Arthur Brooks

speaker

208 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Aug 2025 last heard Aug 2025

Arthur Brooks’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Something You Should Know · How Do You Create Happiness? & Why Dogs Behave the Way They Do · 21 Aug 2025 podcast

a sense of enjoyment about our lives. matched

We want to take satisfaction in our activities and accomplishments. matched

And we want to know the why of our existence, the meaning of our lives. matched

And each one of those things is a different pursuit and takes different skills. matched

And we're in different places. matched

And that's the journey and an adventure of a lifetime. matched

Is it matched

that's a great question because that's the second big mistake that people make they think that they have to eradicate the negative parts of their lives to actually be happy and the mistake that they're making is thinking that happiness and unhappiness are opposites and mutually exclusive kind of like light and dark can't coexist if there's dark in the room it means it's not light and they think that if there's unhappiness in my life it means there's no happiness and that's exactly wrong matched

One of the ways that I teach this is I teach a lot of neuroscience in my class. matched

And one of the things that we know is that emotions associated with happiness and unhappiness are produced literally in different parts of the brain because all emotions are an alert system that there's something around you that either should be avoided or should be approached. matched

It's either a threat or an opportunity. matched

Negative emotions that make you feel unhappy, sadness, anger, disgust, fear, these are things that say there's a threat. matched

And joy and interest and these positive emotions, they say there's an opportunity. matched

You should go get it, is what they say. matched

And the result of it is that you need both. matched

Both are really, really important. matched

Unhappy feelings and happy feelings are both extremely critical for leading a good life, and they coexist. matched

But here's where it gets complicated, Mike. matched

It turns out that for you to be excellent at happiness, to get happier over the course of your life, you need to get extremely comfortable with unhappiness. matched

For enjoyment, for example, you have to pass on a lot of pleasures to actually be governing your own sense of enjoyment. matched

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