Harvard professor who teaches a class on happiness: The happiest people balance and prioritize 3 things

Harvard professor who teaches a class on happiness: The happiest people balance and prioritize 3 things

Social scientist Arthur C. Brooks, who teaches a happiness course at Harvard University, has been searching for the answers about what it means to be happy for decades, and he’s arrived at some specific conclusions.

In Brooks’ recent book with Oprah Winfrey, the pair explain that your goal in life should not be to attain happiness, but to constantly strive for “happierness.” Brooks often emphasizes that happiness is not a destination, but a direction — something that you should aim to increase without an end goal in mind.

“It’s not just, ‘Go get happier.’ That’s too general,” Brooks said on a new episode of the “Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris” podcast. “I talk about the sub-parts, the macronutrients of happiness.”

“When I meet somebody, I can figure out pretty quickly where their ‘diet’ is not up to snuff, where they’re lacking in their macronutrients of happiness and we can work on the subdimensions,” he added.

The happiest people “enjoy their lives. They get a lot of satisfaction in their activities and they have a sense of meaning about why they’re alive,” Brooks said on the podcast. “These are the protein, carbohydrates and fat of happiness.”

The 3 ‘macronutrients of happiness’

1. Enjoyment
2. Satisfaction
3. Purpose

Enjoyment

People often assume that enjoyment is simply pleasure, Brooks said, which isn’t an accurate way to think of it. Constantly chasing purely pleasurable experiences “is a terrible way to live a fulfilling life,” he said.

“What we need to do, by the way is not to get rid of the sources of pleasure, but to add two things that will make them more human.”

You can experience enjoyment when you take a source of pleasure and add people and memory to the mix, Brooks said: “If you’re doing something that’s pleasurable and can be addictive [and] you don’t do it alone, then you can get enjoyment which is a source of actual authentic and enduring happiness.”

There are experiences that you can enjoy solo like reading a book, meditating or listening to music, but he suggested engaging in social activities like going out for drinks or watching funny videos on social media with people you enjoy spending time with.

Satisfaction

“Satisfaction is the joy, the reward, that you get after you struggle for something,” Brooks said. “We as humans, we need to struggle, we need to strive, we need to sacrifice, we even need pain in our lives, because that’s actually how we earn something.”

When you feel like something you have is something you’ve earned, it makes it much more valuable to you in the end, he said.

Brooks shared an analogy from his father-in-law that illustrates the concept of satisfaction: “The reason people aren’t as happy as they should be is because they don’t enjoy their dinner,” he said. “Because they’re never hungry.”

He also used the example of how his students at Harvard wouldn’t be as satisfied by acing a test if they cheated, compared to if they worked really hard to study for the exam. “We want to defer our gratification for real rewards,” he explained.

Purpose

Purpose is the feeling that your life has a sense of meaning, Brooks said. Of all three “macronutrients,” purpose is the one that you need to experience the most.

Brooks said that there are three sub-parts to meaning:

• Coherence: Why do things happen the way they do?
• Purpose: Why is my life unfolding the way it is? What are my goals, and what’s my direction?
• Significance: Why does it matter that I am alive?

And there aren’t right answers to these questions, he said, because the answers are subjective for everyone. The only wrong answers to these questions are no answers, “which is not failure. It’s actually a really good outcome if you fail because you know what to start looking for,” Brooks said.

“It takes a lot of work” to find your purpose, he added, but it’s really important to think about it and have a sense of direction.

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