Stop Trying to be Perfect

Sometimes, the most insidious thing someone can tell you to make you feel better is the age-old phrase, “but you’re perfect!” While research suggests this may ease emotional pain temporarily, it might actually be holding you back from growth and, consequently, satisfaction. In this episode of Office Hours, I explore why we avoid uncomfortable truths when feeling down, and why the better path towards fulfillment is honest self-acceptance—embracing your imperfections, and taking on the challenge to improve. — Brought to you by: • Noble Mobile https://noblemobile.com/arthurbrooks—With Noble, there is only one plan: The No-Bull Plan. It’s simple. It’s transparent. And if you use less data, you get cash back. Get an exclusive offer at: https://noblemobile.com/arthurbrooks — Where to find Arthur Brooks: • Website: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://arthurbrooks.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://arthurbrooks.com/ • In-person Retreats: https://retreats.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 (06:50) The psychology of self-enhancement bias (10:39) Who suffers most from self-enhancement bias (15:50) Why we protect others with comforting lies (17:16) What the research shows about self-enhancement bias (22:57) #1: You’re not perfect but you’re normal (25:37) #2: Accept yourself (27:05) #3: Work to improve (30:03) #4: Don’t blame other people (32:05) #5: Reframe imperfections as puzzles (35:48) Q&A: People pleasing and happiness (37:33) Q&A: Finding time for happiness in a busy life (39:24) Q&A: Teaching happiness habits to young children — 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 • 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 • I'm OK--You're OK: The Pioneering and Bestselling Self-Help Guide: https://www.amazon.com/Im-OK-Youre-OK-Thomas-Harris/dp/0060724277 • Taking time seriously. A theory of socioemotional selectivity: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10199217 • Comparative perceptions of driver ability--a confirmation and expansion: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3730094 • The Illusion of Moral Superiority: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5641986 • Age and the better‐than‐average effect: https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2011-10557-008 • The dorsal anterior cingulate cortex is selective for pain: Results from large-scale reverse inference: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26582792 • ... 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/⁠.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Arthur Brooks?

  You may be under the illusion that it's a good idea to look in the mirror and say, "You're perfect just the way you are." That's a problem. If you can't change to be better because you're as good as you could possibly be, you're perfect right now, then the conclusion that the world is all screwed up and tilted against you is going to create a whole lot of bitterness and resentment and helplessness. So we face a dilemma, don't we? We want to feel better and make other people feel better, but people's tendency to do so through self-enhancement and self-esteem boosting is a short-lived solution with possibly high and enduring ultimate costs. The truth of the matter is, you're not perfect, and neither am I. And that's incredibly good news.

• 0:51Arthur Brooks?

  Hey friends, welcome to Office Hours. I'm Arthur Brooks. This is a show about love and happiness, about how you can have more of both. But just as importantly, how you can become somebody who brings more of these to people that you love, to everybody as a matter of fact. And one of the things that I try to bring up in the show again and again is the fact that when you become a teacher of happiness, that's how you become a happier person on an ongoing and sustained basis. The secret to happiness is learning the science, I believe, but also changing your habits and teaching those ideas to other people. And that's really what the show is all about. One of the reasons that I have this show is because I'm dedicated to lifting people up and bringing them together in bonds of happiness and love. As a scientist, that's what I'm dedicated to my life doing, and I'd love to have you in the movement with me.

• 1:36Arthur Brooks?

  So thank you for watching the show. If you're a long-time viewer, I appreciate it. If you're a first-time viewer, I hope you enjoy it. In either case, please do share. Share these ideas with other people, you as the teacher. Share the podcast, share the link, bring more people into the movement. If you have any ideas about future shows, you have any ideas or criticisms or corrections, please let us know. [email protected] And don't forget to leave a review and comments on Spotify or Apple or wherever you're watching this show. Also, while you're at it, please do order a coffee. Copy my new book, The Meaning of Your Life: Finding Purpose in an Age of Emptiness, which thanks to you is the number one New York Times bestseller. I appreciate that. Pick up a second copy for somebody who's looking for the meaning in their life, which,

• 2:21Arthur Brooks?

  by the way, is everybody. So, anyway, thanks to all of you for making the book a success and for making this show a success. It's spreading more every week. We have more listeners and viewers every week than we had in the last. Hi, friends. I'm Arthur Brooks.

• 2:34Speaker 01

  And I'm Esther Brooks. Hello.

• 2:37Arthur Brooks?

  If you're married and you and your partner are looking for ways to deepen your relationship, Esther and I have something exciting to share with you. This June, at the Modern Elder Academy's beautiful ranch in Santa Fe, New Mexico, Esther and I will be leading a three-day in-person retreat for couples. It's called The Meaning of Us. My recent work on the science and ancient wisdom of meaning has led me to think more and more about romantic relationships and how they're a unique source of meaning in life.

• 3:06Speaker 01

  Most couples never stop to ask each other the big questions. Why? Because ordinary life always gets in the way, and it happens to us, too.

• 3:16Arthur Brooks?

  But there's another problem that I see today. Many hard-working spouses, strivers, fall into a familiar pattern. They try to earn love in the same way they earn the world's rewards. But love can't be earned. It's a gift freely given. That's a mysterious idea that we'll unpack together with you.

• 3:37Speaker 01

  This is not a couples therapy.

• 3:39Arthur Brooks?

  Uh-uh, no.

• 3:40Speaker 01

  No, no, no, no. This is for couples who are good together, but who want to grow deeper. But most importantly, you will leave with a concrete vision for your next chapter. This vision will be rooted in your own values.

• 3:54Arthur Brooks?

  This is the only time we're doing this together this year. So if you want to take your marriage even deeper, come join us this June in Santa Fe. We'd love to work with you.

• 4:04Speaker 01

  Come on.

• 4:09Arthur Brooks?

  Today I want to talk about a trend in our society that I think is deeply mistaken and it may be hurting you even though you don't know it. You may be under the illusion that it's a good idea to look in the mirror and say, "You're perfect just the way you are." This is kind of a central tenet of the self-esteem movement. Or you might think it's a good idea to tell your kid, "You're perfect just the way you are." That's a problem. That's what I want to talk about today. The truth of the matter is, you're not perfect and neither am I. And that's incredibly good news. I'm going to give you some relief today in your imperfection and give you permission to start making progress in your life that will bring you tremendous happiness. Today's theme?

• 4:55Arthur Brooks?

  You're not perfect. When you tell somebody, or you are told, that you're perfect just the way that you are, which by the way, we hear this constantly. You probably heard this in elementary school. You hear this in kind of internet memes. You've seen this as kind of this bumper sticker psychology that everybody's perfect just the way that they are. "I'm okay, you're okay." Man, this started when I was a little kid. This is before my time in the 1960s. There was literally a bestselling book called, "I'm Okay, You're Okay." Well, here's the truth. I'm not okay and neither are you. And we can actually get better. Isn't that great? But when you tell somebody that, or you tell yourself that, or somebody tells you that, here's the problem. Here's the psychological problem. This is a social science show after all. It creates what we call cognitive dissonance. Now, as most of you are aware,

• 5:39Arthur Brooks?

  cognitive dissonance happens, occurs, is the idea that there are two competing truths. You hear this truth and you hear that truth and they compete with one another and that creates a whole lot of discomfort. We don't like having cognitive dissonance and so we need to resolve it. But here's how it works. You don't feel perfect. You don't feel perfect. You don't. And somebody says you're perfect. That creates a cognitive dissonance. Are you perfect or are you imperfect? So how do you resolve that cognitive dissonance? You generally do so by reaching one of two logical conclusions. Either I feel crummy, even though I'm as good as I can possibly be, because the status quo is horrible and there's no scope for self-improvement.

• 6:24Arthur Brooks?

  You're the best you could possibly be, and the best is this? You say to yourself, "That's grim, man." I mean, for almost everybody, that's grim, because life could be a lot better for most people. That's the whole adventure of self-improvement, is making life better. And so when you tell somebody you're as good as you can get, and they don't feel like they're worth all that much, one way to resolve that cognitive dissonance is that life sucks. And that's just the way it is. That's not what you meant when you tell somebody that. But that's one way that they could actually resolve that. And I'm going to show you later evidence that that is in point of fact what a lot of people do. The second way you can resolve the cognitive dissonance is saying, "Yeah, you know, I am perfect the way I am, and things are crummy, which is evidence

• 7:09Arthur Brooks?

  that the outside world is to blame for my unhappiness." In other words, there's something wrong not with me, but with the whole outside world. And this is a dangerous way of living, because there are a lot of people who go through life, saying, "I can't be happy until the world changes." I mean, there's a lot of things that the world does need to do to change, but the truth of the matter is that your core competency is in you. And if you can't change to be better, because you're as good as you could possibly be, you're perfect right now, then the conclusion that the world is all screwed up and tilted against you is going to create a whole lot of bitterness and resentment and helplessness. In other words, this is a problem to believe this about yourself or to tell this to other people, because it leads to either a kind of depression or a kind of bitterness. And neither one of those is good.

• 7:54Arthur Brooks?

  It leads to a temporary good feeling, and then one of these two scenarios typically, and we don't want either of these. That's why I'm doing the show today, because we can do much, much better. We don't just have to criticize this and kind of lay into the old self-esteem movement. We can just do something better than that. Here's the truth. You're not perfect, and neither is anybody else. But as I mentioned before, that's incredibly good news because if you accept the reality of your imperfection, you have hope of improving yourself and your life, and you'll be happier. That's what we want, right? Okay, now, why would we want the illusion of perfection even if it's wrong? And the answer to that is what we call self-enhancement bias. Psychologists have been measuring this for a long, long time.

• 8:37Arthur Brooks?

  There are a lot of ways that social scientists look into this in the research. They'll look at the self-enhancement bias, which is this tendency to exaggerate our positive qualities and compare ourselves favorably with other people. I'll put up an interesting article about this, kind of a classic article from 1999 about this, called "Taking Time Seriously: A Theory of Socioemotional Selectivity" that lays out the idea of self-enhancement bias. But this leads to all sorts of distortions in perception that we want to exaggerate positive qualities so we feel good about ourselves, which gives us this kind of ebullience, this ability to get through the day, while we'll exaggerate the bad qualities of other people so that we feel better in comparison to them. Because it's all comparative.

• 9:20Arthur Brooks?

  Remember, I've talked in this show and often a lot about in evolutionary biology, the fact that people live in hierarchical, that human beings were evolved to live in a hierarchical group of 30 to 50 individuals. And so the result of it is that you've, you're evolved to feel better about yourself if you're rising in the hierarchy, meaning you have better qualities and they have worse qualities. And so we've developed this psychological bias because of this evolved tendency to rise, to want to rise in hierarchies, which we still do today. Now, there's all kinds of novel ways that we show this self-enhancement bias, some of which are pretty funny. You know, asking people, for example, "Are you an above-average driver?" 80% say yes. Well, that's not really possible, is it? And I know a lot of people who think they're above-average drivers,

• 10:04Arthur Brooks?

  who are not above-average drivers. I, for one, recognize, I'm in the 20% of drivers, like, yep, I'm not in the above, I'm not above average. I drive 2,500 miles a year. So if you see me on the road, look out. Not very experienced. I'm not looking at my phone. I'm just kind of spaced out. Anyway, the point is that in any sort of interaction with other people, we're kind of positioning ourselves all the time and looking for ways that we're coming out on top, right? That we look a little bit more handsome or beautiful, that we're look a little bit more clever, a little smarter. We're a little bit more right than the other people. And we exaggerate. That's that self enhancement bias, which is kind of an illusion. It's a distortion of reality. Think about it.

• 10:48Arthur Brooks?

  When there's a lawsuit, a civil lawsuit between any two individuals, they both literally think they're right. I mean, you might think about the person who's suing you. Oh, that evil SOB, that person, he knows he's wrong. Actually, he doesn't. He thinks he's, he almost certainly thinks he's right and thinks you're wrong and you think you're right and you think he's wrong. It's the judge's job to adjudicate despite the fact that you both have a tremendous amount of self enhancement bias. Judges are really, really good at sorting through the psychological biases that we have. That's kind of their gig when they're competent. Divorces are all based on the same thing. I've talked to, you know, a lot of couples who've divorced and you talk to both of them. It's like, it's always the other person's fault. I mean, not always. Sometimes they'll say, I screwed up, but not generally. Generally, it'll be, she didn't understand me.

• 11:33Arthur Brooks?

  And, and she'll say, he didn't, he was not emotionally available or something like that. It's almost, I was good and they were bad and that's why we broke up. Those are all based on this concept of self enhancement bias where you rate yourself more highly on positive traits. People do this on positive moral traits. I'm more hardworking than others. I'm more honest than others. I'm warmer than others. And they tend to rate other people more negatively on they're lazier than I am, they're colder than I am, they're more insecure than I am. Great paper on this from 2017 called The Illusion of Moral Superiority. I'll put that in the notes. I love that paper. I've written about it. It's in Social and Psychological Personality Science. Tappan and McKay. Now, this trend is most pronounced for young adults

• 12:18Arthur Brooks?

  and middle aged people who rank themselves as better than average on lots and lots of measures. You get, you have less self enhancement. Bias as you grow older. You're also less likely to hide a lot of your negative characteristics as you get older. And part of it is because you care a little bit less. And you got to trust me on this. You know, it's people are more likely to try to hide a receding hairline. I mean, at this point, if I tried to hide a receding hairline, maybe that would be I'd have to like literally put a bird's nest on my head or something. It would be no way. But people do that when they, when they, when they, when they feel that something is falling behind more when they're in early adulthood and middle adulthood than they do when they get older. By the way, this is one of the great constellations of age is that you're less likely to fall prey

• 12:59Arthur Brooks?

  to self enhancement bias, which frees you from the, the two resolutions of cognitive dissonance, which is either this is the best, that sucks, or everybody's out to get me. Neither one of those is any good. And, and, and most people, as they get older, it's one of the reasons that personality scientists has shown that neuroticism dramatically falls on average for people was to get past 50 years old. So if you have a lot of struggle with depression and anxiety and, and you're in your twenties or thirties, you can look forward to feeling better about it in no small part because you're going to be less biased about yourself. You're going to be more realistic about yourself. Now, what I want to do is accelerate that in this show. I want to accelerate that so that you can get beyond these self enhancement biases now and get on with the business of living.

• 13:44Arthur Brooks?

  So you can feel better about your life. Now, why do young adults do this so much? And it has very much to do with the, the, the idea of protection against the mental pain that comes with an invidious comparison with other people. And it does hurt. You know, there's, as a matter of fact, when you're judged to be insufficient in something, neuroscientists find that the limbic system is very active. There's a place in your limbic system, I've mentioned it before on the show, called the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, D A C C, little D, capital A, capital C, capital C. You can Google that if you want. And that's one of the parts of your brain, that's a pain center of your brain, but it's especially implicated in, in affective pain. That is to say emotional pain, rejection.

• 14:26Arthur Brooks?

  There's a very interesting paper that shows that when people are playing a, on, in an FMRI machine, they're looking at their brains and they're throwing a ball back and forth to each other. And suddenly in this, in the, on the screen that they're looking at, they start to be excluded from the ball tossing game that the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex becomes more active because they've been socially excluded in this dumb little trivial way. It makes you feel crummy about yourself. One of the things that you don't want is to feel bad about yourself. You don't want that aversive emotion of affective pain. And so one of the ways that you try to avoid it is by lying to yourself is what it comes down to. That's what it, and, and by the way, people who love you lie to you so that you don't feel that pain.

• 15:06Arthur Brooks?

  I mean, I have kids, I have grandkids, but I don't want my kids to feel bad about themselves. I love them. So the result of it is that I'm likely to tell them a lie. You're perfect the way you are, even if they aren't. I want their dorsal anterior cingulate cortex to not be overly active. Boy, am I a nerd. Anyway, you get the, the whole point. Now, this is also really interesting in, in the way that we study it. Not when we're looking at people who are trying to avoid depressive symptoms or sadness or anxiety, but people who have these symptoms already. There is a phenomenon well studied in psychology called depressive realism.

• 15:47Arthur Brooks?

  This is the case in which people who are suffering from mood disorders, most notably clinical depression, they more accurately assess their own characteristics and fall prey to less self enhancement bias than do people who are not depressed. They're less likely to lie to themselves. And so, for example, when you leave the room, it's very possible that people go like, oh, right? They say, they do something that's not flattering to you when you leave the room sometimes, right? People who are not depressed, they literally don't know that. When people who are depressed, they usually assume that's true and they're often right. They know that, but that's hard. That's hard on your dorsal anterior cingulate cortex. That's, that's a difficult thing to bear up to.

• 16:32Arthur Brooks?

  But this is another way of pointing out that, that people will relieve an immediate hit to their life satisfaction, to their immediate, to their mood, to their positive affect by lying to themselves a little bit. Okay, now it might seem like I'm making the case. For self enhancement bias. It might seem like I'm making a case that you should tell yourself you're just perfect so that you can avoid this pain, but I'm gonna make the case right now, very shortly, that you shouldn't, because the cost is not worth the benefit. The long-term cost is not worth the benefit, and it won't make you clinically depressed. It's just that clinically depressed people don't tend to do it. Okay, so this, what I'm gonna tell you about being honest with yourself is not gonna make you sad.

• 17:15Arthur Brooks?

  I promise, it's minor pain for big benefit down the line. But let's get that straight. But once again, this is not just what we tell ourselves. We don't just have self enhancement bias. We also have a bias toward the enhancement of people that we love, because we want to avoid that short-term pain. And so somebody says, you know, they're wearing some loud floral pants. Do you like them? And you're like, oh, it looks great, when it looks awful, right? You're perfect the way you are, even though you look like a clown in those pants. When somebody's clearly at fault in their relationship, you say, you're not at fault. Even though we are, that's a lie, and we do that kind of lie all the time, because we want to blow up the good feelings of that person in the short run. Or, once again, you're perfect just the way you are.

• 18:00Arthur Brooks?

  Don't change. I love your little quirks. Oh, I get it. You know, you have a hard time maintaining friendships and romantic relationships with other people. It's just because you're quirky. You haven't found your person yet. You're perfect the way you are. It's a lie. You know, and it's such a lie, as we know that there's, you know, hilariously, Al Franken, the former senator from Minnesota, but better known even than that, as being a comedian, who was for a long time on Saturday Night Live. And he had a character he used to play called Stuart Smalley. Any of you who's my age, you'll remember this, where he used to, he was a self-improvement guy. His whole motto was-

• 18:31Speaker 02

  I'm good enough, I'm smart enough, and doggone it, people like me.

• 18:37Arthur Brooks?

  That's looking in the mirror and saying, you're just perfect. But it's idiotic and ridiculous, because it's a caricature of what we all do, what it comes down to. Okay, so here's the point that I'm trying to make. I'm not going to deny that self enhancement, that you're perfect the way you are feels good in the short term. But I will make the case that it's a terrible long-term solution to life's real problems. Sooner or later, despite your self enhancement, you will be confronted with a painful adjustment in the form of the truth. And when that comes, after you've been engaging in self enhancement bias, you're not going to like the result. And I've got a lot of the data here that I want to talk about. Study from 2001 in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

• 19:21Arthur Brooks?

  And again, I don't know how they got this past an internal review board, because man, this would be a hard experiment to run ethically. But two groups of students. One group was told, you're phenomenal. And the other got their actual grades, right? One was like, you're good at everything. And the other's like, you're good at this, you're bad at this. You're falling behind here, you're below average, et cetera. And they wanted to know how it actually affected their feelings and then how it affected their performance and then how they felt in the long run. So three basic questions. Number one, how does it make you feel when you're in each one of these groups? How does it affect your academic performance? Because that's really what the compliments or criticisms were all about. And then how do you feel in the long run? Okay. And what they found was, sure enough, in the short run,

• 20:04Arthur Brooks?

  the people who are getting buttered up by the researchers, they felt great about themselves, much better about themselves than the ones who were getting the truth, the unvarnished truth about their academic performance. Part two, those who were having their self esteem blown up by the researchers, they didn't perform better. As a matter of fact, they did a little worse than those who actually got their true academic performance told to them. Right? So in other words, self esteem didn't improve their performance. And this is super important because the self esteem movement tells you just the opposite. If you butter these kids up in school, they're going to do so much better. Wrong. The data say it doesn't work. And number three, most importantly, that they tended to fail at their academic expectations, which led to lower self esteem over the long run. Okay, that's the important thing.

• 20:49Arthur Brooks?

  Because you know what? We live in the long run. College lasts a couple of years. Or, you know, my case, it actually took 11. But anyway, I digress. You're gonna live for the rest of your life is what it comes down to. And so the truth is much better in the long run. So that you can actually make adjustments, be accurate with yourself, have self-improvement and all the things I'm about to talk about. So that's experimental research with human subjects that shows that all that stuff is nonsense. Here's a bigger problem. Here's the meta problem about that. Many people believe, and I tend to think that there's a lot of plausibility to this argument. The self-esteem movement, which has been so incredibly important over the past few decades with young people,

• 21:32Arthur Brooks?

  has actually led to many of the mood disorders that we see today. How? By telling young people you're a winner, your participation trophies, to say that, you know, everybody's perfect just the way that they are, has led to the cognitive dissonance and the unproductive resolution of those dissonances that I talked about earlier. For example, if you tell young people when they're in a high state of synaptic plasticity, when their brains are forming, in other words, again and again and again, you're perfect just the way that you are. And it turns out that they run into all sorts of problems academically, socially, economically, emotionally. They run into all the problems that people run into, especially in adolescence.

• 22:14Arthur Brooks?

  Then some of them are going to conclude that life is just crummy. That I'm perfect the way that I am, I can't get any better. They told me I'm basically I'm in Super Bowl. I feel terrible about myself. I don't like my life. And that leads to depression and anxiety. There's a very plausible connection between telling kids things that will blow up their self-enhancement, their self-esteem earlier, and their depression and anxiety later. It's very possible that a big part of this tripling of depression, approximately doubling of anxiety, depending on how you count it, among adolescents and young adults, has everything to do with the fact that we lied to them when they were young. That we didn't give them the honest truth when they were young. That's the first kind of resolution of cognitive dissonance. The second type is maybe even more dangerous,

• 22:56Arthur Brooks?

  which is how you will learn that the world is against you, that you'll hate the world. And that's happened too. You know, the angry activism of college students, high school students and college students for the past decade or so. That's led to Huge amounts of misery. I've talked about this periodically on the show. I've written about it a great deal about the fact that the anger against the world, the idea that previous generations robbed me. I mean, again, I'm not against justice. I'm not against the truth of all the ways that we've harmed each other generationally. But the truth is, it's unambiguously the case that we have more anger and fear and sadness from young people than at any other time since I've seen the data. And there's more activism than what we've seen before,

• 23:40Arthur Brooks?

  which very plausibly is a resolution of the cognitive dissonance that comes from telling them that the world, that you're perfect the way that you are. And when they feel crummy, it must be because the world is unjust. Now, the world is unjust, but that's not the right resolution for it because we want people to be able to take control of their lives. And I know that probably all of you agree with me, which is why you watch a show about how to take control of your life and how to feel better about your life. So we face a dilemma, don't we? We want to feel better and make other people feel better. But people's tendency to do so through self enhancement and self esteem boosting is a short-lived solution with possibly high and enduring ultimate costs.

• 24:24Arthur Brooks?

  But what should we do for ourselves and for others? I'm going to recommend four things, okay? Right now, you're like Neo in The Matrix. You can keep scrolling, experiencing a simulation of life, or you can wake up to how your attention is being harvested for profit. It's happening to people all over the world right now. You don't want to be productized like this anymore, but it's hard. Tech addiction is so potent because it's been designed to tap into your dopamine system, just like heroin, porn, gambling. You've got the cravings, you're addicted. You don't like it, and I don't either. But I can't just tell you to stop doing it, that's hard. If you want to break free from the system, you need an incentive. Well, here's one.

• 25:06Arthur Brooks?

  Why don't you join a phone company that pays you not to use your phone? If you want to reduce brain rot, get Noble Mobile. It pays you to use less data. It gives you an incentive to unplug. Noble Mobile is the phone plan that finally aligns incentives with what's good for you. Use less data, earn money back. And when you do, you'll be living once again in real life, and you're going to like how it feels. Here's a four-step approach to being truthful with yourself and getting better and making life better and being happier at the same time, or doing the same thing for people that you love in your life, maybe even your kids. Number one, here's the truth. You're not perfect, but you're normal because nobody's perfect.

• 25:47Arthur Brooks?

  This is incredibly important to understand because, once again, our Pleistocene brains that are still back in the, you know, our tribe or band of 30 to 50 hierarchically arranged individuals, you know, we feel if we're not as good as somebody else, that that's abnormal. And we want to be normal by being better than other people. But the truth is that that's wrong too. You're imperfect, but it's really, really normal to be imperfect. To have pain is normal. To feel uncomfortable, to be sad is normal. To feel inadequate, to feel insecure, it's normal. And it is so important to tell yourself and to tell your kids, yeah, you know, I feel crummy today. That's a really, really normal thing. You know, that's a metacognitive practice.

• 26:32Arthur Brooks?

  This is something that, you know, people do in, you know, Vipassana meditation or many forms of prayer to say, I feel insecure about myself. I feel sad about myself. I'm feeling bad about these particular circumstances. Why is that? To be introspective about that, to acknowledge the fact that these are normal human emotions being produced by a human brain that contains a functioning, healthy limbic system as a source of signals about the outside world. There's nothing bad about that. There's nothing normal about that. And then to say, this information is actually useful to me, very useful to me. Stay tuned because we don't want to leave it at that. That's just step one. I'm imperfect and I'm normal and so are you. Step two, I accept this.

• 27:16Arthur Brooks?

  I accept myself. I mean, again, that's sort of the I'm okay and you're okay. And, you know, I sort of trashed that a minute ago. And I still would, you know, if this were the only piece of advice, accepting yourself is one step in this, but it is an important step. Is to accept this, and again, this is not to say I'm okay, but to accept the fact that this is reality is the way that this actually works. I accept my imperfections and I treat myself with a kind of compassion. You know, we often are so much harder on ourselves than we are to other people. You know, I recognize that because I'm such a striver and I'm such a perfectionist in everything that I do. And I realize like if anybody talked to me the way that I talk to myself, I'd be so insulted.

• 27:59Arthur Brooks?

  I mean, I would be scandalized if somebody talked to me that way. It would be hard for me to forgive anybody who talked to me the way that I talk to myself. You moron. Or something dumb like taking a right when I was supposed to go left. Like anybody did that and was a passenger during the car and say, I think you needed to go right there. Okay. But me, you get the point. And so it's having a compassion about yourself is really important. There's a great article on this, by the way, in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, which is a great journal. From me to you, self compassion predicts acceptance of ones and others imperfections. Acceptance, not celebrating it, but accepting it as normal is step two. Step three, work to improve.

• 28:42Arthur Brooks?

  Now here, this gets really important because if you stopped with I'm okay, you're okay, then you can do something that a lot of people have done in the last decade, which is to make your flaws into a sort of identity. Right? My, you know, things about my personality, things that ordinarily you'd want to improve. It's like, no, that's who I am and use it kind of as a cudgel against other people. Don't do that. Your flaws shouldn't be your identity. You shouldn't relate to yourself through your, you know, the things that you should want to improve. Doing that is to say, is to resolve the cognitive dissonance that life is crummy. The world is against you. And so therefore you're going to try to, you know, not just make the best of it. You're going to use it as a source of self-understanding.

• 29:25Arthur Brooks?

  Very unhelpful to you, very bad for your mental health to do that. To say, You should acknowledge I'm flawed in this way right now. That is not to say I will always have this flaw. On the contrary, self-acceptance can and should facilitate improvement. Now, now, here's a good example of this. Um, I learned Spanish as an adult. I moved to Spain when I was 25 years old. I did that because I was chasing a girl that I had fallen in love with to Barcelona. And I moved there. I didn't know it worked. I knew no Spanish. It was so dumb. I, I, I, I studied German in high school. That's useful. You go to Germany, they all speak better English than we do. You go to Spain, nobody speaks a word of English, including the girl I was in love with. Nothing.

• 30:09Arthur Brooks?

  So I had to learn Spanish and I talked like a toddler at 25. It was unbelievably humiliating. I didn't say, I'm just crummy in Spanish and then never try to talk to anybody and, and shut in on myself and say, well, Spanish is stupid. No. I said, you know, I was, I made myself into a kid again. You know, I have my, my, my grandsons have four grandsons growing every day, it seems. Well, they're growing, but the number appears to be growing every day too. And when they're learning to talk, you know, nobody's like, you idiot, you just, you just mispronounced hospital. You said it hopital. I mean, idiot. No. On the contrary, you say that, you say that's a funny little flaw. And then you tell them the word and over time they actually learn it.

• 30:52Arthur Brooks?

  And, and, and you treat yourself with the same self-compassion and you work to improve. And over time, sure enough, after about a year, which was slower than some people and faster than others, I could go out of the house without rehearsing what I was going to say. And now, you know, years and years and decades and decades later, I can lecture in Spanish and I can live in Spain. And the other day I did live TV in Spanish. It's my second language. I'm almost as comfortable as I am in English. I still have an accent, by the way. But you get the idea. Self enhancement says that that whole idea, you won't make progress if you pretend you can already speak fluently. And you also won't make progress if you make your lack of fluency your identity. You get my point? Work to improve, step three.

• 31:37Arthur Brooks?

  Step four, don't blame other people for your flaw. Now, again, sometimes other people are to blame for stuff, but it still doesn't help. It still doesn't help. There's a very interesting body of literature that shows that people who take responsibility for things that aren't even their responsibility, they tend to do better in life. And you can kind of figure out why that's the case. They're sort of life entrepreneurs, right? They find solutions to things. But if you're wallowing in the idea that everything is somebody else's fault, you're very unlikely to be making product, finding productive solutions to the problems in your life, and you're going to get less happy. Marty Seligman, Martin Seligman, here in Pennsylvania, my great mentor.

• 32:18Arthur Brooks?

  Marty Seligman, he created a whole body of research on something called learned helplessness. Now, learned helplessness occurs when you feel like nothing that you can do can make anything better because everything is out of your control, or nearly because of the actions of other people that kind of are conspiring against you. And he said that this is a huge predictor of depression, a huge predictor of anxiety. And by the way, it makes it so people can't ever solve problems, even if they're not the cause of the problems, they have no, they have no possibility of solving these problems, which is really, really unproductive. He's shown this with laboratory animals, he showed it with people, and you know, people get just sort of depressed mood and, and in a sort of permanent state.

• 33:02Arthur Brooks?

  Learned helplessness is horrible, and it comes because you figure there's nothing you can do because things are out of your control, or nearly because it's somebody else's fault. Scholars have shown that people with a weak capacity for emotional self-regulation tend to blame others for their poor choices. Now, I'm not going to say that everything is your fault if something's wrong in your life, sometimes, I mean, there is injustice, there is discrimination, I completely have got it. But the idea of looking for culpability in other people and outside your control is usually the worst way to look at things, at least as the first course of action. Fifth, here's the best part, that's why you're here in the show, is reframing your imperfections and others, not as failings, but as puzzles.

• 33:48Arthur Brooks?

  See, here's the fun about self-improvement. When I first started getting really interested in self-improvement, I remember when I was I was kind of older, as a matter of fact, I read How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie, 1936. I read Stephen Covey's book, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, and they just energized me, man. Not because I was like, check, I got all this stuff, all these 36 habits to win friends. I got all of them. No, I didn't. The interesting thing was that I didn't have most of these habits. And the fact that I recognized the fact that there was something that I could do was great, because it gave me this challenge, it gave me this, gave me a castle in the sky I could walk toward. It was so wonderful. It was a puzzle for me about myself to solve.

• 34:31Arthur Brooks?

  That's one of the things that people really like when they're starting a program of physical fitness, is that it's not because they're already fit, it's because they have a purpose, they have a direction, they have a goal, and that gives them all this gusto for being alive, is a puzzle that you can solve that's utterly solvable, and when you do, you're gonna be better off, and that's gonna make you happier. I'm gonna get better grades, I'm gonna have a better relationship. All the imperfections of yours are interesting puzzles to solve. Now, I tried to raise my kids this way. When something wasn't right, I wouldn't say, "That's bad." I would say, "That could be better, here's how." And they want to be better, they would do that, and we had, you know, when there was a grades problem, we would deal with it, and you know, whatever it happened to be,

• 35:14Arthur Brooks?

  or a behavior problem, and the idea of puzzles to solve, without just getting a cookie at the end, by the way, with the satisfaction that comes from being better, this is the most exciting thing. Now, again, I'm preaching to the choir here, because you're watching this show, because you're into it. You're watching Office Hours, because you know that you can be happier, and you want the secrets. That's already acknowledging that you're not as happy as you could be, but that you believe that the secrets are there, and you're watching this show to get those secrets, because you want to apply these ideas. You already understand how to turn imperfections into puzzles. Do that more, and do that with your kids, and do that with everybody around you, and you will become a force for absolute positivity in your life and the lives of other people.

• 36:00Arthur Brooks?

  Now, that also suggests one last point, which is how boring not to have areas of improvement in life. How boring. What a horrible way to live. You know, that that leads to this idea that I've arrived. And I've talked in the show before about a rival fallacy. You get a particular goal in anything in your life, in your relationship, in your money, in your fitness, in your health, in anything. It doesn't live up to expectations. The goal in life is progress, making more progress and more progress. And when you find something that's an area of imperfection in your life, don't lie about it. Say, yeah, man, that's why I'm alive. That's what it means to be an entrepreneur. That's, that's, that's the kind of progress that I want to make. And that is a big part of the meaning of life

• 36:41Arthur Brooks?

  because meaning has purpose at its core, goals and direction at its core. Your imperfection is the source of your excitement in life. And that's a great thing. We've talked an awful lot about this and I'm not going to go on further. I'm going to come back and talk about this in further episodes as well. But do feedback and tell me what you think about this, about this idea of, you know, these statements I've made about self-esteem and the problems it might have about, you know, how self enhancement actually leads to lying to oneself and, and how we can be a lot better, et cetera, et cetera. I would love feedback in the comments about this because I suspect that that some of you have some pretty strong opinions about it as well. So either way, let me know. I would love

• 37:21Arthur Brooks?

  to hear it. Let's do some questions and we're out. Annette Ridenar writes into the show, I'd love to hear more about people pleasing and this relationship to happiness. Yeah, a lot of that going around. Me too. Thank you so much for your time and for sharing this content. My pleasure. Thank you, Annette, for being a listener and, and for passing on the ideas. People pleasing is a big problem because what people pleasing is doing is it's outsourcing your understanding of yourself to other people. You're basically, people pleasing is a way for you to try to get people to tell you about your self-worth, generally speaking. If they like me, I'm happy. That is to outsource control. And that's a problem. It is quite related to the things that we're talking about here.

• 38:06Arthur Brooks?

  You have to in-source your control about who you are as a person. You have to understand your own identity as something that is intrinsic to you, as opposed to something that you'll get because you please somebody else and then they'll like you more. This is also based fundamentally, people pleasing is also based on the idea that love is earned, and that's a big problem. Love isn't earned. Love, the free gift, freely given, it's a grace. Anybody who makes you earn their love doesn't love you. That's huge to understand, right? Whether it's parents or friends or your romantic partner. If anybody's making you earn their love, they actually don't love you, or at least as much as they should. And so therefore, if you're people pleasing,

• 38:47Arthur Brooks?

  you have somehow processed, probably in childhood, the idea that love is earned. And that's a very important thing to work, to leave behind. And by the way, I fall prey to it all the time. Just ask my wife. I wonder if she, I wonder if she likes that question? Do you think she'll respect me more because of that question?

• 39:06Arthur Brooks?

  Cruz Ramnareen writes in, "How can young professionals with families find ways to fit snack-sized happiness habits into their daily lives?" I like that. It's like, it sounds like Cruz Ramnareen is packing a lot of school lunches and thinking about these snack-sized things in these little baggies, right? I get it. You're really busy and you want to punctuate the equilibrium of your life with things that will actually enhance your positive affect. That's what it comes down to. It's a punctuation of the equilibrium. When your equilibrium is all busyness and you're not fully present, that's a problem for your happiness. So Cruz, you're already on the right track by asking this question. So how do you do it? Number one is actually programming savoring into your day.

• 39:51Arthur Brooks?

  And that means stopping at particular times and savoring. Now, what I do often with my wife is she'll say, like last night, I'm recording this on a Monday, and last night on a Sunday night, we had a stressful weekend because one of our kids is looking at real estate and, you know. But then on Sunday, all of our kids were home with all their kids. It was complete chaos in our house. Because it's like, babies, babies, babies, babies. But then it was the end of the day and we were lying in bed and she says...

• 40:20Arthur Brooks?

  What are you most grateful for this day? And I know it sounds corny, I know, I know. But that was a punctuation of the equilibrium. It made us stop and savor. Savoring is so important, but you have to do it on purpose to savor. Like eating a piece of chocolate, you put it in your mouth, swallow. No, taste it, taste it, right? And savoring good things is a good way to do that regularly and on a schedule. And that's related to another thing I just mentioned before, which is actually being more conscious of things that you're grateful for, which is why I recommend people keep gratitude lists. Both of these ways are these snack bag sized happiness habits, happiness snacks that we can put into our lives on purpose. And finally, David E. writes in and asks,

• 41:03Arthur Brooks?

  "What happiness habits are you encouraging with your grandkids?" Ha ha. So my grandsons are not exactly of the age where I can sit them down and give them a lecture. And I keep playing office hours for them and I don't know, they keep wandering off, mostly because the oldest one is not quite three yet. But the truth is that the way that you encourage happiness habits with grandkids is by doing things that brings out happiness in them. And when your grandfather's the best, because I never have to do anything disagreeable. I mean, I live with two of my grandsons and my whole job is jokes and wrestling. It's unbelievable. And like, I understand how the jokes work in their little brains. There's a piece of your limbic system called the parahippocampal gyrus, which when you flick it, it gives you a, it gives you positive surprise.

• 41:48Arthur Brooks?

  That's why dad jokes actually work. And you know, they're so corny and all that. But what it does is surprises them a little bit and they laugh, right? And so that's what I do all day long. It's like, hey, hey, you know, do you like my new hat? Right? He knows it's not a hat. He knows it's a book and he cracks up and I can do it, you know, nine times and it still gets the same laugh. And then of course, there's just lots of little boys. I'm just like. Tackling him and throwing him on the couch. And one of the things that they really like, by the way, is that I'll hold my almost three year old as if I'm rocking him to sleep. And he knows what's coming. So he's just like laughing like crazy while I'm doing it. And I'll sing him, and then I pretend that I lose my grip and drop him. And I drop him onto the couch and then I apologize to him.

• 42:31Arthur Brooks?

  And, and, and he thinks that's just the funniest thing, right? The same joke over and over and over again, especially physical stuff. Anyway, I'm going into detail that goes beyond the scope of your question, David. But the whole point is you encourage kids. One of the best ways that you can do it is by, by modeling things that people find fun and that make people happy. And when they see you cracking up and being happy, that shows them how to do it. We're done with that note on jokes and wrestling. We're done with another edition of Office Hours. Let me know your thoughts at [email protected]. Especially comments, criticisms, suggestions for future episodes. What do you want me to talk about? I have an endless variety of things I can bring up, but I would love to know what's on your mind.

• 43:14Arthur Brooks?

  Please like and subscribe on Spotify, YouTube and Apple. Leave a comment, as I mentioned before. Follow me on Instagram, LinkedIn and all the other platforms and order The Meaning of Your Life, also known as my hat for my grandkids. Finding Purpose in an Age of Emptiness. And maybe just for get ahead of the holidays this year. You get some holiday gifts for a million of your closest friends. They're available any place for you buy books. Anyway, it's great to talk to you. Thanks as always for tuning in. I'll see you next week.