Digital Social Hour
Why Work-Life Balance Is a Lie (Do THIS Instead) | Arthur Brooks DSH #1159
Mon, 03 Feb 2025
Is work-life balance holding you back? In this episode of the Digital Social Hour, Sean Kelly sits down with Arthur Brooks—a Harvard professor, happiness expert, and bestselling author—to uncover why work-life balance might be a myth and what you should do instead! If you’ve ever felt burnt out, stuck in a cycle of overworking, or unsure how to find true happiness, this conversation is packed with valuable insights just for YOU. Arthur shares his game-changing approach to work-life *integration*, offering actionable tips on how to make progress across all areas of your life—work, relationships, fitness, and even spirituality. Discover how to fight burnout, manage your happiness like a pro, and transform your mindset with practical advice backed by neuroscience and years of expertise. You’ll also learn why chasing more "stuff" might not bring you joy and how managing your wants can unlock lasting satisfaction. Don’t miss out on this eye-opening discussion! Watch now and subscribe for more insider secrets. Hit that subscribe button and stay tuned for more powerful conversations on the Digital Social Hour with Sean Kelly! Join the conversation and take the first step toward creating a life of meaning, happiness, and true fulfillment. #DigitalSocialHour #SeanKelly #Podcast #ArthurBrooks #WorkLifeBalance #Happiness #Burnout #Neuroscience #ApplePodcasts #Spotify #SelfImprovement #Entrepreneurship #happinessinadversity #thesecrettolivingahappylife #selfimprovement #positivepsychology #joyinadversity #proactivementalhealth #happinessinadversity #selfimprovement #joyinadversity #howtoavoidburnout CHAPTERS: 00:00 - Intro 01:11 - Avoiding Burnout Strategies 04:58 - Work-Life Balance Myths 07:19 - Dangers of Addiction 08:49 - Reclaiming Mental Clarity 12:24 - Cultivating Happiness Skills 16:51 - Money and Happiness Connection 18:00 - Smart Money Management Tips 22:00 - Savings Impact on Happiness 22:58 - College Debt and Education 27:37 - Immigrants in Entrepreneurship 31:18 - Role of Department of Education 32:50 - Teaching Emotional Well-being 34:15 - Understanding Anxiety and Depression 36:25 - Overcoming Shame 38:48 - Managing Fear and Anger 44:45 - Dark Triad Personality Traits 46:18 - Impact of Cheap Entertainment 48:17 - Exploring Cancel Culture 49:34 - Arthur’s Final Thoughts APPLY TO BE ON THE PODCAST: https://www.digitalsocialhour.com/application BUSINESS INQUIRIES/SPONSORS: [email protected] GUEST: Arthur Brooks https://www.instagram.com/arthurcbrooks/ SPONSORS: Specialized Recruiting Group: https://www.srgpros.com/ LISTEN ON: Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/digital-social-hour/id1676846015 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5Jn7LXarRlI8Hc0GtTn759 Sean Kelly Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/seanmikekelly/
Chapter 1: What are effective strategies for avoiding burnout?
All right, guys, Arthur Brooks here today. Got him in Vegas. Welcome to Vegas, man. Thank you. Vegas is great. Yeah, you got some fun stuff planned this trip?
A little bit. I'm giving a bunch of talks, a bunch of lectures at the Venetian. Oh, nice. Yeah, the Venetian is not featuring happiness content, but... But a group is actually there, and they're having me talk to 5,000 or so of their employees. Nice. Venetian's one of my favorite hotels. It's a nice place. They got the best rooms, in my opinion. Yeah.
I knew Sheldon Adelson back when he was still alive. Yeah. I was running a big think tank in Washington, D.C. called the American Enterprise Institute, and he supported us a little bit. Nice. When was that? I ran that from 2009 through 2019. I just saw Miriam Adelson, as a matter of fact, in Abu Dhabi last week.
Chapter 2: What myths surround work-life balance?
Nice. Small world. Yeah, it's a small world. We were just talking about working in our 20s. I want to dive into that because I'm 27 now. I feel like I've been grinding really hard, but I have felt like I lost a step recently.
Really?
Yeah.
Chapter 3: How does addiction affect happiness?
How come?
Burnout. Yeah, burnout, it's classic. Well, I didn't take a day off for five years. I worked five years straight, 15 hours a day.
Well, nobody teaches you how to take a day off. If you're a natural grinder, if you're a striver, nobody teaches you how to take a day off. And so taking a day off feels like a waste and it feels like you're going backwards. You're the kind of guy probably, like most strivers, who feel like life is good when you're putting points on the board. Progress is everything.
And if progress is everything, when you're not moving forward, you actually start to drift backward. And that feels really, really terrible. The point is you've got to get a different kind of balance in your life and see progress across multiple domains, not just work.
Yeah. That's been a big thing for me this year. My fiance begs me to take weekends off, but then something always comes up. And I start working again.
Well, weekends off means drifting backwards is the whole problem. And so you setting up your weekends with your fiance so that you're making progress in a different kind of a domain mutually with her is the way to do that. And there are ways to do it.
So for example, in your physical health, in learning new skills and building your spiritual life, those are the things you dedicate yourself to when you're actually not working. So no matter what, you're going to continue to make progress. You're a progress machine. You're not going to be able to change that your whole life. Trust me, I'm 60. Yeah. And I still can't stop doing that.
But I've had to actually understand how to open up multiple domains as leads me to quality of life. So you don't have to stop. So your fiance says, you got to stop and relax. And you feel like you're going to die. That's why. But you can set up things that aren't just grinding away on work. And so you won't be burning out.
They will be something that's sharpening the saw, making progress in a different area. I love that. That's how to think about it. That's huge. When did you figure that out? It took a long time, actually, because I was a very ambitious guy in my 20s. I was working as hard as I could. I was a French horn player. I was a classical musician. French horn. Yeah, I was touring all the time.
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Chapter 4: What is the connection between money and happiness?
I spent a lot of it in Barcelona, in the symphony in Barcelona. And I wanted to be the greatest French horn player in the world. And when I wasn't practicing, I was dying a little bit. And it actually took my wife. I mean, I met my wife. I moved to Barcelona to try to get her to marry me, as a matter of fact. We got married, and she has a much more balanced understanding of life.
And so she helped me set up multiple goals. And it took through my 30s and 40s and having her kids. It took a while for me to get this. I wish I'd gotten this a little bit earlier. But having physical goals for good fitness and proper health, these are a set of serious goals. I mean, that's as serious as your job.
Chapter 5: How can smart money management improve wellbeing?
Spiritual life was really important to actually get serious about who I was as a religious person. And there's no end to the progress you can make in studying that kind of stuff. And setting up those silos in my life, that's what takes up all my non-work time, as a matter of fact, plus actually having relationships that are really healthy. I take my relationships as seriously as I take my career.
Wow. Yeah, absolutely. And I think about it in the same way. And I set up goals in the same way. I've got metrics that I'm tracking across all these different domains of my life. How's my spiritual life? Have I made progress in the past six months? What's evidence of the progress that I've made? How's my fitness? What are my lifts?
Now, sooner or later, I'm going to start... You can't have higher and higher lifts as you get through your 60s, of course. But your fitness can be really good. I mean, you can kind of stop time if you're serious about this. And then I think about my relationships with my children, with my friends, with my wife, with God. I'm thinking about this all the time.
And am I making progress or am I not making progress? And I chart it the same way. And I have an entrepreneurial mindset about every area of my life. And now I've got balance, a lot more balance. I don't have balance. I don't have balance. I still work 68 hours a week, but I'm not working 100. Because 100 is death. Right. That's what I was doing. You're doomed if you do that.
Chapter 6: What role does college debt play in happiness?
You can't keep that up. You're 27 years old and you feel like you're 50. It's a problem. Yeah.
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Not really because I think that work is part of life. And to say work-life balance is to suggest that work and life are at odds with each other. And so I believe in work-life integration, which is different than work-life balance. I don't have to balance the two. I want balance in my life by integrating all the different parts of my life, which is to say my spiritual life, the love in my life.
my physical life, and of course my productive life through my work. And I'm thinking about all of those things with the same entrepreneurial seriousness.
I love that.
Yeah.
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Chapter 7: How can we cultivate happiness as a skill?
Yeah.
And it was probably the most unhappiest I've ever been.
You'll become unhappy.
Even though I had a million in the bank, whatever financial amount. Sure. I just felt unhappy.
Chapter 8: What are the dangers of chasing material possessions?
So what will happen is when you neglect your spiritual life, that your happiness will fall. And when you neglect your physical life, your unhappiness will rise. Those are two different things processed in different parts of the limbic system of your brain. And you need to manage both the unhappiness and happiness in your life through the way that you gear your habits. And so the areas of faith...
family life, friendship, and work, work that serves other people and is really productive. Those are the happiness side. On the unhappiness side, you need to manage that largely through taking care of your health. So better health through health and fitness and what you're eating and how much you're moving, et cetera. That's the best way to manage your unhappiness, your negative affect.
The worst way to do it is you know, workaholism and alcoholism and drug addiction and all the other things that people do to try to feel a little less unhappy. So the classic thing for a striver, a real entrepreneur, a guy like you, you start to see success in your early twenties. Unbelievable. It's great. And success gives you a whole lot of passion and it gives you a whole lot of enthusiasm.
So you do more and more and more and more and more. But running faster and faster and faster is not going to get you where you want to go. And so the result is that your unhappiness starts to rise dramatically. And you try to manage that unhappiness by drugs and alcohol and substances, for example. And a lot of people really get into that.
They get some extremely dangerous and bad habits as a result. Porn is a big thing, especially for guys in their 20s, for sure. I mean, that's one of the most common addictions. And it works on the same brain circuitry as drugs and alcohol. It's working on the dopamine circuits. Or there's an anticipation of reward. It's all the learning. Addiction is all about how your brain learns.
And it torques the learning mechanism in an unnatural and a dangerous way. So it's all about wanting and liking. So if something says, I want that thing, and it gives you this little impulse to go seek out that thing. And then if you get it and it's better than you thought it was going to be, then you like it. This is all based on dopamine, a neuromodulator dopamine.
And if it's just what you thought it was going to be, you don't get any more reward. And if it's worse than you thought it was going to be, you'll feel a little bit depressed. That's because your dopamine actually dips. And this sets you up in a cycle to do more and more and more and more of that thing. And your brain gets good. It learns how to get those rewards.
And that's how people get addicted to drugs and alcohol and pornography and gambling. Right.
And another big one is doom scrolling, they call it on TikTok or Instagram. For sure. And you're a college professor. Do you see kids on their phone all the time? Yeah, not in my classes. No devices in my classes.
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