Arthur C. Brooks

That suffering means something's wrong.

I tell my students, look, you're studying at Harvard.

If you're not sad and anxious, then you need therapy.

You're doing something hard on purpose.

And that's the point.

Here's how to think about suffering so it will truly bring meaning.

Suffering is pain times resistance to pain.

That's the formula, that's the arithmetic.

Suffering equals pain times the resistance to it.

Now pain is an automatic physiological thing.

It's your brain saying this is bad.

And that means it's sensory, you can feel it, or it's affective, meaning that you don't like it, but that's automatic.

Suffering is your struggle that ensues.

Your struggle is not automatic.

And so we shouldn't go through life trying to lower the pain level, because pain is inevitable.

We should lower our resistance to the pain by saying, what am I gonna learn from this?

And I have a whole set of exercises that I give my students on how to lower your resistance to the pain so that your suffering will be lower.

And here's how you know you're doing a good job.

Here's how you know you're doing a good job in life.

is when your pain is high, but your suffering is low.