How to Enjoy Your Life

Introduction

0:00Study and play. Come together on a Windows 11 PC. And for a limited time, college students get the best of both worlds. Get the Unreal College Deal. Everything you need to study and play with select Windows 11 PCs. Eligible students get a year of Microsoft 365 Premium and a year of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate with a custom color Xbox wireless controller. Learn more at windows.com slash student offer. While supplies last, ends June 30th. Terms at aka.ms slash college PC.

Childhood Memories

0:30As a kid, I would come home from school and I would practice my French horn and then I would paint with my mother and it was just bliss. But my mom was better than me, not just because she was older, but because she had more ability. I remember asking her, I was probably 13 or 14 years old, how I could improve as an artist. She said, look deeply at the thing you're trying to draw, that you want to draw. Think about it and look at it again. Stare at it. Look at the nuances. Then try. Savoring experiences in life, neutral experiences,

1:00good experiences, even bad experiences, can be fundamentally game-changing in your well-being. One of the biggest ways that we miss our happiness is that we're not here, we're not fully alive. And I promise you that if you learn to savor your life,

Office Hours Introduction

1:15your life's going to change. Hi friends, welcome to Office Hours. I'm Arthur Brooks. This is a show about how you can lift people up and bring them together in bonds of happiness and love using actual science and ideas. This is a show that actually shows you how research can be in the public interest and indeed your interest. If you want to lift people up, if you want to help people to become their best selves, this show is for you. Why do it? I want to be happier. I want you to be happier.

1:46And I want you to help other people to be happier. And furthermore, this is not just a self-improvement idea. This is one that's actually based in data and that's what we'll be talking about. This is an evidence-based program about how to lead your best life. Hope you've enjoyed it so far. If you do, please recommend this show to other people. Hit like and subscribe wherever you're listening or watching this show. That actually helps the algorithms find other people, as a matter of fact. And I appreciate you doing that an awful lot. If you have questions or criticisms or comments, we want to hear it. Leave it in the notes.

2:16Leave it in the comment sections wherever you're consuming this content. Or send me a note at officehours at arthurbrooks.com. Don't forget to leave a review. We want to know what you think. And once again, that's really helpful to the show so that we can continue to spread as we are. Bigger audiences almost every week.

High Protein Diet

2:32So thanks to you for that. Hey friends, a lot of you know that I keep a very high protein diet. That's important for me in my 60s because I want to maintain a good level of muscle protein synthesis. And I don't always have time to eat as much protein as I want from whole foods. That's the ideal. But it's just not manageable all the time. For that reason, I'm always looking for supplements that can actually get me where I need to go with respect to my macronutrient profile. A bunch of my friends were telling me that David protein is a really good source. The reason is because protein bars in general,

3:02they're handy, they're convenient, but they can be very high in calories and they can actually be really high in carbohydrate, especially in the form of sugar. David protein, I heard, was better. Sure enough, it's got a great profile. It has 40% more protein and 57% fewer calories than most of the protein bars you find out there. 28 grams of protein, 150 calories, zero grams of sugar. That's actually quite a feat to put that together. And by the way, they taste great. David protein has a new bronze line with 20 grams of protein, 150 calories,

3:34and zero grams of sugar. That comes to 53% calories from protein, another industry-leading protein-to-calorie ratio, as most leading protein bars on the market average 40% or lower. Each bronze bar features a smooth, decadent marshmallow base with a flavor-filled layering, airy crisp, and a chocolate-flavored coating, providing a different taste and texture profile compared to our Hero Gold line. I started buying David protein bars, and now I'm pleased that they're sponsoring this show as well. So whether you're on the go or hitting the gym,

4:06if you're trying to meet your protein targets, David protein is a good way for you to do it. That's why I'm doing it, and it's what I'm carrying when I'm on the road. So head over to davidprotein.com slash Arthur. They've got a special offer for you. If you buy four cartons, they'll give you the fifth carton for free. You're going to love that. And you can also find David protein in stores by looking for the store locator. So enjoy.

Savoring Life

4:28You're not broken. You're meaning starved. I talk to people all the time who are by any external measure successful. They've built careers. They have families. They've checked the boxes. And yet something feels off. Life feels thin. Like you're going through the motions. Like you're watching yourself from the outside. And here's what I want you to know. That feeling is not a personal failing. It's not ingratitude. It's not something wrong with you. It's a meaning problem.

5:00And it's an epidemic. The modern world is extraordinary at giving us comfort, achievement, and distraction. It's terrible at giving us meaning. And no amount of success will fix that. I've seen it in my research, and I've seen it in my own life. That's exactly what we work on at MEA, the Modern Elder Academy, in a program I've developed called The Meaning of Your Life. It's not a lecture. It's not a quick fix. It's several days of real work in a small group

5:30on the questions that actually matter. If what I'm describing sounds familiar, I hope you'll come take a look.

5:40I'm recording this a little bit before Mother's Day 2026. It's going to play pretty close to Mother's Day as a matter of fact. And so you're probably thinking about mom, whether mom is still alive or not. And I hope you had a good experience growing up with your mom. I hope you love your mom. Everybody deserves to, for sure. Not everybody does. I want to tell you a little story about mine. Not because this is a show about Mother's Day, but because this is going to help me explain a very important phenomenon for your happiness. My mother was my late mother.

6:12She died relatively young, 73. She suffered a lot because she was very ill for most of her life, as a matter of fact. She was, however, a terrific artist. She was an artist of some renown in the Pacific Northwest. I grew up in Seattle, Washington. And she was a terrific mixed-media artist. Many people in the Pacific Northwest own her paintings. She did this to the exclusion of most other things over the course of her life. She was also an amateur violinist and pianist. So she was really into the arts and a creative soul, to be sure. One of the reasons

6:42that she was so dedicated to her art, if you've been a listener of this program over the last few weeks, you'll recognize this argument. It is that when you participate in the production of beauty, you illuminate the right hemisphere of your brain and you find the meaning of your life. When my mother would wake up in the morning, she was really in a lot of agony. She suffered from tremendous mental health problems. And, I mean, every day was a chore. It just was. And then she would come down

7:14and have a cup of decaf and because of her medication, she couldn't take caffeine and she would have a little breakfast and then she would head up to her studio and life started at that moment. She was a different person. It was extraordinary, as a matter of fact, how I saw that. And she was a great artist. She was fantastic. She had excellent technique. If she decided to paint a naked guy holding a guitar, much to my mortification as a teenager, it actually looked like that. And it was beautiful to boot, I guess,

7:44although once again, as a teenager, I wouldn't have been able to discern that. Now, growing up, I was very interested in the arts myself. I was more of a musician. As a matter of fact, I made my living as a classical musician for many years until I was 31 years old. But I was interested in all different kinds of creativity. I wrote stories and poetry and I painted with my mother. As a kid, I would come home from school and I would practice my French horn and then I would paint with my mother and it was just bliss. I loved it too. Not knowing, of course, that my little right hemisphere was fully illuminated

8:15and I was experiencing the meaning of my life. But my mom was better than me, not just because she was older, but because she had more ability. I remember asking her, I was probably 13 or 14 years old, how I could improve as an artist and I expected her to say, do it a lot, get the reps, which certainly is true. That's not what she told me. She said, here's the reason that people can't draw. Here's the reason. Because they actually never look at the thing they're trying to draw. She said, look deeply at the thing you're trying to draw,

8:46that you want to draw. Think about it and look at it again. Stare at it. Look at the nuances. Then try. So I was actually trying to draw a tree. Simple thing, right? And I would look at it and try to draw the tree. Didn't look like a tree. Didn't look very good at all. Then I really stared at it. I really took in the details of what I was looking at. I was, I wasn't relying on my brain to fill in the details. I was actually observing the details, the contours, the colors, the shadows. And I drew a pretty good tree.

9:17Now, here's the point of that. I was also happy. I remember being really happy, not because the tree looked good, but because the whole experience was rich. What was that? It turns out that that was an experience of what we call savoring. Savoring experiences in life, neutral experiences, good experiences, even bad experiences, can be fundamentally game-changing in your well-being. And that's what I want to talk about today. In our hustle and grind culture, where everything is fast,

9:48where we're distracted constantly, one of the biggest sources, one of the biggest ways that we miss our happiness is that we're not here, we're not fully alive. Now, this is not just a call for some sort of mindfulness meditation technique. This means simply savoring life as it's happening right now. I want to tell you why it's so important, and I want to tell you how you can do it in your ordinary life. And I promise you that if you learn to savor your life,

10:19your life's going to change. Let's start off with some, you know, some basics of what savoring actually means. Savoring is to pay attention and to say, I want to be doing this right now. I want to be fully absorbed in this thing right now. That's what savoring really is. So you savor the experience of eating a piece of chocolate. You don't just gobble it up.

10:43You actually put it in your mouth and you taste it on your tongue and you feel the texture of the chocolate and you're conscious of it. See, that's smooth, that's sweet or whatever it happens to be. That's what savoring really is all about. Or if you savor moments with your beloved before you say goodbye, you're experiencing the look in her eyes and the smell of her skin and you're conscious of that. That's what savoring really is. Now, there's been a lot of research on how that affects you psychologically,

11:13how that affects you neurophysiologically. And it's pretty interesting what researchers have come up with. When you're savoring, when you're paying attention, when you're immersive, when you're here now on something neutral, positive, or perhaps even negative, we'll get to that later. where actually it stimulates the reward processing centers in your brain, your brain's ventral striatum. There's two parts of your limbic system that principally are responsible for you feeling pleasure. What is the ventral striatum? The other is called the ventral tegmental area.

11:44You tap those things. Now, they're very thrifty, which means there are lots of ways to tap it. If you say, if my wife says to me, I just love you so much, it will tap these pleasure centers. And I'll say, joy, right? That's positive emotion. If I had a huge bump of cocaine, it would do the same thing because of my thrifty brain. By the way, I don't do that. But you get the point that I'm actually trying to make. So when you savor, you will actually stimulate that ventral striatum, that part of your brain,

12:14that, and there's interesting research on that, that, of course, as always, I'm going to put into the show notes. This is a paper called Savoring the Past. Positive Memories Evoke Values Representation in the Striatum from Neuron, which is a terrific journal, neuroscience journal. So all you have to do to do that is to pay attention and say, I want to be paying attention to this. I like paying attention to this. And then really look like I was looking at that tree that day. You can even savor completely ordinary things like, right now,

12:45I am walking to the post office. That's the essence of what the great Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh, of course, one of the most famous Buddhists in the world, Theravada Buddhist Hmong Vietnamese, when he wrote his famous classic, The Miracle of Mindfulness, which starts off with just an explanation, this description of washing the dishes. When I'm washing the dishes, I should be fully present in the act of washing the dishes. What he's saying is savor washing the dishes. Don't rush through it.

13:15Be fully present. Be saying, this is what I'm doing now. I like the fact that I'm savoring this. I like the fact that I'm fully present. And that will stimulate, once again, I'm here to tell you, that's going to stimulate your pleasure centers. You're going to get pleasure from washing the dishes, but only if you savor washing the dishes. The second thing that it does, this is an interesting study from 2022, is it lowers symptoms of depression and increases higher levels of reported happiness. Probably that's related to the first effect that I talked about because when you stimulate the parts of the limbic system

13:46that elicit the feelings of joy, that's not consistent with the affective pain that we actually get, which is the activation of the anterior cingulate cortex, a different part of the limbic system. And third, it leads to these higher levels of reported happiness in not in looking at people's brains, but just asking for people's experiences. There's one study where researchers ask human subjects to record the frequency and intensity

14:17of their daily positive experiences. half of the subjects in these experiments were asked to savor their events in their lives, to be fully present, to be paying attention. And they found that these subjects were significantly happier after the experiment than those who were not given any specific instructions. In other words, if I just remind you to be fully present, you're going to be happier. You're going to enjoy your life more. This is especially clear for people who experience, here's the irony,

14:47for people who experience fewer positive events in other words, if you're living a life that is tough and you're going through a really tough time right now and you savor the moments that you like, you know, all of us go through these things, you're really stressed out or really, really too busy, but there's going to be a moment like, you know, the sun coming through the clouds a little bit, you stop and you say, yeah, sunshine on my face and you savor it, that will have a disproportionately joyful impact on you. The less good there is,

15:18the more good you get. That's one of the benefits of savoring. It also leads to happier memories later on, which is interesting, that the more that you savor the present, the more you're going to remember the present when it becomes the past because you lay down more intense memories in the hippocampus of your brain. The episodic memories are actually more distinct when you savor them. It makes perfect sense, doesn't it? You remember the things where it feels like time slowed down because you were fully present. By the way, this is one of the reasons that when you're in the middle of a car accident and it feels like

15:49time slows down because you're laying down hugely complex memory tracks in those moments, you're savoring the experience of getting T-boned by a semi or something, which, you know, not so great, I suppose. Actually, more on that later because I want to tell you how negative events can be savored much to your advantage as well, but we're not there yet. So, savor more, have happier memories later. Now, this is important. And this one's really important to me personally. I'll tell you why. I don't have very many happy memories. It's not like I had some trauma

16:20and some terrible childhood, but I don't have happy memories. I just don't. I don't like remembering the past. I don't like looking at childhood photo albums. I don't like it. I don't like looking at old videos. It just bugs me. It bothers me. It makes me uncomfortable to do that. I mean, I practically don't drive looking in the rearview mirror. I'm a dangerous driver. But, I mean, I go through life not looking in the rearview mirror. It's through the windshield of the car. It's just, for some reason, that's how I'm wired. I don't like talking about the good old days. And so, it's hard for me to keep up with my old friends,

16:51as a matter of fact, because it's just past. I don't know. I mean, I have this one set of really, really happy memories. When somebody says, what are your happiest memories from childhood? They're all the same thing. I used to go down to the Oregon coast with my Aunt Marie and Lincoln City, Lincoln City, Oregon. And it's funny because those of you who've been a long-time viewer of the show, you know that I'm great friends with Rainn Wilson, the actor. And his wife grew up going to the Oregon coast in the exact same places as me. And we reminisce about that, actually, which is sweet

17:21and really good. But generally, I don't like it. I don't like that. And what I've learned from the literature, this is how I try to engineer my own life, is by using the research to live better, is right now, what I'm trying to do with my life is savor more now because I want better memories. I don't want to be the kind of guy that can't remember the past in a positive way. So why is it hard? Why don't we naturally do it? If this were such a great thing that we'd be savoring everything all the time and life would be sweet, right? Well, it's hard because we're not evolved to savor anything. We're evolved to rush

17:52through everything and pay attention to the negative. That's what we're designed to do. Now, why? You, as a viewer of the show, you know that I rely a lot on evolutionary biological and psychological arguments and because they're compelling and because they're ordinarily right. We have brains that were designed in more or less their current form, something like 250,000 years ago in the late Pleistocene era. And that was a dangerous time to be Homo sapiens. You know, you had to pay attention a lot or you were going to be a wild animal's lunch.

18:22There was no law. Somebody could come and, you know, take your buffalo jerky and animal skins and, you know, kill you summarily if you're not paying attention. So we have more brain space dedicated to negative emotions and positive emotions. That's what gives us what we call the negativity bias in our lives. Negativity bias means that life isn't that great all the time, but we're more likely to get to tomorrow. We're more likely to survive the night. That makes perfect evolutionary sense that your suspicious,

18:52nervous, inner troglodyte is trying to survive and pass on your genes. So you're not a saber-toothed tiger's lunch, but that negativity bias is now maladapted. It's basically an error that we would do that, that we would not savor, but rather that we would be suspicious and vigilant and trying to get into the future as quickly as possible as a survival tactic that doesn't actually lead us to happiness. One quick note, Mother Nature, who did that, doesn't care if we're happy. That is an important thing to keep in mind. Mother Nature wants us to survive and pass on our genes,

19:23but that's why we have a wonderful prefrontal cortex so that we have decisions. We can make conscious decisions not just to live according to our animal impulses, but to live up to our moral aspirations. That's the beautiful thing about being human, that even though I have a negativity bias, I can override it with my consciousness. And that's what we're talking about here. Savoring is rebelling against yourself. And oh, how freeing that is, isn't it? To stand up to your worst impulses. It's an error because a negative disposition

19:55it's maladaptive today because the negative disposition makes us error prone in our predictions. You're always going to overpredict the worst. You're going to be going to assume the worst all the time. And that's a heck of a way to live. And it lowers our quality of life to be sure, of course. Lots of interesting work on this, by the way. I'll put in a great article in the notes titled The Brain is Adaptive, Not Triune, How the Brain Responds to Threat, Challenge, and Change. And that's in Psychology, Therapy, and Psychopathics. It's a nice article. So savoring is the secret degree to happiness, but it doesn't come naturally.

20:26How are you going to savor your life more? And that's what I want to tell you now.

Techniques for Savoring

20:30What are the techniques for actually savoring more? What are the techniques for overriding your negativity bias, your tendency to rush into the future, to not pay attention, savor the ordinary moments of your life that you actually need? And I'm going to give you three ways to do it. Three ways that you can savor your life more. Number one, technique number one for savoring your life. Do it in all three time zones. Okay, now, what do I mean by that? I don't mean literal time zones. I'm talking about savoring the past,

21:02savoring the present, and savoring the future. This comes from the work of the psychologist Fred Bryant, who created something called the Savoring Beliefs Inventory, which asks people to talk about their tendency to seek and enjoy positive experiences and memories. And so how does he talk about it? Richness of Reminiscence. In other words, what do I need to do as somebody who struggles with the past is think back to the past and think, what was good about that? And you know what? I just did that in the opening of the show, didn't I? I mean, I could have talked about the fact that my mom

21:33was sad all the time. It seemed to be as a little kid sometimes. She wasn't sad all the time. She was painting beautiful paintings, and those were moments of bliss for her. And I remembered that on purpose. Why? Because I was savoring the memory of me savoring the present. This recursive structure created by time travel and the prefrontal cortex, it's a miracle, isn't it? I'm able to edit my memory in this particular way, in a positive way. Richness of Reminiscence is doing exactly that. It's to savor the past

22:03on purpose by paying attention to the positive parts. And by the way, the editing of memory is a very interesting area of research. You know, you can say, oh yeah, you know, Thanksgiving of, you know, 1996, that's when, you know, you know, Uncle Chet, he, you know, got so drunk and he barfed in the front yard and went and beat up the neighbor. There was something good that happened that day too, probably. I'm just going to guess.

22:29Second time zone is the present, and that's the degree of conscious enjoyment. That's really kind of the main focus of what we're talking about here. Savoring the present, being here fully, thinking about the good that is in this, the experience, the full experience. You know, that full experience has almost theological overtones. The great Catholic Saint Irenaeus of the second century, his most famous quote is that, the glory of God is a man fully alive, and to be fully alive

22:59is to be fully present. Why? Because only in the present can you love. You can't love in a different time. You can't love in the past or love in the future. Love is now. If you're not here now, you're not loving. By the way, important for your relationships. Why should you savor your marriage? Because she needs love, and so do you. And then here's the third time zone, the future. And that's something to look forward to. That's keenness of anticipation. Now, a little of this

23:30can go a long way. According to Marty Seligman at University of Pennsylvania, the average homo sapiens spends 30% to 50% of the time thinking about the future because it's incredibly adaptive. You practice future scenarios, see the dangers, come back to the present, and don't choose those routes and those paths into the future. That's how we, that's why human beings are so awesome is because we're able to make mistakes in our minds and not make them into real life. And so the average person is literally 30% to 50% of the time in the future, but the average striver,

24:01and I'm looking at you, and I'm kind of looking in the mirror, spends something like 80% of their time in the future. These are estimates. Your results may vary as they say in the commercials. But if you're 80% of your time in the future and it's all castles in the sky, this can go a long way. But if you're the kind of person who lives with a little bit of dread, then thinking about things that you can look forward to is all about the savoring of the future. So you've got to figure out, is that your challenge or not? If it's not your challenge, good. If it is, that's what to do. You don't have to really choose.

24:32I recommend that you choose all three, but I do recommend that you think, once again, as I'm emphasizing here, that one of these things is harder for you and that's what you should actually work on. If you have a hard time being here now, then present savoring is important. If you have a hard time in the past, you need to edit your memories. That's me. If you have a hard time actually getting out of the future, right? Or if you have a hard time actually not being in the future because you have so much dread, then that's what you need to is to find something you look forward to. What do you need to do? What's your challenge? What's the time zone in which you need to savor? Go do that. That's number one.

25:03Number two is to expand your repertoire of savoring techniques. This is great stuff from 2010 where psychologists found four savoring techniques that were really, really effective. So here's your savoring chops. Here's how we're going to put it together. Number one is what they call behavioral display, which means expressing positive emotion with nonverbal behaviors. Here's the deal. Smile, even if you don't feel it. I think I've mentioned it on the show before, the Duchenne smile, which is the only smile that's actually associated with true human happiness.

25:34It involves two sets of muscles in the face, the zygomaticus major and the orbicularis oculi muscles. You can actually simulate that by holding a pencil in your teeth like this