then and then you do less i mean you're busy is the whole thing and what that's doing is that's attenuating the relationship neurobiologically yeah the second thing is touch when you're together you're touching always be touching abt always be touching that's the rule when you're walking you're holding hands when esther and esther and i we walk look at that okay i like holding her hand when we're on the podcast sometimes people will comment like that's so weird why is he holding her hand it's like i don't know maybe she's my wife it's just his wife and that's a normal thing to do with your spouse for pete's sake i mean i was just esther and i were together in mexico city yesterday because we were doing some talks in mexico city and uh and we're doing them together and we're doing more and more talks about love and relationships and marriage together she's she her studies are in philosophy and theology and mine are in science and so we go back and forth and we talk about it in that particular way and when we're together we're always touching and we go to we go for a 30 to 40 minute walk every night after dinner when i'm home which is i'm home about half the time and and always touching always touching always touching always touching you can save so many marriages just by eye contact and touch and that's what they lose and when you lose those two things you're you're changing your brains you're changing your brain you're changing your brain you're changing your brain and you're disconnecting your brains from each other you know people think about like sort of the physical connection of one flesh the one flesh is the flesh above your neck it's all that stuff inside your cranium that's one flesh and that's how you stay connected isn't there something about like six or seven second kisses as well yeah it's 22 second hugs is actually what the research is kind of yeah you maximize oxytocin at a 22 second hug oh yeah yeah and so here's a timer i know i know you counted but you're like i know it's like it's like stop stopping me here's here's kind of the rule with your kids though because you get tons of oxytocin with your kids never be the one who releases the hug oh oh wait that's a disney rule have you heard that the characters aren't allowed to like if a kid hugs them they're not supposed to break it the kid has to break it first okay well i didn't i didn't i don't mean to plagiarize from disney but but that's always what we've said because you know the the research is clear that you're especially as they become adolescents oh so make them they do the break you're not gonna hold on to them you're gonna freak them out let go of me god struggling you know like you gotta hit 22 seconds which is kind of long it's a long hug i feel like i could do that though make them laugh because we like to wrestle a lot like we we just went to disneyland and got lightsabers and we have bad they call it battle so we'll battle each other but yeah the wrestling is really fun wrestling's great i mean when you're wrestling with your and you know i wrestle with my uh with my oldest grandson who now he lives with me and he's 20 he's two and a half his parents and his their family they're on the bottom floor of the house we're on the top floor of the house no way you guys all live together yeah yeah we actually made a decision to move to the same place um all of us because we had a big family because the data the data you know i'm a social scientist i gotta go with the data go with my data right i gotta eat my own cooking yeah and and it's very clear that it's way way better for a grandchild to be able to live with their grandparents and have a real relationship with their grandparents and and grandparents live longer and are happier when they have a serious relationship with their grandchildren and so we talked about with our kids i was like where do you want to raise your kids they had been raised in the dc region because i was running that think tank in dc for 11 years in dc and that's right they went to these great catholic schools that they want to send their kids to that's the goal and they said okay so we all packed up and moved there one from when one of my sons got out of the marine corps they moved from california with his wife and they're baby and and one the other who lived in boston near us when we were living in boston and we just packed up the same moving van and moved down there to my daughter graduated from college now she's in the marine corps in quantico virginia which is not that far away she'll be going back and forth during deployments and and where she's posted but at the end of the day she'll come probably back to the dc region as well why because we're all going to live together and and it's even more convenient when we some of us at least some of us live in the same house oh it's like 1940s you know but but based on research yeah no it's it's cool we we actually did that for a time and that was like that was really fun yeah and now like we have a lot of family near us like my brother lives 10 minutes away um yeah everyone's close now abby's parents two minutes away my sister-in-law brother-in-law i think are they five minutes away like everyone's so close and it's great like yeah at first we used to live in arizona man yeah we were in hawaii for a little bit and i fell in love with surfing r.i.p but now there's a surf park in arizona which is awesome i i'd go there god bless capitalism let's go capitalism i love america but like it's uh it's just i was like we wouldn't like live by our family no like what and but it's been amazing like it's it's so good having having that connection that community because i was so close to my grandparents yeah and still am so it sort of depends on the family too i mean there's some right i would have struggled living with my parents um i would have struggled living with my in-laws i mean it would have it wouldn't have been like you know we wind up on the news that kind of thing but but it would have been it wouldn't have been happiness i didn't realize you were so funny what did what did you start cracking jokes like this i haven't heard it he just knows it's happening in your brain oh yeah it's because of you you're you're bringing up you're bringing out the best in me right here you're ruining my career thank you very much no no it's it's uh it's it's phenomenal i mean it's like you know in the morning when i'm there and you know joseph my little grandson he comes upstairs and he knows he's like the king of the and he's and he's he's all about it it's just it's fantastic they had a new baby um last the week before last as a matter of fact wow so prince prince h prince h entered the mix in my house and then the others live you know 12 miles up the street and they have two and and and they're they want lots you know they're we're repopulating the earth with brooks when we first met like an hour ago you asked us how many kids we had yeah and i don't know why but i just like my brain was like we have three kids yeah and then abby was like i don't know why but i just like my brain was like no well we we just missed care we lost her daughter because you do have three kids yeah we do and uh and it's been awful and it's like it's still something like we you know abby and i are figuring that out going to lots of therapy grieving like it's it sucked but like i i guess the reason i'm bringing this up is since we're on the subject of happiness and that's something that we're trying to rediscover again after you're being very public about it because you want to help other people yeah because a lot of the people who are watching this they're your but they're going to be married yeah and it's that's going to happen yeah that's going to happen and the more that that's familiarized demysticized the better off they're going to be this is how you're turning something that happened that was really really rough and that you had you didn't actually think about probably before into a way to serve other people and so doing it's healing for you yeah and it's protective for them how do you find happiness again after grief let's you know we have brains for a reason your limbic system the console of emotion in your brain it processes your negative emotions using different parts of that system and they all exist for a reason sadness loss the sense of loss is largely it largely involves a little thing called the again sorry to you know for the for the technical term the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex what is that it's a little thing about the size of the end of your index finger and it just like lights up like a christmas tree when you're when you're feeling socially excluded or losing something or someone that you love it's the really i mean there are other parts of your brain that involve sadness but that's that thing that they always identify the bad breakup the loss the death of a loved one the loss of your child this the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex and the reason that you have this i mean people say i want to live without sadness no you don't if you if you live had no fear of the pain of sadness you'd say everything inside your head and you'd be like divorced friendless and fired in like a week you know you need to be afraid of loss we are a kin-based hierarchy hierarchical species 250 000 years ago until about 10 000 years we lived in bands of 30 to 50 individuals and it was if you if you had lost social loss if you lost your relationships you'd walk the frozen tundra and die alone you'd be in a panther's meal in like 10 minutes by yourself you need to not be alone yeah and so that's why a part of your brain says don't be alone don't be alone don't face rejection don't face loss don't face loss but you're gonna and when it when you do that part of the brain is and other parts of the brain are really really really affected by that grief is one in which you can't resolve it through going back to the person by by reconciling with your clan you know you say something and you're socially rejected and you feel really sad and hurt and then you reconcile with the people this is the reason you reconcile with each other all the time because you i mean i'm sure you argue and fight and disagree and you're like i'm sorry i've never done that i'm married to a spaniard it's like every day 10 000 fights are you know our memoir will be called 10 000 fights right oh that's actually good oh yeah totally and by the way anger and divorce are uncorrelated anger and divorce are uncorrelated anger is a hot emotion that says i care what you think and i want it to change contempt and divorce are correlated where you add disgust into the anger and make it ice cold saying what you're saying and who you are is worthless to me that's eye rolling sarcasm derision dismissal we can talk about that that leads to divorce okay but the whole point is that when you've got this grief because you can't reconcile because you can't reconcile when when some when you're when your father dies it's no reconciliation that's a loss of an actual person from your life or when you have a miscarriage any of these these these things are real grief and then you need to actually heal and what happens is that the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex the parts of the brain involved they become as you learn you start to find the meaning in it that the activity in these parts of the brain start to lessen you maintain the memory but you feel less pain you start to put it into context there will always be some pain because there is a sense of loss but it's not going to be debilitating very debilitating the very beginning people say i'm going to be sad forever and and the reason is because evolution said i want you to think you're going to be sad forever so that you'll reconcile to go find the person right but you can't be debilitated that way so you aren't and so as you find a sense of meaning there's lots of ways to find sense of meaning it's um one of the best ways to find sense of meaning after a bad breakup a nasty breakup but you can't find a sense of meaning after a bad breakup believe it or not is to listen to sad songs and you'd think it'd make you more sad but what it does is it puts into perspective it helps you understand that your feelings are not unique and that this is a normal part of life and that normal part of life says that there's meaning to the experience that's why people listen to sad songs that's cracking me up because i was i was 15 years old i'd crushed on this girl since like third grade and i'd like asked a friend to ask one of like to ask her like if she liked me and she said no and i was like devastate listening to sad in the car we were on vacation with my family and i like just i remember like listening to all these sad songs they're like come on matt stop being like damn i know let's listen to like a marching band or something no no no because the marching band will give you no sense of meaning like these bummer songs it's like she done me wrong and you know it's like it all this is you know basically it's funny because you know when you talk about the neurobiology of emotion it eviscerates all of the romantic content of every love song or every country in western society and it's like you know it's like she done my limbic system wrong it's like that doesn't sound great right but that's kind of literally what's going on yeah so so what you want is actually defined is to look for meaning in it and the meaning in it is the depth the spiritual depth that actually comes from the connection and what it actually means to be alive so what it means for you to be alive what it means for you to be parents of the children that you didn't lose what it means for you to serve the world what it means for you to have time on this earth that's not about you you're jarred out of your psychodrama when you have a loss and you look at bigger deeper more metaphysical things which you need to understand what your life is actually really all about and in this way 90 of people who have a devastating loss they look back on it with a sense of gratitude 90 that's called post-traumatic growth yeah let's talk about post-traumatic stress yeah post-traumatic growth percent of the cases more because you look back on and say i learned a lot about my life when i saw when i saw a terrific loss in that life that's how i understood it that's why in the sort of the therapy industrial complex that we're living through in america and around the world today the idea of eliminating negative emotions is so unbelievably dangerous so dangerous you got to lean into it man you got to turn around and look at it you got to be alive you need to be fully alive now it could be exaggerated and become a mood disorder and you're not going to be able to learn and you can be dysregulated i got it yeah i completely got it i mean i've had you know thank god for psychiatric care in my own family my mother would have you know wouldn't have had a life you know had it not been for that because of so many mood disorders that were debilitating but for ordinary people evidence that you're alive is that you're sad it's evidence that you're angry that you're afraid that you're disgusted that's you know that's just negative emotions they're not something to eliminate there's something to understand and grow from and the ordinary person every 18 months or so is going to be like oh my god i'm going to be like oh my god i'm going to be so this is according to bruce filer who does work on on on stages in life every 18 months you have a big transition mostly unwelcome and every five years you have a catastrophe catastrophe the the miscarriage that you suffered was a catastrophe right it's going to be every five years for the rest of your life buckle up buckle up right and you're not going to expect it generally because you can't and you're not going to like it you're not going to like it you're not going to like it and you're going to learn and grow from it and you're going to love each other more because of it and you're going to love your kids more if you let yourself find the meaning in that loss wow that's so good i also have a follow-up question i wonder what i can i call you a happiness scientist i guess i guess i sort of am at this point i mean there's not a happiness science because it's across so many different fields but sure yeah people call me that a lot for sure what like your perspective is on antidepressants yeah so most antidepressants they fall into categories uh chemically but the most common form are called selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors ssris um the sort of the prozac family as it were and what that does it's all based on on the research that shows that people who have ruminative sadness um they they're they tend to have very low levels of serotonin in the in the synapse in the brain and if they can do something chemically to raise the level of of serotonin in the synapse either by increasing the amount of serotonin or keeping it in the synapse longer so it doesn't get reabsorbed that that those people they tend to have less ruminative sadness and and it's pretty reliable at about you know something like 30 of people who take these ssris they get significant relief as a result of that now there are other chemical things that are going on with clinical depression there's sort of three big categories of physical manifestations of of clinical depression one is that ruminative sadness um the second is anhedonia which is the inability to feel pleasure and the third is called psychomotor retardation which is you're physically inhibited you're you walk slower you mumble that's what they actually find and different chemistry actually affects those things in different ways so if you have anhedonia inability to feel pleasure typically what they'll do is they'll raise your dopamine levels and so you'll have it anticipate you'll have rewards and anticipation of rewards so you get really low dopamine in a lot of cases of clinical depression so even things that you used to like you don't look forward to them anymore and you don't like them right and this is actually one of the reasons that glp1 drugs can be hard on people and actually and and lead to depression in some people oh really yeah because what they do is they inhibit the dopamine from your rewards and people who you know had trouble with eating a lot of junk food for example a lot of their rewards and anticipation rewards and little rewards from day to day were like twinkies or something and you don't get that anymore and you're like huh life's gray and so they have to kind of migrate to different kinds of rewards and they feel this anhedonia and that's why some people actually feel depressed when they're on glp1 drugs and that could be you know equilibrated neuro chemically with you know with a good psychiatrist and the last is when they have this gait problem when they're you know they walk slowly or mumble or something those usually well they are that'll that works on the norepinephrine receptors and so norepinephrine adrenaline which is from the adrenal glands that they'll they'll find some way to make sure that that that there's sufficient amount of that so it's not affecting you physically so the first thing with clinical depression and then experimenting to see whether drugs work now that said just because you have low mood and even persistent low mood doesn't mean you have clinical depression it means you're a human being on Earth and when you go through difficult times in your life you're going to feel sadness you are you're going to feel like the things that you used to like you don't like as much these are normal things they're signals to you that these are times for you to learn these are periods between the equilibria in your life that you're in a transition that you've experienced the loss for a lot of people this is this is evidence that your limbic system is working properly and and if anytime you feel sadness or anxiety and you go to the doctor and the doctor says ah we got to get rid of that what they're saying is I need to make you a little less normal in a lot of cases again you know it can be exaggerated or dysregulated in which case you actually need medical care but for most people that's not the case students I mean they're studying at Harvard I say you're Harvard students if you're not sad and anxious you need therapy because man this is a thing that you've chosen to do why do you say that like it's scary and hard yeah it's a scary and hard thing i mean you're going to one of the finest universities in the world and it's hard yeah and and it's a competitive environment and you have high expectations for yourself it's like you know my son when he was in boot camp as an enlisted marine i mean it wasn't like it was the worst thing that ever happened to him yeah now he looks back on and go man i wouldn't get i wouldn't trade it for anything i wouldn't do it again yeah but i wouldn't trade it for anything and it got harder from there because he became a special operations marine became a scout sniper and it got harder and harder and harder and harder every single thing helped him understand who he is and that's the truth for most of us your sadness and anxiety are boot camp they're your teacher and if we don't ask okay okay what am i supposed to learn from this how am i growing from this how am i learning to manage myself from this we're missing the boat and we if we let people who are older than us when people your age let people my age tell you that you better eliminate your sadness and anxiety or you're going to be stunted for life you're getting bad advice you're generally speaking getting bad advice i can't help but notice i i have a feeling that you lift weights i'm seeing a vein on on the bicep you got a vein on the bicep that either that or i just don't eat okay so i i'm guess i'm guessing you you stay active i'm guessing that with happiness there's probably a correlation with being physically active you know going to the gym running something like that sort of sort of sort of sort of so happiness and and and fitness don't have a direct relationship fitness has a direct relationship with unhappiness so happiness and unhappiness are not opposites right you have different parts of the limbic system giving you different aversive and positive emotions okay and you need unhappiness to find all the things that we've talked about here but you need to manage unhappiness right and the best way there are terrible ways to manage unhappiness like drugs and alcohol terrible way workaholism awful unmanaged internet use terrible way staying distracted terrible way to manage unhappiness the best ways to manage unhappiness are spiritual activity and picking up heavy things and running around no way the best way to manage unhappiness and so if so people who don't have unhappiness issues and half the population is below average and unhappiness right makes sense has to be those people have trouble staying in the gym they have trouble staying in the gym because they don't feel like they're getting any well-being benefit from their from their weight lifting or yoga or whatever it's they don't feel better they don't feel better because they don't they're not there's no problem they need to solve with their with their fitness fitness goals me on the other hand like i'm not naturally happy so i work out for an hour a day seven days a week and i have for decades and that's how i manage my my my negative affect as we social scientists like to say or just my grumpiness and unhappiness as ordinary people say is by picking up heavy things and running around every single day every single day every single day because you're a happy person abby you're happy i mean look you glow as a happy person oh no i go to the gym no that means you manage your unhappiness yeah yeah i'm more the black cat yeah yeah but the other thing is that half the people i mean a quarter of the population is both above average happiness and above average unhappiness oh that's called a mad scientist affect profile and that's probably you what does that mean that is somebody who feels a lots of emotions very intense oh yeah yeah yeah and that's who above average intensity of positive and negative emotions these are people where you don't the happiness stuff you can do that stuff and that's great but what you really need to work on is keeping the happiness high and then managing the unhappiness so it doesn't interfere with your life and that's why fitness and spirituality are going to be really really important in your life after listening to a lot of yourself i was like i need to take that quiz because i'm sure that's probably where that's a new quiz that we're just putting up now because you know for the longest time i've used a lot of other people's surveys on affect profiles and well-being levels and finally i found one that's really statistically valid that measures your well-being with respect to the rest of the population where are you on the macronutrients of your well-being so you know what to work on whether you have an enjoyment issue a satisfaction issue or a meaning issue and then whether happiness or unhappiness is your bigger challenge it's a sort of 40 question thing you get this like report on you and what you actually need to work on because all those things need to be separated out it's called the happiness scale we just loaded it yeah you need to link it and also how long does it take you to take it because between five and ten minutes forty questions today between between five and ten we should both take it i know i want to ask you also i would actually predict that on the happiness i would predict that you're a mad scientist okay and i'll predict that you're a cheerleader which is to say that you have intense positive emotions and very normal negative emotionality i would say that you're not like crazy negative emotionality um and and that's that's one that's correlated with the highest level of well-being it has i mean everybody's got theirs it's a strength and weakness no matter what yeah right it makes it harder to be a ceo that can actually give criticism and you don't like to get bad news you know it's one of the things but it's uh it's a happy way to live for sure i would i would predict that but i can't know because we've only been talking for an hour yeah yeah yeah he's a golden retriever as people say ah the golden retriever is i you know the cheerleader profile is part of the golden retriever profile the profiles that are that can be the hardest one is the poet which is positive is low positive emotionality and high negative emotionality the reason it's called a poet is because when i talked about ruminative sadness with which is one of the symptoms of clinical depression that involves a part of the brain called the ventral lateral prefrontal cortex it makes you ruminate right you ruminate on sadness but you also ruminate when you're falling in love on another person which is why it's super active why the brain of somebody falling in love looks like somebody who's deeply clinically depressed because of the activity that part of the brain no way yeah yeah and it's also really creative people have a lot of activity that's why poets they tend to be creative romantic and depressed because the same part of the brain right and so and so that's what the poetic now that's the big strength of the poet the the big weakness is like high negative affect the big strength is romance and creativity and so what they need to do is to have really really good hygiene in their lives for managing their their high level of negative effect that's why every poet i meet i'm like i'm going to do this for myself i'm going to do this for myself and i'm going to do this for myself i'm going to do this for myself and i'm going to do this for myself and i'm going to do this for myself and i'm going to do this for myself and i'm going to do this for myself and i'm going to do this for myself can you be too happy no no and i've never at least i've never met anybody who is actually i've never met somebody who's actually too happy that's actually interesting that's a question that some psychologists have answered to look at the the most successful people in life so people who are most successful are the second happiest people so if you have like five categories super happy happy normal kind of unhappy miserable that's called a likert scale of five anyway okay four is happy not super happy those are the person people who make the most money have the best careers right and the reason is because the people at the very top it's like the grasshopper and the ant they're the grasshoppers they're having a great time and the reason is because the people at the very top it's like the grasshopper and the ant in college they have all the friends and they're going to all the parties and they're not studying that much and the second happiest people they have a lot of good moods so they're able to perform at a really high level but they also can see threats better they can see threats better than the happiest people actually can so when it comes to success the answer is yes but when it comes to quality of life the answers don't so then i guess you have to ask yourself the question what's more important wait sorry i got a little lost there so you're saying like the happiest people are not the most successful because when you're at the top it's like it's a party times part life's a big party okay life's a huge party he's saying the top of happiness the top of happiness the top of happiness the top category of self-evaluated life satisfaction are not the people who make the most money and have the best careers god it's the second highest okay i want to be that guy yeah totally well i mean part of it is that that is a good ambition by the way because the idea of having unmitigated joy is not a good ambition okay because unmitigated joy is not doesn't have the it's not being fully alive yeah it's not the most i mean it's just life requires difficulty yeah for you to actually be a fully alive human being now i'm not casting aspersions on all the people because i'm just jealous but i am i'm like i'm jealous about a lot of things i'm jealous people have hair i'm jealous of you right now i'm thinking look at that hair it's beautiful what's that i just got a hair transplant i've got i have like a comb over right now but i got like these baby hairs coming in you did i literally you were losing your hair i went to turkey i'm just like oh my god i lost my hair i lost my hair i lost my hair i went to turkey i'm not even kidding you'd never know you never know it looks phenomenal estinove the problem is that i can't do that can you imagine if i did that and it's like i got a lot of people who know my work for a long time and i suddenly show up with hair it'd be like a complete object of derision you're doing it right you're just making you're just not going bald as opposed to you know i got a turkey and i come back people are like that's not normal you know i don't think i trust arthur anymore but i will admit to like real jealousy it looks just right what do they take where they take the hairs from i was going to say they take it from your arms or something i can show you afterwards i had like i was like all bloody around the side of my head i've seen those pictures yeah it actually i'm not gonna lie it hurt but it was one of those things where it's like yeah it's painful but i i'm gonna look good eventually you'll see his full results you have to see us again six months from now yeah great i got a new book coming out in the meaning of life okay that's coming out on march 31st so let's make a date no seriously yeah it's called the meaning of finding purpose in an age of emptiness that talks about how the brain is getting screwed up by the misuse of technology and making it impossible fine to find the meaning of life and the six things that people have to do to to live life like the old days even in the new days because you're not gonna get rid of your phone that they actually can find the meaning of life so it's a solutions man it's a guidebook to actually finding life's meaning that's coming out March 31st so we should have a conversation about that then most importantly I get to see you know Matt's complete results 100% that book sounds fantastic though because I feel like there's like there's so many aspects like that just speaks to I feel like so many people are desiring in our age we're like how do we find some of those traditional values and elements of life but in this modern age because you can't you can't go back like you said like no no it defined why when the whole world is pushing you to how and what the whole world is pushing you to you know fritter away your time distract yourself work harder achieve these things get this device blah blah blah blah and what it's doing is it's blocking this right hemisphere of your brain where mystery and meaning are processed yeah and when you turn off that right hemisphere of the brain it's interesting because now the whole everybody's talking about AI right and AI is great I mean AI is going to do all kinds of things but it's an adjunct to the left side of your brain if you use it to try to meet your your right brain needs if you try to make it your therapist or your friend or your girlfriend you're doomed man because your brain knows it can fool you into thinking it's a real person for a minute but your brain knows you're going to get more depressed and more anxious and more lonely because you're using a left brain solution for a right brain problem so that's what this book is all about how do you live differently and and in a few short months you can actually know the meaning of your life but you got to live like you know great granddad who never came home and said he had a boring job and a hard life but he never came home and said you know I had a panic attack behind the mule today because it wasn't a thing that's so true yeah yeah there's a reason I really like the way you you put it when you were uh talking about the book you wrote with Oprah which seems seems so true I think it's a really good book I think it's a really good book I think it's a really similar seems like a similar um some similarities there between that book in this new book which I'm really excited to read but you were talking about how rather than like changing it'd be stupid to try to change everything around you to fit your needs rather than just like looking inward and saying hey how can I change myself to adapt to the environment I'm in can you speak more about that and maybe tell the story that you you gave like a uh an example about like a road and and like a car I thought that was kind of cool well yeah so you know I don't want to get a flat tire obviously so I need to make tires that are never gonna go flat and the right material for that is probably cement I should have cement tires but you know I can't drive on a cement road with cement tires yeah that would be catastrophe so the obvious thing for me to do is to bulletproof myself with cement tires but then I got to create a whole world that's got nothing but rubber roads which is of course absurd that doesn't make sense you do it the other way yeah which is that you have cement roads which are nice and cheap and really durable and you have rubber tires on your car which sometimes go flat but you deal with that and that's what you do is you deal with the thing that you can deal with living in real life saying sometimes I'm going to get flats and I'm going to work on building a life where I have the durability and I have the emotional fortitude to deal with the with with flat tires and then and then be smart about it like when my tires are bald change the tires in advance and kind of take care of myself change the things in your life that you need to change and don't try to change the outside world and you know one of the biggest reasons that there's so much depression anxiety today is because we're being told by you know baby boomer activists that are trying to conscript people your age into a culture war that that the reason that you're suffering and there's really high rates of depression anxiety is because the whole outside world is against you and the whole outside world is screwed up and that's just nothing more than a political play by people my age to activate you to our political purposes it's like I want you really really mad and sad and angry and afraid yeah I want you to be afraid and saying I can't live a good life until the world looks different and so I got a vote for this guy or buy this product or follow this person on social media or read this newspaper or watch this channel and I'm a victim and so the world has to become a particular way so I'm not a victim anymore that's completely dangerous and incorrect thinking and it's a cynical ploy yeah to activate your generation for different political agendas right and left by the way it scared me I mean with the with the last election I was noticing on both sides people basically saying hey it's the end of the world if our candidate doesn't get elected if you're not out rage you're not paying attention man means you're a bad citizen it's so it's it's freaky because I'm like I I like to think of myself as a fairly intelligent person and even that like brought up this fear in me like oh my gosh like you know it's like what this is really important I don't want the world to end I don't want like and it just it almost like takes away all logic and reason and and intellectual thinking about hey let's slow down think about actually what the best foot forward is rather than just like jumping into fear yeah so this amygdala activate activation is biologically happening when when you have activists politicians and media they're trying to fire you up they're trying to make you feel angry and afraid because that the amygdala when it's activated it clears the decks man it in terms of evolutionary biology you want fear to to erase everything you know you hear a little snap of a twig behind you and you're walking across the savannah 200,000 years ago you don't want anybody to say huh I bet that's one of my friends coming up to say hi you know you're not going to be able to say hi to me you're not going to be able to say hi to me you're not going to be able to say hi to me you're not going to say hi to me you want to be like run for to climb a tree and ask questions later and that's why we have this amygdala that's part of our this little almond shaped things on either side of our brains in the limbic system that they activate they'll turn on and like if you see a car in your peripheral vision when you're in a crosswalk coming toward you that will register as a as a large predator because your your brain can't say that's a mercedes your brain says that's something big that's going to hurt me kill me and eat me that's a lion or something that's what your brain is telling you and in 74 milliseconds your heart will be pounding and you'll be sweating and you'll have flipped off the driver and jumped out of the way way before you know what's going to happen and your amygdala saved your life so what happens is if you're a demagogic leader somebody in the press or somebody in politics or somebody on social media or somebody who's just trying to make you mad on a college campus they're trying to activate your amygdala so you'll act in panic that's what they want you to do because then you're putty in their hands then they can use you if they can wipe out love for somebody you disagree with if they can wipe out negative emotion prop positive emotions if they can just activate that they own you yeah and that's what they're trying to do yeah okay talk about that on your podcast it's really good how do you manage that say if like any of those fear you know fight or flight responses come up in a marriage you know like like circling back to kind of like what we talked about before you're meant you were talking about anger and contempt and how which it surprised me you said that anger is actually not a predictor of divorce right contempt is anger the fun but it's not a predictor of divorce it's when you actually allow disgust to mix with anger creating a complex emotion complex emotion basic emotions are singular complex emotions are mixes of different emotions and so you know different experts in in in the biology of emotion we'll talk about you know there's like you know 43 different emotions with like cocktails of different emotions that we mix together right and uh you know you have fear plus joy you know what is that you know and that's going to be the roller coaster effect you know that kind of thing so but contempt is fear plus disgust disgust is your natural reaction uh using a part of the brain called the insula or the insular cortex that makes you feel disgust toward a pathogen so you feel it naturally when something smells off some in the fridge when something looks rotten when something is dead when and the reason is because we're evolved to know where bacteria and germs come from yeah and something that's a carrier a common carrier bacteria and germs will make us feel disgusted if you don't have if you have natural antibiotics in your saliva like the dog then then you're not going to be disgusted by licking the floor yeah but if you're a person you're going to tell your kid don't lick the floor it's disgusting and they'll learn that it's disgusting because it actually is more likely to make you sick than than than than phyto yeah right so that's kind of how all that that whole thing the same thing works when you make somebody disgusted about other people so demagogic leaders dictators like the in in in rwanda and the general genocide in the 1990s they had a word the hutus had a word for the tootsies which meant cockroaches why because they wanted to stimulate the insular cortex and the brains of these particular people so they would be capable of unspeakable savagery of barbarity and you do that by stimulating this really kind of all-encompassing negative emotionality you turn them into a pathogen that might actually kill them the nazis referred to jews as rats to try to stimulate the insular cortex that's how you know press and politicians are actually talking about people with whom we disagree politically today yeah they say they're disgusting when they say the word disgusting what they're trying to do is they want the they want the amygdala fired up for anger and they want to mix it with the insular cortex activity yeah which is disgusting that creates contempt which is the worthlessness of another person yeah okay that's bad in politics it's fatal for a marriage it's absolutely fatal for a marriage when you express contempt even if you don't feel it the other person will absorb then the complex negative emotion of contempt from the person which is actually hatred yeah so the person you love the most is actually expressing hatred toward you yeah that's that breaks up marriages it really does and that just means and and the way you avoid it is learning how to fight you don't not fight i mean couples that don't fight don't stay married because they don't have there's no passion yeah and and some couples fight a lot like me and esther i mean we don't know like little kids or cats and dogs or you know it's and me too. And so we're like, we're very much alike in terms of terms of character. And so it's like, it's daggers drawn a lot. But we get it. We know what's going on. Neither one of us thinks this is the end of the world. And we're always apologizing. There's constant apologies going on. It's like the life of apologies, to be sure. The problem is when you don't realize that you're expressing mutual contempt for each other, absorbing hatred when you feel love. That extinguishes the love in a marriage. And that requires that you fight in a different way and you understand your own emotions. So being married 34 years, you guys still fight. How do you fight in a way to where contempt doesn't creep in? Well, sometimes it does, but then you have to recognize it and apologize. It's just like, it's a life of recognizing your own frailty. It's like, I'm sorry. And we're better. Fights would go on for a couple of days back in the old days. It was like, you know, the Cold War. But, you know, and now it's just like a couple of hours. Or sometimes usually a couple of minutes is kind of how it goes on. It's like, yeah, I'm sorry I reacted that way. I was thinking this and I misperceived the thing that you said. Are you both pretty good about not trying to win the argument, right? Because if someone wins, there's no winning, right? Yeah. I mean, a man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still. That's from How to Win Friends and Influence People by Neil Carnegie. Wait, say that again. I love that. A man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still. Wow. If you win an argument, you lost. Yeah. And if you win an argument in your marriage, you just weakened your marriage. Yeah. Is the whole point. You don't try to win. You do try to persuade. But the whole point is that, you know, persuasion is a win-win because it's like, huh, yeah, you're right. We did need that couch, right? Or something like that, right? Because that's, you know, it's a common thing. I used to come in years ago and I'd come home and I'd be like, every day, I'd be like, what's that? You know, I'd come home. It's furniture, she'd say. It's like, and I didn't even know because, you know, I'm a man. And so I would be living on lawn furniture and it would be an unheated garage sitting on lawn furniture because, you know, and we do need stuff. But the whole point is that you learn about this with each other and you learn to persuade each other in important ways. Yeah. Abby, it's funny because like, I would say probably Abby, spends more often than I do, but when I spend, I probably buy bigger budget items. And like, one example of this is recently I built a half pipe in her backyard and she's like, how much is this half pipe? Are you a skateboarder? Oh, what a great question. So I grew up. No, I'm actually creating a problem. No, I grew up. So I grew up skateboarding. I wanted to be, I wanted to like go pro, but like, obviously that never worked out, but you know, it's a, it's been a dream. I wanted to be a pro skateboarder when I was like 10. That's so cool. Yeah. But I mean, it's a, what is cool now though, is because of, like the, the platform we have and stuff, I have friends that are pro skateboarders and I've invited them to come skate my half pipe with me. And I think, I think it'll be a freaking blast. Yeah, that's right. And you're like, this is my backyard. Yeah. I mean, there's a couple of things I'm curious about, but I was like, I'm married to a 14 year old. You know, the last person that the guy dropping off all the lumber for this was like, yeah, the last person I delivered this to is a professional skateboarder. I was like, Matt, we've been together almost a decade. I've seen him skateboard handful of times. Yeah. I get it. It'll be great. It'll be great. Our boys will love it. Your boys probably will love it. And you know, you can always get rid of the half pipe. Yeah. You know, once the next thing enters your head, you know, yeah, maybe it costs $5,000, but you know, yeah, just get rid of the half pipe. You approach the biggest questions people ask themselves and the biggest pursuits you have in your life, the meaning of life. How do I find happiness? Like, like all these things, but in such a conversational way that all has all this research into it, like it's, I feel like I just like, I don't re-listen to our podcasts. This is one I will be re-listening to. And I'm like, I need to take notes and like really absorb this because there was just so much wisdom packed into like such a short amount of time, really. And I have so many takeaways from this that are very tangible for me. Well, thank you. And you two are a case study in doing so many things right. And that's really important. You're super curious. You love each other. You're building a life together. You're trying to be an example to other people. It's just very beautiful to see. And, and there's wonderful times ahead that you're going to share with other people as well. I'm really privileged to be, to be a small part of your journey today. Thank you. That's so, so kind. Well, Dr. Arthur Brooks, thank you so much guys. Follow him on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, all the socials. Check out the new book coming out in March, March 31st. Yes. March 31st. So again, thank you so much. Pre-order now. And take the quiz. I want to take it too. Yeah. The happiness scale. That's at arthurbrooks.com. That's a, that'll, that'll be fun. We'll let you know our results. Thanks a lot. Thank you. Member SIPC. Life is all about making decisions. Sometimes you make questionable ones, like buying a new TV. That's too big for the wall because the electronics store employee was a little too good at their job. Then sometimes you make great ones like protecting your home and auto with progressive. 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