Why Success Never Feels Like Enough

Ultra running shoes are all about space. The space to go further, to feel better, to do something you never thought possible. And this space starts with UltraFit. Unlike traditional running shoes, UltraFit gives toes more room to move naturally, so every step is strong, balanced, and comfortable. Whatever you're lacing up for, stay out there with Ultra. Shop now at ultrarunning.com. That's A-L-T-R-A running dot com. Workaholism. What a funny addiction it is. If I just get the billion dollars, if I just get the acclaim that I want, if I just work hard enough, then people will love me. If I work hard enough, will you love me more? You can feel pretty satiated when it comes to the love in your life, but you'll never be satiated with money. There'll never be enough. You know, why do you think that lottery winners have their lives fall apart, and they'll blow their fortune and become poor again? Because there's never enough to buy all the stuff that you want. There's not enough stuff in the world. They've worked. It has become an actual love relationship for you that's crowding out real relationships. That's an addiction that we have to address because if you don't, you're going to wind up lonely. You're going to wind up isolated. You're going to wind up anxious. You might very well suffer from depression, and until now, you might not have known why. Hi, friends. Welcome to Office Hours. I'm Arthur Brooks. This is a show about the science of happiness, about how you can use the best ideas based in science to lift yourself and other people up in bonds of happiness and love using ideas that are well-validated, that academics have designed their careers to actually understand, and now you can as well. My job is to take the best in science and bring it to you in a digestible form. The reason is because I want you to have the best information. That's the beginning of becoming a happier person. That's the beginning of habit change, is having ideas that actually work and are well-validated. But I also want you to have the best information. But I also want you to become a teacher with me. I want, together, to share these ideas with the world. Please do so. One of the ways you can do so is taking these ideas and talking about it with your friends and family and your kids and anybody who will listen. Another way is to actually share the show with other people. So thank you for continuing to spread the word about Office Hours with other people. It's spreading really quickly and well, and it's unbelievably gratifying. Please do send this to your friends and your family and anybody else who can use it. You can write to me, proposing topics, officehours.arthurbrooks.com, and today is one of those topics that has been proposed to me. In a past episode, I talked about burnout. That was something that people asked about. But in the same messages, most people also asked about workaholism, and that's today's topic. Now, before we get there, I do want to note that if you like this material and you want a little bit more, please do subscribe to my completely free newsletter. Every Friday morning, delivered to your inbox, you'll get 300 to 500 words of actionable, interesting stuff that you can use, with actual links to peer-reviewed research, if you're really into that. You can get my newsletter at arthurbrooks.com slash newsletter, and it's peppered with, you know, interesting facts and anecdotes and even some photos of my grandsons, because I need to share those, because I want to be a happier person as well. You can also talk to fellow members of the community here, people who are involved in this work, and meet other people who are interested in this journey, as well as you, by going to my website, and you can learn about community activities, that we've got going on, communities you can actually join. And there are even live events that you can come to, because we're starting to do more and more retreats around this material. You can find out about the retreats at retreats.arthurbrooks.com. Right now, you're like Neo in the Matrix. You can keep scrolling, experiencing a simulation of life, or you can wake up to how your attention is being harvested for profit. It's happening to people all over the world right now. You don't want to be productized like this anymore, but it's hard. Tech addiction is so potent, because it's been designed to tap into your dopamine system. Just like heroin, porn, gambling. You've got the cravings. You're addicted. You don't like it, and I don't either. But I can't just tell you to stop doing it. That's hard. If you want to break free from the system, you need an incentive. Here's one. Why don't you join a phone company that pays you not to use your phone? If you want to reduce brain rot, get Noble Mobile. It pays you to use less data. It gives you an incentive to unplug. Noble Mobile. Noble Mobile is the phone plan that finally aligns incentives with what's good for you. Use less data. Earn money back. And when you do, you'll be living once again in real life. And you're going to like how it feels. Today, workaholism. I want to talk about what it is. I want to talk about why it happens. I want to talk about the origins of it. Probably in your life, if you suffer from it. But most importantly, I want to talk about the steps that you can take to resolve the issue and come back to being fully alive as an individual. Okay, so that's really what the run of show is today. And if I do my job, if this is a problem in your life, I want to put you on the path to recovery because no joke, one of the things that I'm going to be talking about here is that this is a very serious matter. Workaholism is a major source of what we call gray divorce. Gray divorce is classified by social scientists like me as divorce that happens after 25 years or more of marriage. One of the greatest things that happens and one of the greatest sources of this is that people don't know each other and they grow apart because they're workaholically married to their work, to their jobs. Any holism, any addiction is really just a relationship. You know, one of the reasons that alcoholism drives married couples apart is because the alcoholic partner is more in love with the booze than she is with her husband or he is with his wife. You get my point, right? These are really love relationships. And so the problem is, the problem that I've got here that I've got to talk about is the fact that if work has become an actual love relationship for you that's crowding out real relationships, that's an addiction that we have to address because if you don't, you're going to wind up lonely, you're going to wind up isolated, you're going to wind up anxious, you might very well suffer from depression, and until now, you might not have known why. Well, we're going to learn about that and most importantly, we're going to learn how to fix it. Now, I have a lot of, anecdotes and stories about this and personal experiences and I will first start by confessing that I have very strong workaholic tendencies, which I will talk about. I mean, left to my devices. You know, early on in my family life, when my kids were little and my wife would go to Barcelona to visit her family and she would take the kids, I'd be like, what am I going to do? When the cat's away, the mice will work. I would be like, okay, now I'm going to work 16 hours a day. It was like, oh yeah, fungi, right? And yet that's, kind of how I thought about things, which might sound virtuous in its own way and sort of the Protestant work ethic, despite the fact that I'm a Catholic. It's not virtuous. It's dangerous, as a matter of fact. And these are real hurdles that I've had to get over in my personal life. And I'll tell you more about that. I'm not going to, you know, break down weeping or anything like that. I mean, everybody's got their struggles to be sure, but this is something I know a lot about personally. And it's important that you learn and conquer it as well. But I also have seen it in even worse forms in the people that I've worked with, the people that I've interviewed for my books. I was interviewing somebody for a piece of research at one point, an incredibly successful individual, somewhat older than me, made orders of magnitude more money than I will ever be able to dream of. Just incredible, as a matter of fact, how successful this person is. And it came from humble beginnings as an entrepreneur. And I said to him, you know, I knew about how he had made it to the top, which is basically working seven days a week, 12 to 15 hours a day, for decades on end. Just working, obsessively working. I never saw the guy not working. And he was well past the age where he could have and probably should have retired and still. He was working, working, working, working and thinking about work all the time. Just absolutely as workaholic, textbook workaholic as you can possibly be. And I'll give you the textbook stuff here in a second. And I asked him, just telling me about his life, and when you're a happiness specialist, people treat you like a psychiatrist, which they probably shouldn't. And I said, when you were young and you were on your way up, and there was probably some point at which you knew you were going to be extremely successful and wealthy. I said, yep. I said, how old were you? He says, when I was 32. That's when I realized that at some point I was going to be rich. And I knew I was going to be. I wasn't rich yet, but I knew I was going to be rich. And I said, what did you think was going to be better about your life? What do you think the major difference in your life was going to be when you got rich? And he thought about it and he said, I actually thought that if I got rich, that my wife would love me. And I glanced at his left hand. He wasn't wearing a ring. And I said, and what happened? And he's sort of silent. And then he says, she didn't. Now, this is a point that I want to make. If you have an idol, if your idol is anything, money, power, pleasure, fame, work. If you have an idol, you will tend to endow it with magical power. Power is to solve your problems. To make all the difficult parts of your life go away. I work hard enough. Will you love me more? It doesn't work. It's not going to work. I know you know that intellectually, but emotionally, you might not. At the visceral level, fellow strivers, you might not. So let's talk about that as a pathology. Let's talk about it in the same way that we talk about everything else. which is with respect to the scientific data and facts what actually leads us to be thinking in this wrong way what leads us into the patterns of behavior that are so destructive and most importantly what can we do to get out of it now workaholism is something that's been talked about since about the 1960s and it's so weird because you know i've lived most of my adult life in two places in the united states and spain because esther's from spain and and you know that's where we got married i lived there through my 20s and i've been going back and forth for extended periods of time for the past 35 years workaholism is not a thing in spain it's a it's it's much more of a leisure-based culture you try to get something done in august good luck because the country is shut down you're not working in august unless you're in tourism which is a major industry in spain but also just there's this expression called el puente and that that means the bridge but basically it's if you have a if you there's a holiday on a thursday or a tuesday puente means you take the friday or the monday off as well it's just like your constitutional right practically and and on the days when you're not working you're not working there is not this workaholic tendency to turn everything to into work they have a a much i guess healthier understanding of work it's not very productive in its way and it can be really frustrating if you're trying to get something done but people are not suffering from the addiction in the same way that we often are here in the united states i see it constantly look i teach mba students at a business school i talk to business audiences and leaders all over the place and they work extremely well and i think that's one of the things that's really interesting about this workaholic tendency to turn everything to into work i think that's really long hours and obsessively so 13 hour work days seven day work weeks no vacations and in point of fact a lot of them are addicted to their work they don't know what to do without their work they're at loose ends okay let me give you the signs of workaholism clinically so if you're working with a clinical psychologist and you're this exhibiting addictive work behavior they're going to look for three signs and i'm going to add four to them that i've actually studied in my own research the three classical signs of workaholism is that you're addicted to your work and you're number one you work during your free time you're not being compensated for your work you're not expected to work but you work nonetheless you're working during your free time not just when there's an overload not just during special periods of swarm but because you chronically work during your free time because it's what you want to do as opposed to having free time number two is that when you're not working you're thinking about work it's what you think about all the time you can see this in other people where you go out to a bar with your friends and you've got that one friend that has no personality outside of you and you're not that's budding workaholism right there if you're going to sleep thinking about work you wake up thinking about work you're thinking about your job when you're in the gym lifting weights that's all you can talk about when you're out with your friends that's number two number three is you're always going beyond what's required now sometimes you want to do that you want to go above and beyond because you're excellent at your job but you're always going beyond what's required it's because you're looking for an excuse to get the relief from that now why would you do this one of the reasons is because you're always looking for an excuse to get the relief from that is because workaholism like all addictions is a way for you to treat negative affect you'll remember from an earlier episode of the podcast i'll link to that podcast here right now that affect is your the predominant mood that you feel positive or negative and people who have a very very high level of negative affect meaning that they have persistent and intense negative emotionality that one of the ways that you treat that is why is through addictive behavior because it distracts you drugs and alcohol gambling these are classic ways to treat negative affect to treat high chronic negative affect but so is workaholism and it's an unhealthy thing to do just like treating your bad feelings with booze treating your uncomfortable emotions with chronic work is an unhealthy thing to do and those are the signs that you're actually doing that working during all your free time thinking about work all the time and always going beyond what's required that's in in assessments what we do and i'll put some of those assessments in the show notes as well as some of the best um uh literature on that there's a good article the classic article from 1992 the stone age from the journal of personality assessment that's that's just cited all the time on this as well as a chapter on this now let me add four more that i've actually four more signs that i've seen in my own research on classic workaholic behavior number one is hiding in defensive behavior you know everybody knows that one of the classic signs of drug and alcohol addiction is that you hide it and so if you're hiding how much you drink from your spouse this is a this is a sign of of dependence on alcohol and even addiction to alcohol well if you're hiding your work from your spouse it means that this is a sign of workaholic behavior as well if you know your spouse goes to the supermarket on sunday and and and and when she comes home and walks in the door you snap shut your your laptop and put her under the cushion of the couch so she doesn't see that you were answering email or working on a powerpoint that's same thing another is actually that you're you're feeling lonelier and lonelier because nobody can actually understand the relationship between you and your spouse and so that's a sign that you're hiding your work from that you have with your job again this is a classic sign of addictive behavior another is that your sense of self-worth is really tied up with work when you think about your worth as a human being you start to measure it with respect to how well you're doing at your job and last but not least is starting to deleteriously affect your relationships so those are the four that i would add to the first big three hiding behavior loneliness self-worth tied to work and and damage to relationships those are as far as i'm concerned should be added to the protocol of of understanding of workaholic behavior okay now what are the origins of this of compulsive overworking which is absolutely incompatible with healthy intimate relationships they take time and energy and effort they almost always lead to great unhappiness when we talk about the the the solutions to this what i'm not going to recommend is going to a workaholic or saying to yourself just stop just work less right that's as stupid and ineffective as going to somebody who drinks too much and saying i think you should cut down a little right sorry that's not the way addiction works work addiction is a compulsive behavior that has an escalation effect to it it tends to be compulsive it goes beyond your ability to actually control it if it's a workaholism it means it's actually getting out of control so giving people advice or demanding or or putting pressure on them to stop it or pressure on yourself to stop that's unhelpful so i'm not going to recommend that i'm going to recommend actual methods that work but they require that you understand what's behind the pathology of your over um reliance on work to be the person that you want to be or to get the satisfaction that you want or to mask your negative emotionality or whatever it happens to be for treating yourself in that particular way so here's how you need to understand the pathology and it gets back to a a slightly different concept but you'll see how it's all related in a second there's a big literature on what's called intrinsic motivation versus extrinsic motivation right and it just sounds like an esoteric way of saying some simple ideas which in point of fact it is because that's how we get tenure in my business but intrinsic motivation is that which is internally generated rewards that are internally generated like i just love doing that thing whether it compensates me or not that's an intrinsic motivation that's an intrinsic reward love and happiness that you get from something or an intrinsic reward of doing it but you go to a museum unless you're a curator or something they don't pay you to do it but you want to look at beautiful pieces of art that has an intense that has an intrinsic motivation to it is the way that that works the reason that people hang out together after work with their friends generally speaking is an intrinsic motivation the highest level of friendship is an intrinsically motivated friendship it's not motivated by you know something good or something bad or something good that you can give me materially is something the fact that you're useless to me i just love you that's an intrinsic motivation this is in contrast with extrinsic motivations which is to say material things that can be procured that come from outside you money benefits goods fame power glory that come to you because of something that you do from the outside those are extrinsic motivations so your paycheck is an extrinsic motivation the satisfaction from your job that you get from a job well done is an intrinsic motivation most people in most parts of their life have both and that's really really good okay now that's an important distinction that i want to make because a lot of research contrasts the two and asks what's better for mental health what's actually better for your well-being intrinsic or extrinsic motivation you probably can predict based on my comments here what the result of that research actually is the more that you're in extrinsically motivated to do something the less happiness it will bring you the more you're intrinsically motivated to do something the more happiness it will bring you the more overall well-being that you'll actually get from it lots of research shows this their research on little kids for example where they'll have their favorite toys in in a playroom and they'll just be blissfully playing with their favorite toys then the researchers will offer them something that they want in exchange for playing with those toys and their motivation to play with those toys falls why because they've tied the worth of the thing to some sort of market that's been created so for example if you play with that truck i'll give you a cookie and say well now that must mean that playing with that truck requires that somebody give me a cookie which means that it must not be that great the intrinsic motivation actually falls when the extrinsic motivation rises you find this with you know in college students when you give them really interesting puzzles to do and they like doing the puzzles but if you start paying them money to do the puzzles they like the puzzles less and sort of all areas of life this is how we're wired extrinsic versus intrinsic they tend to crowd each other out one really interesting study out of the university of rochester it asked graduates to their motivation for work after graduating from college was primarily about extrinsic things, money, position, or intrinsic things. Their motivation for what they were going to do with the next part of their lives was about love and relationships, is what it came down to. Those that were more motivated to make decisions in their careers and their lives, to get more love and happiness, be near their families, to have closer friends, two years after graduation, they were way happier than those who said, I'm going to make my decisions on the basis of my position, about my, you know, where I am in the pecking order, how much money that I'm making. Okay, so bottom line is that they're both intrinsic and extrinsic motivations for all the things that we do, but the more it's extrinsic versus intrinsic, the unhappier you're going to wind up, and all of the experimental research shows the same basic pattern. What you want is to do things that have more intrinsic as opposed to extrinsic motivation if you want to have higher well-being. I know from listening to this show, I've never been a super naturally happy person. That's exactly why I've spent much of my life and my career trying to understand human happiness, not just academically, but in a way that I could use very practically, and you can too. I don't do research, I do me-search, well, and you-search. My time in academia has reinforced the lesson I continue to rely on today. Happiness, well, and energy are best managed through deliberate habits and discipline. I take my personal habits seriously. I need to. I have a morning routine. I've talked about it on this show. It involves prayer and exercise and healthy eating and a lot of coffee while taking it at the right time. But in my creative work, I've long looked for a gold star supplement to that routine that helps me take charge of my day. I came across Magic Mind. Now, I was skeptical at first, honestly, because there's a lot of noise in the space, and most of it really doesn't hold up to the science or human experience. But Magic Mind has ingredients that I like. 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The only thing that will inherently satisfy you is the love of your life, is what it comes down to. And that means you need to do the things that give you that intrinsic satisfaction, as opposed to always searching for the things that will bring in the extrinsic rewards. People who are more extrinsically motivated never can have enough, and so they'll escalate their behavior and try to finally get to the point where they scratch so much that the itch stops. But it doesn't. And that leads to workaholism. Now, this has such parallels with any addictive substance or behavior, right? It's funny that when you talk to people who are addicted to opiates, for example, they honestly feel at a visceral level that if I take enough heroin, finally I'll have enough. People who are drinking alcoholically, they say, at some point I will have enough alcohol, but I need a little bit more. But you know there's not enough. That's a bottomless pit. It doesn't finish except in very, very dark and bad places. And the same thing is true if you think that when you finally work enough, that you will have earned your way, that you will finally be lovable, that you will finally achieve the version of yourself that you actually want. But that's an external validation. That's an extrinsic motivation. And you can't get there from here. You're drinking seawater. Now, if you want to see the difference between intrinsic and extrinsic motivations and their relative level of satisfaction and fulfillment that they bring, let's do a little thought experiment. Let's say that you can compare two scenarios. In the first one, you're driving to the most expensive restaurant in town and your brand new Ferrari where you're going to eat alone because you have no friends and family. Scenario number one. Number two, you're driving to a Denny's in a 1999 Corolla that the muffler just fell off of to hang out with the people who truly love you and that you love. Which one, say? Now, I'm not asking you which one would you choose because we're all imperfect, right? You might choose door number one, despite the fact that you know perfectly that door number two is the door of happiness, the door of fulfillment, the door of contentment, the door of satisfaction. But you still might take door number one. Why? Because your biology says just a little more, just a little more, just a little bit more extrinsic reward. And you'll finally, you'll finally have enough. I see this all the time in the strivers that I work with. A story that I've told often in speeches is a woman I was interviewing for a book I wrote called From Strength to Strength in 2022 about high achievers and how they struggle in the second half of life often is, this is an icon in the finance industry, a woman who's at the absolute top of her game, who's just my age and rich beyond her wildest dreams and who admitted to me that all she ever does, is work and she's desperately unhappy. And I said, well, tell me more about this unhappiness that you're talking about. She said, well, you know, my husband and I were roommates. We're just roommates. I have not much more than a cordial relationship with my kids, not for anything bad, but because, you know, I really pursued it. And the reason I didn't pursue it is because the same reason I don't really have any friends, which is that all I've done every day for decades is work and become more and more and more successful and make more and more and more money. It's hurting my health. I drink too much. I don't get to the gym. I'm getting bad reports back from my doctor. What do I do, professor? And I said, you know what to do. I mean, take a souvenir from your firm and step away, get to know your husband, get into AA, get in touch with your faith, get to know your kids. Come on. She says, I know, I know. And I said, well, why didn't you do it? If you know it, why didn't you do it? And then she was, she thought about it for a while. And she said, because I've always chosen to be special rather than happy. That's the search for extrinsic rewards that leads to workaholism, that leads to addiction. And that might describe you. Why? Why would you get into such a fix? Why would you mistake the Ferrari for the Corolla to go to a restaurant alone, as opposed to going to a restaurant where people love you and you're hanging out and having a great time? Why? Well, there's basically three reasons that we see this, actually. In the literature. And one of these might describe you. But knowing this is key to being free. Number one, if you're a workaholic, it might just be that you had workaholic parents. And this is an epigenetic expression. Now, by the way, it might actually be genetic. There might be something in the human genome that leads people to be workaholic, that tends to make people work too hard and to be extrinsically motivated. We don't know. There's a lot of parts of the personality that are genetic. Most aspects of personality, openness, conscientiousness, agreeableness, neuroticism, they're between 40 and 80% genetic. So why wouldn't this be partly genetic as well? It's absolutely possible. But what we do know is that workaholic parents tend to have workaholic kids. I'll put up an interesting article in the show notes from the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, understanding work addiction in adult children, the effect of addicted parents and work motivation. You get it. If you grew up seeing adulthood modeled by people who work all hours and are rarely home, that's what being a grownup is going to mean to you. Plus the fact that you actually might have it somehow encoded into you. The reason that you have workaholism in your life is because you had workaholism growing up. It's number one. Happens all the time. Number two is the way that your parents parented you can lead to this. One of the classic patterns that I see in strivers and people Often that they learned when their brains were highly synaptically plastic, aka they were little kids that love is earned and this is doesn't mean you had bad parents it just means that you got attention and energy and affection from your parents when when you did a great thing you came home with straight as in your report card you got first chair in the orchestra you made picture on the baseball team whatever you won an art contest if your parents were cool whatever it happened to be but it was something extraordinary and your little plastic brain concluded that i get love when i do a great thing love is earned now this is not the recipe for becoming a human being it's the path toward becoming a human doing because if you believe that love is earned and you and you process that and you reinforce that over the course of your life you will try to earn people's love through what you do and that almost always means you're going to work harder and harder and harder and harder there are other ways that that pathology can become manifest if you realize that you earn love by being unbelievably beautiful you might get into pathological and unhealthy body modification you might spend you know nine hours a day at the gym or get endless plastic surgeries that's another way that people actually try to earn love from other people as a matter of fact but for strivers people great at what they do maybe you it might just be that you recorded the lesson that love is earned and then you go looking to earn love for the rest of your life i work a little harder will you love me well i got news for you love isn't earned it's a free gift freely given love is a grace if you're living with somebody or you're hanging around with people that make you earn their love they don't love you because that's not what love is but your brain might not quite believe it who knows i've seen couples that are torn apart because one partner is chronically workaholic thinking that if i finally earn enough work hard enough achieve enough become admirable enough in the outside world that then finally i'll be worthy of this other person's love and what they're inadvertently doing is pushing their partner away and there's nothing sadder love can't be earned number three is a downstream addiction which is i should say an upstream addiction because really it comes before workaholism which is an addiction to success success winning is unbelievably motivating for people as a matter of fact it it stimulates the same neurochemistry as many drugs and alcohol the the reward and anticipation of reward involves dopamine the look is ceruleus spritzes a little bit of dopamine into the nucleus accumbens of the brain that says do more of that do more of that do more of that people who have a lot of victories who are really good at what they do they'll often find that life feels gray when they're not winning but winning gets harder and harder and harder which means they have to work more and more and more and more if you're addicted to success if you're neurochemically addicted to success and winning which many of you probably are then you're going to have to work harder and harder to get back less and less and less that's escalating behavior and that's just like any other addiction and that's going to turn into workaholism we're going to work harder and harder and longer and longer and longer hours to get that feeling that life has some something some spark in it you know oh i got that feeling of winning again i got the deal i sold the company i you know i got the i got the attention i got the applause whatever it happens to be that's success addiction and that's your brain malfunctioning with respect to the rules that you actually need and that you deserve all right now here's where we get to the main point that i want to get to which is if this is a problem now you understand what you now you understand what it is and you understand where it comes from but i really want to talk to you about what you do in the what to do part i want to give you three pieces of advice three steps that you can take to resolve the issue these are the same things that i would a version of which i call the gambling by the way number one is look at the origins and face the truth look at why this actually happened in your life look at the extent to which your parents did hold out love on the basis of your accomplishments turning into a a being who believes that love is earned or a success addicted individual look at the basis of why this is probably the case in your life and face it with and say yeah that actually became a pathology and don't blame your parents i mean i'm sure your parents were really really good i know tons of people who example for example came from families where their parents were penniless immigrants to the united states who gave everything to give their kids a better future and and they thought that they were doing their kids a great favor by holding them to these unimaginably high standards in school and at work i get that you just recorded the wrong information on the basis of this they actually did love you but they thought that holding back was the way to do it so so so look at the basis of this pathology and face it with actual truth not with recriminating not with reproach but realize that there's a script in your head that says you're not inherently lovable as you are so you better go win the spelling bee or some grown-up version of the spelling bee here's the second piece of advice start giving the thing that you most want to receive you want love how do i know you want love because i live and breathe my friend i don't need to be a phd in all this nonsense for me to tell you what is most obvious humans exist to love and be loved this is the the fuel of human life is love not everybody's good at it not everybody's good at getting it and even fewer people are good at giving it but the truth of the matter is that this is this is really the mother's milk of the essence of life itself and so if you want it if you actually want it don't try to earn it stop trying to earn it go give it instead there's a famous quote by benjamin franklin if you would be loved love and be lovable that's what he said so stop trying to earn love and just start going and giving love and that's what you'll start to receive you'll start to get the intrinsic reward that you want in the first place don't you know try to earn your spouse's love by working harder go love your spouse go give them true love in the intrinsic currency that satisfies her or his soul as well as yours and that means giving of yourself not money and things taking a day off from work turning off your phone and giving the person you love the attention that they crave all day when's the last time you did that this works magic i promise you and here's number three you need to make plans to change you've got an addiction and that means you're actually going to have to make plans to change to make a commitment to change feeling like you're listening to this podcast like yeah i gotta change yeah i gotta change that's not enough one day is not enough to repair your relationships um and big changes in habits don't take place overnight they just don't um i've talked about habits on this show the average habit takes 42 days to break or make the average habit takes 42 days to break or make the average habit takes this is probably longer than that if you were dependent on alcohol i wouldn't be so naive as to imagine that not drinking for a day would fix your problem it absolutely wouldn't it takes a lot of planning and it takes a lot of resolve and it takes a it takes a strategy it means in this case owning up to your workaholism acknowledging the roots of your problem and working with your loved ones to make a long-term plan to live differently and that might mean some significant changes that might mean planning a career or job change in six months two years time that might mean deciding to retire even though you're not ready to retire and setting a date right it might mean doing that because once you do that by the way you're not going to work workaholically right up to your retirement age most people don't do that they actually start confronting the fact that you're going to go to a completely different different platform in your life and so they start to deal with the issue that would make them drive right off a cliff in advance it also might require making a plan to working less strategically so for example scheduling weekend trips and tech-free vacations right now starting to do that making commitments to your loved ones to do that even though it's actually hard for you at first and then it requires asking people who love you to make you accountable to this if you don't have anybody who would make you accountable that's a that's a sign by the way that they are codependent in your workaholism meaning they're probably making you earn their love and they're part of the problem so if you're addicted to drugs and alcohol i might recommend that you get new friends people who are not firing you up in your addiction if you're workaholic you might need new friends who are not making you earn their love um in much the same way all right now what am i trying to do here at the end of the day i'm not saying that this quick fix even if this has given you an epiphany or two about your own life is going to solve the problem i want to set you on the path to recovery that's what it comes down to you might need help on this you might actually need to seek counseling or therapy or a clergy or close friends or whatever it takes but the bottom line is this you need to face the truth you need to give more love you need to make a strategic plan to change and you need to change because the one thing i can assure you is if you don't deal with this in a forthright way it's not going to make your life better there isn't enough work in the world there aren't enough worldly rewards in the world to fill that hole in your life and you're not going to be able to do that if you don't do that if you don't be able to do that if you don't have the power to do that if you don't have the confidence in your soul trust me there aren't and so you need to get after this is the bottom line because you deserve to be happy you deserve to be intrinsically happy you need to get be satiated with a love that you seek that you really seek that can't be earned and it's not going to start to happen until you start taking on its face the problem that you actually are experiencing and i have to do the same thing good luck couple of quick questions and we're out chris write sanded office hours to the website after listening to your office hours episode on greenlight and i'll see you next time on the greenlight podcast. grief, I have the following question. What is the difference or similarity in grief that arises from loss through death versus loss through divorce. I'm curious if there's a different healing timeline, if there are different steps. So in general, the literature would suggest that death is more severe with respect to grief than divorce. And this comes from one 1987 study, but there's been very little written about it. And of course, your results may differ because the circumstances are everything, right? You might have had such an unbelievably traumatic divorce where you didn't want it, you were deeply in love, you got blindsided, whatever it happened to be, that it might be as bad or worse than a death in the family. One thing that we do know is that for kids, especially for sons, it's actually less traumatic to lose a father to death than to lose a father who abandons the mother and is absent from the family. The second is more traumatic. And so the results really differ. It's highly individual. Bottom line is you should treat grief the same way. Yeah. Yeah. No matter what it is, it's actually making you grieve and follow the same protocols that we see there. Thanks for that question. That's a really, that's a beautiful question. This is an anonymous question. Once again, written into the website. My question is on the psychology of forgiveness. Tough one. What advice do you have to remedy the physiology, the physical and mental pain of anger and sadness that come from betrayal? This could come from, you know, disloyalty of a spouse, somebody who hurts you, who's very close to you. How does one pursue a meaningful, happy life with or alongside the person that hurt them? This is very classically the case when one spouse is unfaithful to the other outside of the bounds of their marriage. But the marriage sort of hangs together, but it's sort of this phantasm over the marriage. And this is really scarring. It's really, really hard. There is a literature out this about, you know, about forgiveness. And I'll go into greater depth at some point about actually the protocols for forgiveness. It's like there's protocols for everything. There's a model actually for forgiveness. There's a model actually for forgiving that makes you better and better and better at it if you practice it following a particular progression of thoughts and ideas. And I want to tell you about it. This guy actually comes from the work of the Templeton Foundation, which is a great foundation doing really important work. And it's called the REACH model. Number one is there is something that's really, really bothering you with somebody that you're not going to get away from. Maybe you have a schism with your brother or sister. These are your kid. These are people that are going to be part of your life with a direct family member. Or this is somebody who's betrayed you like a spouse. OK, so this is somebody that you've decided to stay together with. Here's what you do as you're healing to escalate the healing to heal better and faster. It's the REACH model. It's an acronym. R is to recall the hurt. I know you don't want to, but it's very important that you you make it clear not to re-traumatize yourself, but just to remember the source of your hurt. Then move on quickly. This is even harder. Empathize with the offender. Say, I empathize, which is not to say that it's all good. That's not to say that you accept it. No, it's just to say, I understand it. I understand it. I feel what that person was feeling, right? Not that I would have done it, but I can understand actually what it was that they did. So I recall it and I understand it. Then A is I am going to give them an altruistic gift. I am going to be the kind of person that gives despite the fact that I don't necessarily want to, but because this is the kind is committing to forgive. That's your act of altruism. I forgive this person. And H is holding on to the feeling of that forgiveness because that feeling of forgiveness is a feeling of sort of wiping clean your soul, or as my wife would put it, voluntarily letting go of a bag of garbage. Now it's temporary, especially when the hurt is fresh, which means you need to go through the REACH protocol maybe every day for a while. Maybe this is the meditation, your holy prayer, REACH and going through it. E is to empathize with the offender. A is a commitment to give an altruistic gift that's not earned to an offender. C is committing to forgiveness, which is the altruistic gift. And H is to hold on to forgiveness. And then you'll feel better and it will reset you. It'll reset your nervous system as a matter of fact, but you're going to have to do this again and again and again and again. This will help. This is well-validated actually in the literature that can help you. And I hope it does. I hope you've gotten that spirit today. I hope it's been useful to you. I can't wait to see you next week. I hope you've gotten that spirit today.