Special episode: Understanding true happiness and the tools to cultivate a meaningful life—insights from past interviews with Arthur Brooks

**Peter Attia** (0:11)
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Welcome to The Drive. Today's episode is a special best of, with Arthur Brooks, Harvard professor, social scientist, columnist at The Atlantic, and best selling author. I've sat down with Arthur twice in the past few years to talk about how to build a life that's both successful and deeply happy. We pulled the best moments from these two conversations into one focused episode built around four themes, happiness, what hijacks it, the tools and practices that help, and the courage to live and love well, highlighting the most insightful and actionable takeaway steps from previous episodes. I'm really excited about this one because I've actually recently gone back and started re-reading one of Arthur's books. And I've come to realize in re-reading it that in just a span of a year and a half or two years, it's so easy to forget some of the nuance. And while I rarely have the time to go back and listen to old podcasts, I love having a mashup like this that actually brings some of the most important aspects from several podcasts into one. So, without further delay, please enjoy this Best of Brooks episode on The Drive. Arthur, thanks for making the trip to Austin, although maybe it's only partially to see me.

**Arthur Brooks** (2:17)
It's mostly to see you, Peter. I love seeing you.

**Peter Attia** (2:19)
There you go.

**Arthur Brooks** (2:19)
It's the best. Doing this in person is great. Last time we did it by Zoom. This is better.

**Peter Attia** (2:23)
Congrats on the book.

**Arthur Brooks** (2:24)
Thanks.

**Peter Attia** (2:25)
This is not your first, second or third rodeo, but I'm sure each time it's a little bit of a, what's the world going to think?

**Arthur Brooks** (2:31)
Oh, yeah. No, no. It's like having a child. I mean, well, a child you live with for a super long time and they torture you decade after decade. But a book is something where as you bring it into the world, you go through, you remember Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, the Swiss psychiatrist wrote that famous book about death and dying. And you have to go through five stages. I mean, most of that research has been questioned since then, but it's pretty interesting. You go through bargaining and denial and rage. That's like, as you know, when a book is coming out, writing a book, denial and bargaining and rage, and finally there's acceptance, but you're still nervous for sure.

**Peter Attia** (3:03)
Yeah. There's a lot of stuff I want to talk about with you on this topic. But let's begin with a question, which is, what's the difference between happiness, which is what you write about, and happy feelings? Are they the same thing?

**Arthur Brooks** (3:17)
They're not. And this is a really important misconception all of my students and most of us actually have. We live in the era of feelings. If you'd talk to my parents or, God knows, my grandparents about feelings, they would scratch their head.
What are you talking about? I mean, talking about your emotions all the time, ephemera, feeling seems so counterproductive. And in point of fact, our grandparents were right. Feelings are not happiness any more than the smell of the turkey is your Thanksgiving dinner. Feelings are evidence of happiness. And that's incredibly good news. I mean, a lot of people think that happiness is a feeling. It's quite incorrect. There are many better technical definitions of happiness, but they produce a lot of feelings. They're associated with a lot of emotions, which is limbic system activity, a part of the brain, a 40-million-year evolutionary process that developed the limbic system to create emotions. That signals information is what it comes from. If you mistake these feelings for the underlying phenomenon of happiness, you're going to be chasing it all over the place. You'll be chasing ghosts. How I slept last night, what I ate for breakfast, if my spouse yelled at me this morning, that's what's going to determine my happiness. You wind up being managed as opposed to having any prayer of managing your own happiness. So that's the first thing to keep in mind. It's not feelings.