Arthur Brooks

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, 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 an 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 it does, this is an interesting study from 2022, is it lowers symptoms of depression and increases higher levels of reported happiness.

Probably that's related to the first effect that I talked about, because 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, the different part of the limbic system.

And third,

It leads to these higher levels of reported happiness, 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 brainwaves.

daily positive experiences.

Half of the subjects in these experiments were asked to savor their events in their lives, to be fully present, to be paying attention.