Introducing The Happiness Lab: Build the Life You Want... Advice from Arthur Brooks and Oprah
Nov 13, 2023
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Oprah Winfrey and Arthur Brooks discuss building the life you want, the struggle of happiness experts, and the power of negative experiences. They also explore the importance of understanding and managing emotions, giving sentimental gifts, encountering the sacred, and finding focus through walking in nature.
Enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning are the three key dimensions of happiness.
Keeping a negativity journal can help counteract our negativity bias and enhance overall happiness.
Practices like meditation and spending time in nature are essential for improving happiness and achieving transcendent experiences.
Deep dives
The Impact of Howard University and the HBCU Experience
The podcast explores how attending Howard University had a significant impact on the host's life. She describes the sense of inspiration she felt while on campus, surrounded by beautiful black women with diverse natural hair. The episode emphasizes the beauty and power of the HBCU experience, highlighting the importance of recognizing and appreciating the contributions of historically black colleges and universities.
Interview with Arthur Brooks on 'Build the Life You Want'
Dr. Lori Santos interviews Arthur Brooks about his New York Times best-selling book 'Build the Life You Want.' They discuss the book's focus on happiness, personal growth, and the importance of finding meaning in life. Brooks shares his personal journey and highlights the value of applying happiness research to one's own life. The conversation also touches on the collaboration with Oprah Winfrey and the significance of their joint project.
The Three Dimensions of Happiness: Enjoyment, Satisfaction, and Meaning
The podcast delves into the three key dimensions of happiness: enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning. It explains that enjoyment goes beyond mere pleasure, emphasizing the importance of communal experiences and lasting memories. The episode also discusses satisfaction, highlighting the need to work for achievements and avoid the pitfall of the hedonic treadmill. Lastly, it explores the significance of finding meaning in life and the value of answering fundamental questions about one's purpose and significance.
Understanding Negativity Bias and Painful Moments
Our evolutionary history has given us a negativity bias, making us more attuned to negative emotions than positive ones. This bias helped our ancestors survive dangerous situations. Today, it can lead us to focus on the bad stuff and neglect the importance of painful moments. However, we can counteract this bias by keeping a negativity journal. By documenting negative experiences and reflecting on them after some time has passed, we can gain valuable insights and learn to put our negativity bias in context, enhancing our overall happiness.
Achieving Transcendent Experiences through Mindfulness and Nature
Taming the monkey mind and finding moments of transcendent experiences are key to improving happiness. Practices like meditation, prayer, and spending time in nature can help us achieve these experiences. Meditation allows us to observe our own thinking and make conscious decisions about our emotions. It brings us into the present moment and reduces distractions. Additionally, spending time in nature, especially with awe-inspiring natural phenomena, can provide profound insights and stimulate our neurophysiology. These practices help us focus, appreciate the present, and access emotions that are hard to replicate in other ways.
Global media leader and philanthropist Oprah Winfrey and Harvard professor and New York Times best-selling author Arthur Brooks want you to be happier - so they teamed up to write a book outlining the steps to ‘Build the Life You Want.’ Enjoy this episode of The Happiness Lab from our friends at Pushkin Industries.
Over the summer, Dr Laurie Santos readBuild the Life You Want, the Art and Science of Getting Happier and loved it. So, she recorded a conversation with Arthur touching on how his son found meaning in the Marine Corps; why you may want to stop using mirrors and whether happiness experts can ever be happy themselves.
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