Pod Insights Office Hours with Arthur Brooks How to Enjoy Your Life About this episode Want to miss (or forget) life’s sweetest moments? Easy: don’t savor anything. My late mother, an artist, knew this was a terrible strategy for happiness. Through her art, she was an expert at savoring—and the first to teach me its benefits.
In this episode of Office Hours, I connect her lesson to what we now know from behavioral science: because of our built-in negativity bias, we tend to overlook positive experiences unless we make an effort to notice them. I’ll share three simple ways to do that—so you can experience your life more deeply, remember it more clearly, and find meaning even in the hard moments.
Want to go deeper on this—and other ideas from the podcast—and actually put them into practice? If you’re ready to do that work in person, I’ve partnered with MEA, a transformational science-backed retreat center, to bring these principles to life through a series of retreats in Santa Fe. You can find the details at retreats.arthurbrooks.com.
—
Brought to you by:
• David Protein—The most effective portable protein on the planet https://davidprotein.com/arthur https://davidprotein.com/arthur
—
Where to find Arthur Brooks:
• Website: https://arthurbrooks.com/ https://arthurbrooks.com/
• Newsletter: https://www.arthurbrooks.com/newsletter https://www.arthurbrooks.com/newsletter
• X: https://x.com/arthurbrooks https://x.com/arthurbrooks
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/arthurcbrooks/ https://www.instagram.com/arthurcbrooks/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ArthurBrooks/ https://www.facebook.com/ArthurBrooks/
• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCGuyFRjJQFGCKzfHTBvWM6A https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCGuyFRjJQFGCKzfHTBvWM6A
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/arthur-c-brooks/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/arthur-c-brooks/
• Email: [email protected] mailto:[email protected]
—
Timestamps:
(00:00) Intro
(09:52) What savoring really is
(10:39) How savoring affects your brain and body
(14:54) How savoring shapes your memory
(17:16) Negativity bias and why it’s hard to savor
(20:18) #1: Savor in all three time zones
(24:34) #2: Expand your savoring techniques
(27:21) #3: How I do it–what are you looking forward to
(29:12) How to savor difficult experiences to support growth
(31:19) Q&A: Making space for relationships in a demanding season of work
(32:39) Q&A: Finding a religion that resonates
(34:08) Q&A: Finding a calling
—
Referenced:
• The Meaning of Your Life: Finding Purpose in an Age of Emptiness:http://themeaningofyourlife.com/themeaningofyourlife.com http://themeaningofyourlife.com
• Meaning Membership:https://hub.arthurbrooks.com/the-meaning-membership
• Arthur’s newsletter:https://www.arthurbrooks.com/newsletter
• The Happiness Scale:https://learn.arthurbrooks.com/the-happiness-scale
• The Pursuit of Happiness with Arthur Brooks:https://www.thefp.com/s/the-pursuit-of-happiness-with-arthur
• Savoring the past: Positive memories evoke value representations in the striatum: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4254527
• The Miracle of Mindfulness: An Introduction to the Practice of Meditation: https://www.amazon.com/Miracle-Mindfulness-Introduction-Practice-Meditation/dp/0807012394
• ... References continued at: https://www.arthurbrooks.com/office-hours https://www.arthurbrooks.com/office-hours
—
Production and marketing by https://penname.co/ https://penname.co/.
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:01 Speaker 00 This episode is brought to you by State Farm. Football has a play for just about everything. You can go deep, keep it on the ground, or draw up something nobody sees coming. And whether you want to run a flea flicker or the tush push, you need a plan to fit your unique situation. That's why State Farm takes the time to get to know you so they can help personalize coverage for your life and budget. Now that's a solid game plan. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.
0:29 Arthur Brooks? 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. 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, good 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,
1:14 Arthur Brooks? your life's going to change.
1:22 Arthur Brooks? 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's for you. If I do it, I want to be happier, I want you to be happier, and 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 live 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.
2:06 Arthur Brooks? 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 criticism or comments, we want to hear it. Leave it in the notes, leave it in the comment sections, wherever you're consuming this content. Or send me a note at [email protected] . 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. So 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.
2:45 Arthur Brooks? 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, they'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, 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, it tastes great.
3:28 Arthur Brooks? David Protein has a new bronze line with 20 grams of protein, 150 calories, and 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, if 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.
4:12 Arthur Brooks? So head over to davidprotein.com/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 gonna love that. And you can also find David Protein in stores by looking for the store locator. So enjoy.
4:28 Arthur Brooks? You'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. And 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.
5:11 Arthur Brooks? I've seen it in my research, and I've seen it in my own life. That's exactly what we work on at M E A, 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 on the questions that actually matter. If what I'm describing sounds familiar, I hope you'll come take a look.
5:40 Arthur Brooks? I am recording this a little bit before Mother's Day 2026. It's gonna 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 gonna help me explain a very important phenomenon for your happiness. My mother was my late mother. She 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.
6:25 Arthur Brooks? 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 that 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, she was really in a lot of, uh, really in a lot of agony. She suffered from tremendous mental health problems and I mean, every day was a chore.
7:10 Arthur Brooks? It just was. And then she would come down and have a cup of decaf and because, because of her medication, she couldn't take caffeine and, and she would have a little breakfast and then she would head up to her studio and, 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, um, much to my mortification as a teenager, it actually looked like that and it was beautiful to boot, I guess, although once again, as a teenager, I wouldn't have been able to discern that. Now, growing up, um, 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
7:55 Arthur Brooks? 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, you know, and I just, I, I loved it too. Not knowing, of course, that my little right hemisphere was fully illuminated and I was experiencing the, 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 than I expected her to say, do it a lot, do 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.
8:40 Arthur Brooks? 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. 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, uh, 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. Now, here's the point of that. I was also happy.
9:21 Arthur Brooks? I was, 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 wellbeing. And that's what I want to talk about today. In our hustle and grind culture where everything is fast, where we're distracted constantly. One of the biggest sources, one of the biggest ways that we miss our happiness is we're not here, we're not fully alive. Now, this is not just a call for some sort of mindfulness meditation technique.
10:04 Arthur Brooks? 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, your life's going to change. Let's start off with some, you know, some basics of what savoring actually means. Savoring is, 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.
10:42 Arthur Brooks? You 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. Say, that's, 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, how 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.
11:24 Arthur Brooks? On something neutral, positive, or perhaps even negative, I'll get to that later. 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 is the other is called the ventral tegmental area. You 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.
12:07 Arthur Brooks? So when you savor, you will actually stimulate that ventral striatum, that part of your brain that. And there's interesting research on that, but 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 I am walking to the post office. That's the essence of what the great Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh.
12:52 Arthur Brooks? Of course, one of the most famous Buddhists in the world, a Theravada Buddhist monk Vietnamese. When he wrote his famous classic, The Miracle of Mindfulness, which starts off with this just 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, be 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 does, this is an interesting study from 2022, is it lowers symptoms of depression
13:37 Arthur Brooks? and increases higher levels of reported happiness. Probably that's related to the first effect that I talked about, because when you, when you stimulate the parts of the limbic system that 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 asked human subjects to record the frequency and intensity of their daily positive experiences. Half of the subjects in these experiments
14:22 Arthur Brooks? 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, for 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, sun coming through the clouds a little bit.
15:06 Arthur Brooks? 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, the 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, it feels like time slows down
15:50 Arthur Brooks? 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. This was 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, 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.
16:34 Arthur Brooks? I mean, I practically don't drive looking in the rear view mirror. I'm a dangerous driver, but I mean, I go through life not looking in the rear view mirrors 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, as 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 longtime 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.
17:18 Arthur Brooks? And we reminisce about that, actually, which is sweet and 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, then 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 through 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
18:01 Arthur Brooks? psychological arguments and because they're compelling and because they're more nearly right. We have brains that were designed in more or less our 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. There was no law. Somebody could come in, 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 it, it, we're more likely to get to tomorrow. We're more likely to survive the night.
18:47 Arthur Brooks? That makes perfect evolutionary sense that your suspicious, nervous, 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. But 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,
19:32 Arthur Brooks? 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, it's, it'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 just 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,
20:17 Arthur Brooks? and Change," and that's in "Psychology, Therapy, and Psychomatics." It's a nice article. So savoring is the secret to greater happiness, but it doesn't come naturally. How are you going to savor your life more? And that's what I want to tell you now. What 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 and 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,
21:01 Arthur Brooks? savoring 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 at the opening to the show, didn't I? I mean, I could have talked about the fact that my mom was 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?
21:43 Arthur Brooks? Because I was savoring the memory of me savoring the present. This recursive structure created by time travel, the prefrontal cortex. It's a miracle, isn't it? 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 on 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, Uncle Chet, he, you know, got so drunk and he barfed in the front yard and went and beat up the neighbor. Ah, there was something good that happened that day too, probably. I'm just going to guess.
22:27 Arthur Brooks? Um, second 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's, that's the, that full experience is, has almost theological overtones. The, 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 is 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.
23:13 Arthur Brooks? 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 that could just, a little of this can 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, you practice future scenarios, see the dangers, come back to the present and don't choose those routes into 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 in real life.
23:56 Arthur Brooks? And so the average person is literally 30 to 50% of the time in the future. But the average striver, and I'm looking at you. And I'm kind of looking in the mirror, spend 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 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. I 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
24:38 Arthur Brooks? 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. Number 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
25:21 Arthur Brooks? positive emotion with non-verbal 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. It involves two sets of muscles in the face, the zygomaticus major and orbicularis oculi muscles. You can actually simulate that by holding a pencil in your teeth like this.
25:43 Arthur Brooks? And because happiness is seen in the eyes and not in the mouth, that's the Duchenne smile. That was invented, that was no, that was named, discovered and named by a physiologist named Duchenne because he wanted the happy smile to be named after himself, of course. But you can do that, by the way. I mean, you can put the pencil in your molars and go grin in the mirror that way. You'll fool your brain. You'll be happier because of this behavioral display, because of what you're doing. This is actually a savoring technique in its own way. Smile more. Pretend you're happier. Go act happier. Behavioral display is number one way to savor. When you're doing something, behave.
26:22 Arthur Brooks? With joy. Second, it be present, which is mindfully focusing on the pleasant experience. And what that means is saying to yourself, I am doing this thing. I am sitting on the train, looking out at a beautiful seascape. If that's what it is. Being present means actually saying the thing to yourself because you want to bring it from your subconscious into your prefrontal cortex, into your, you know, consciousness, where you're really thinking about something. And the way to do that is by saying it. And, and it's, it's really unbelievably effective. There's a famous piece of avant garde music from the 1970s by a, of a French composer named Alvin Lucier called, I am sitting in a room. And the whole thing is just, I am sitting in a room. And he talks about sitting in the room.
27:05 Arthur Brooks? It's just like studying, savoring and over and over and over and over again. I thought, how silly. And now I'm thinking, I kind of like it. So say what you're doing to yourself. That's number two. Number three is capitalizing, which means talking about and celebrating positive experiences with others. So don't just say it to yourself, say it to other people. Talk about the experience that you're actually having. Notice things to other people, which makes this even more conscious, even more concrete, even more permanent. And last but not least is what they call positive mental time travel, which is once again vivid reminiscence or anticipation of positive events, just what I talked about in the last one. So those are your four techniques, your repertoire for savoring.
27:48 Arthur Brooks? Number three, I want to talk about how all this works for me. Right? Okay. So I'm, this is kind of how I all put it together. I promised you three, it's actually two, but now I'm going to talk about how I'm trying to do this in my own life. Here's how I do it. I use the research that I'm talking about by starting my morning with a quick reflection on two or three things that I'm looking forward to, right? When I wake up in the morning, the first thing that I do is I, I say a prayer. That's how I start my day. Um, at some point in the show, I'll give you my daily prayer. If you're interested, put it in the notes if you are, if you're not, say, don't do that. Okay. But then I reflect on two or three things I'm really looking forward to. And for me, it'll be my morning workout routine. I just, I want to do it, man. I'm just super grateful to wake up and to be able to go down to the gym, even when I'm tired.
28:32 Arthur Brooks? Um, getting to do this podcast, having dinner with my wife, whatever it's going to be, whatever that day is going to bring, just kind of looking ahead a little bit, savoring that. I imagine each of these events vividly for a few seconds and I make an effort to smile when I'm doing it. Because what I'm doing, I'm neurocognitively programming myself to savor that thing, to remember it more, to imprint it in a positive way, so that the episodic memory of that event, when it actually becomes the past, will be positively valanced. Boy, there was a lot of jargon in that last sentence. Forgive me for that. And then finally, before I go to bed, I think back vividly on each one of these experiences, when it is now a memory with a sense of gratitude. And I'll express that gratitude with whoever I'm with, and it's almost always with my wife. At luck, when I'm going to sleep, it's either with my wife or I'm alone.
29:18 Arthur Brooks? Now, if I screw this up, I fail to carry this out, because my caveman limbic system wants to hijack the process and wants me to worry about somebody looting my cave and stealing my jerky and animal skins. And so I start again. And that's how I try to live. So far, so good. One last note. I promised you I was gonna talk about savoring bad things too. The research focuses entirely on savoring pleasant events and experiences. But there are difficult parts of your life, and if you savor them correctly, these can be unbelievably enriching as well. And here's why I recommend you do that. Here's how you savor the bad. I've mentioned this briefly, but I want to bring it up again in the show. I keep a failure journal.
30:01 Arthur Brooks? Look, everybody has a lot of failure in their life, disappointment in their life. Lots of things are happening you don't like. When something bothers me, I write it down. Now, sometimes I keep it electronically and sometimes I keep it in pencil and paper. It's actually better in pencil and paper, you're more likely to remember it. But I leave two blank lines under each entry. And I come back to the first one after a month. I go back and I read the thing that bothered me. It might be something stupid, right? It might be something kind of important. But I come back and I say, after a month, after that first blank line, and I write down what I learned in the intervening period, thanks to that bad experience. There's always something. It might be, you know, I thought that the argument that I had with somebody I care about.
30:45 Arthur Brooks? Which really bummed me out. I thought it was gonna bum me out for a long time, but I actually stopped thinking about it almost immediately and didn't hurt the relationship. I learned that. How interesting. Then after another month, I'll go back to the second blank line that I left after the entry, read it again and read the thing I learned. And then write something positive, something good that happened as a result of the experience. I might say, we ended up making amends and our friendship was actually stronger as a result of that. A good thing happened as a result of our ability to make amends, which, which deepened our relationship. Now, trust me, if you give it a bit of thought, you'll have something worthwhile to say about almost negative, any negative event. You're not gonna say, I'm glad it happened, but you might.
31:26 Arthur Brooks? And you're gonna get benefit from learning and benefit in, in creating a more positively valanced memory from that, which is a form of savoring of something negative, which will add depth to your life, learning to your life, growth to your life. And that's something that makes every minute of your life worthwhile. I'll just finish with a couple of questions. This comes from Yu Jian Zhao. Thanks for the email. How should someone earlier in their career think about intentionally maintaining and investing in relationships when so much of the feedback and momentum is pulling them toward work? Okay, yeah. Yeah, yeah, I get it. Yu Jian, we're all strivers, aren't we? Workaholics. I get it. And the answer to that is actually the work of Joseph Pieper.
32:11 Arthur Brooks? I've done a podcast before on the importance of leisure. Joseph Pieper said that there's three kinds of leisure. They do not include chilling on the beach. Cause I tell you, fellow strivers, you go to the beach and like the first couple of hours, you'd be like, this is awesome. It's so nice in the morning. By the third hour, you're like, I wanna go back to work. I wanna go back to work. Why? Because your monkey mind is gonna be back in the office or in front of your laptop or whatever it is. This is how you're wired. I get it. Joseph Pieper, the German philosopher, said that you should engage your leisure, your leisure, which is defined as generative, positive activity for which they don't pay you. That's leisure. Three kinds of things. Deepening yourself spiritually.
32:50 Arthur Brooks? Deepening your relationships and learning something deeply. That's the three things to do. And so that's actually how to think about that. How to not go back with your monkey mind to the office is because you're dedicating yourself to something that's meaningful under these circumstances. And you need that kind of leisure. William Page writes in to the Office Hours email address. How would a person raised in a non-religious family choose a religion to begin your recommendation to start first practicing? Yeah, that's good. That's good. I mean, it's funny because it almost sounds like, oh, man, there's just so many choices out there. It's like going to the supermarket and deciding what kind of breakfast cereal. And William, I know that's not what you mean, but you know, look, it's a, it's a, it's a huge world out there, right? The most important thing that you're telling me is that you want something, that you know
33:33 Arthur Brooks? there's something deeper and that you're looking for something. Here's the algorithm. Start by reading, then start by observing, like a front row seat. And then start by practicing a little and only then start believing. And last but not least, maybe start feeling. That's the way to think about it. A lot of people, when they're, when they're looking for, they know they need some sort of a faith or life philosophy at least, or coherent spirituality. They say, I gotta, I gotta feel something. No, no, no, no, that's the wrong way to think about it. Feelings are just the activity of your limbic system. That's not how you should pursue your marriage either is by saying, I gotta feel it all the time. You're gonna end up divorced. No, no. It's really all about finding something that you can practice every day, believe a lot and occasionally feel.
34:16 Arthur Brooks? That's your marriage and that's your, the religion that you'll actually find if that's what you're in the market for. And the way to do that is by doing the work, is by learning, which is by reading and then observing, because it's not enough just to read, you have to observe and then actually experimenting with practice. From there, belief will come and occasionally feeling as well. Good luck on your journey. Last but not least, and I don't know how to pronounce this one. I'm sorry, Masieje Buzuk.
34:41 Arthur Brooks? Was enough. In your research and experience, what is the most important? What is the most important for someone in a situation of high competence, genuine contribution, but a persistent inability to translate inner value into outer reward? Now, this sounds an awful lot like you've got an adolescent kid who is unbelievably smart. I'm just guessing here. Unbelievably smart, really, really creative, but not posting like in school and in life, not maybe launching as a young adult. And the answer to that is fundamentally to help that person, even if it's you, to find calling. And the way to find calling is the two questions of meaning. This is the meaning exam that I've talked about on the show before. Think deeply about this. Where do I need to go?
35:25 Arthur Brooks? And what do I need to do to find the answers to the two questions? Why am I alive and for what would I die? Why am I alive? And for what would I die? Maybe that's who created you. Maybe it's what you're on earth to do. And most importantly, for what would you give your life? What are you going to do? Where are you going to go? What are you going to read? Who are you going to ask? What experiences are you going to have? So you can find the answers to those two questions. When you do, what you will find is your calling. That's what you're supposed to be doing. And that will solve the problem of high competence and low performance virtually always. We're done. Let me know your thoughts at [email protected] . Like and subscribe on Spotify and Apple and YouTube and leave a comment. We want to hear it. Negative, positive, we like it all.
36:09 Arthur Brooks? Follow me on Instagram, LinkedIn, the other platforms. There's all kinds of content over there that's in shorter form, but it will reward your scrolling as opposed to frittering away your time. I promise. Order The Meaning of Your Life, my new book, to learn more about all the topics I'm talking about here. And last but not least, Happy Mother's Day. See you next week.
36:35 Speaker 00 This episode is brought to you by State Farm. Football has a play for just about everything. You can go deep, keep it on the ground, or draw up something nobody sees coming. And whether you want to run a flea flicker or the tush push, you need a plan to fit your unique situation. That's why State Farm takes the time to get to know you so they can help personalize coverage for your life and budget. Now that's a solid game plan. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.
Previous How to Manage Grief Next Stop Trying to be Perfect Page updated October 30, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated