14 Habits for an Optimised Morning & Evening Routine - Arthur Brooks - #1043

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
When it comes to well-being, what do you think contributes more psychological elements or physical elements? Because we experience our well-being psychologically, but we experience everything psychologically, including our physical well-being. When it comes to well-being, what contributes more? Psychological or physical elements?

**Arthur Brooks** (0:21)
The answer is yes, because psychology is biology. Fundamentally, psychology is biology.

**Chris Williamson** (0:26)
What's that mean?

**Arthur Brooks** (0:27)
That means that you cannot disconnect from your brain. Now, perhaps there's some external consciousness that people are experiencing, but the truth of the matter is that the functioning of the limbic system of your brain, where you're having positive and negative emotions all day long, that's biology. That's a part of the brain that was evolved between 2 and 40 million years ago as an alert system to what's going on outside of you. You perceive things, threats and opportunities. You react, your brain reacts with negative and positive emotions, which then give you a sense of being happier and happier at any particular time. And so, that being the case, we should be very grateful for our negative emotions, but we also need to learn how to manage them. That's the great goal of life. That's the great goal of becoming a self-managing, self-leading person when you're in a state of suffering to understand why that is, how it can be productive, what you can learn and how you can manage it such that it doesn't dysregulate you or ruin your complete quality of life.

**Chris Williamson** (1:24)
If psychology is biology, should we just attack the biology?

**Arthur Brooks** (1:28)
Well, the way that we attack the biology is by understanding the psychology and actually acting in a different way.

**Chris Williamson** (1:32)
It really does sound like the human centipede.

**Arthur Brooks** (1:34)
Yeah, it really is. Now, my whole philosophy is a self-licking ice cream cone because no matter if you say biology, I say psychology. But the truth of the matter is that once, if you want to become a happier person, the first thing you need to understand is the science, which is the reason that I teach the science of happiness to my students.
I don't go in and teach woo-woo and say, here's, why don't we all try to manifest some sort of happiness? It's like, no, this is what's going on in your brain. When you're feeling sad, what's happening is that the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex of your limbic system is highly alerted to the fact that you're perceiving a loss. That loss in your life of a person or something that you love is a very normal reaction in the ancestral environment, where we lived in bands of 30 to 50 individuals, to be rejected, to have a break up, to have a schism with somebody else in your band, meant that you were at a real risk of walking the frozen tundra and dying alone. You need to be really averse to that. That's why you feel grief when you're disconnected from somebody that you love, and you have a part of your brain that's evolved to make you feel that grief, and that's completely normal. That's the most normal thing it could possibly happen. People find a lot of comfort in saying, oh, there's nothing wrong with me. There's not something I need to cure. That's actually evidence that my brain is working the way that it should, and I'm going to be okay.

**Chris Williamson** (2:58)
Do most people need more happiness or less unhappiness?

**Arthur Brooks** (3:01)
That's such a good question. And the answer is, it really depends on who you are. Okay, so let's back up a little bit. You made a very important distinction right now, which is that happiness and unhappiness are not opposites. They're not. People, for the longest time, thought that unhappiness was an absence of happiness.

**Chris Williamson** (3:17)
It's a single spectrum with happiness on one end and unhappiness on the other.

**Arthur Brooks** (3:20)
Yeah, and it's not true. I mean, it's like darkness is the absence of light, but unhappiness is not the absence of happiness. On the contrary, the emotions that are behind happiness and unhappiness, and again, happiness isn't emotions. Emotions are evidence of happiness, but they exist in different, they're produced in different parts of the brain for different reasons. And so the result of it is that you can be a very happy person and also a very unhappy person.

**Chris Williamson** (3:45)
Oh wow, that's interesting.

**Arthur Brooks** (3:46)
You can, and that just means you're a high affect person. I have a test that I give, it's a test of affect. And that is to see the intensity of your positive and negative emotions. A quarter of the population is above average positive and above average negative.