Modern Wisdom
#1043 - Arthur Brooks - 14 Habits for an Optimised Morning & Evening Routine
08 Jan 2026
Chapter 1: What contributes more to well-being: psychological or physical elements?
When it comes to well-being, what do you think contributes more, psychological elements or physical elements? Because we experience our well-being psychologically, but we experience everything psychologically, including our physical well-being. When it comes to well-being, what contributes more, psychological or physical elements? The answer is yes, because psychology is biology.
fundamentally psychology is biology what's that mean that means that that you're you cannot disconnect from your brain now perhaps there's some external consciousness that people are experiencing but but the truth of the matter is that the functioning of the limbic system of your brain where you're having positive and negative emotions all day long that's that's that's that's biology that's a part of the brain that was evolved between 2 and 40 million years ago as an alert system to what's going on outside of you you perceive things threats and opportunities
You react, your brain reacts with negative and positive emotions, which then give you a sense of being happy or unhappy at any, at any particular time. And so that being the case, we should be very grateful for our negative emotions, but we also need to learn how to manage them. That's the great goal of life.
That's the great goal of becoming a self-managing, self-leading person when you're in a state of suffering, to understand why that is, how it can be productive, what you can learn, and how you can manage it such that it doesn't dysregulate you or ruin your complete quality of life. So if psychology is biology, should we just attack the biology?
Well, the way that we attack the biology is by understanding the psychology and actually acting in a different way. It really does sound like the human centipede. Yeah, it really is. It really is. No, my whole philosophy is sort of a self-licking ice cream cone because no matter if you say biology, I say psychology. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But the truth of the matter is that once, if you want to become a happier person, the first thing you need to understand is the science, which is the reason that I teach the science of happiness to my students. I don't go in and teach woo-woo and say, you know, here's, you know, why don't we all... try to manifest some sort of happiness. It's like, no, this is what's going on in your brain.
When you're feeling sad, what's happening is that the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex of your limbic system is highly alerted to the fact that you're perceiving a loss. And that loss in your life of a person or something that you love is a very normal reaction.
In the ancestral environment, where we lived in bands of 30 to 50 individuals, to be rejected, to have a breakup, to have a schism with somebody else in your band meant that you were at a real risk of walking the frozen tundra and dying alone. You need to be really averse to that.
That's why you feel grief when you're disconnected from somebody that you love, and you have a part of your brain that's evolved to make you feel that grief. And that's completely normal. That's the most normal thing that could possibly happen. And people find a lot of comfort in saying, oh, oh, there's nothing wrong with me. There's not something I need to cure.
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Chapter 2: Why should we be grateful for our negative emotions?
Right. And so it's by construction. It's those quarters. Now that doesn't mean that it's not overrepresented among podcasters and entrepreneurs. You know, that's going to be 75% high, high. You're a very high effect guy. You're the mad scientist. That's what that quadrant is called. And so am I, by the way. I'm 95th percentile in positive emotion. I'm 90th percentile in negative emotion.
And so what does that mean? It goes to show that it's not a single spectrum. Exactly right. And I know a lot of people who are low-low. Those are called judges. Those are people who make really good surgeons. They make really good nuclear reactor managers. There are some people who are above average positive and below average negative. Those are the happiest people. Those are the cheerleaders.
They have very intense positive emotion and very weak negative emotion. They're great to be around. They make terrible bosses because they can't stand negativity and they can't give criticism. No bad vibes. No bad vibes, man. And then there's low-low, right? I mean, sorry, there's high negative, low positive. Those are the poets.
And we know actually a lot about the neurobiology of the poetic temperament, as a matter of fact. We actually understand kind of what's going on in their brains. And they're the unhappiest, but they're unbelievably creative and romantic. And it's what we find.
And the reason for that is there's this funny little part of the limbic system called the ventral lateral prefrontal cortex that makes you ruminate. That's your rumination organ, effectively. And so if you're a sad ruminator, like which most people who have a little bit of depression, they ruminate a lot.
That's the same part of your brain that you use when you're ruminating on a business plan or a poem or a symphony or on another person when you're falling in love. It's really, really active. And so that's why poets, they tend to be depressive, romantic, and creative. It's the same part of the brain. Psychology is biology.
But the whole point is you ask, what's more important to manage, happiness or unhappiness? The answer is, what's the bigger challenge for you? So for you, you need to work more on your unhappiness because you're a mad scientist. Me too. You know, it's a happiness is really much more important to work on.
If you're a poet or you're a judge, you need to lift that happiness as opposed to moderating, managing the unhappiness. Okay. What are the big movers for the judge or the poet compared with the mad scientist or the, what was the fourth one? The cheerleader. Cheerleader. Yeah. Yeah.
Well, I guess the cheerleader's just... The cheerleader's doing great, except the cheerleader has weaknesses that the cheerleader doesn't recognize. Now, I'm just resentful, you know? I'm just jealous. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, you know, I'm married to somebody who's more of a cheerleader than I am. And it's really interesting when you match these profiles because it turns out that...
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Chapter 3: How do happiness and unhappiness differ?
Because anxiety is so unbelievably effectively dealt with by alcohol. It is so incredibly efficacious. And that means you need to deal with anxiety in a proper way. And drugs and alcohol are not the way to do it. Workaholism is a terrible way to deal with your anxiety. if you have high negative affect. What's workaholism's point of intervention?
If the link between the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex is being severed from alcohol, what is it that workaholism is doing at a biological level? Distraction. So the amygdala is funny. So with little kids, you're going to see this when you have your children. that your two-year-old's gonna be having a freak out, because they're freaking out all the time.
That's what two-year-olds do all the time, because they have a completely dysregulated amygdala. And so they're, you know, fearful and angry, and they cut the crusts off their little PB&J sandwich the wrong way, and they totally freak out. That's because their amygdala lights up like a Christmas tree, right?
The way that you get them to not freak out, and young parents never figure this out, right? They're gonna be like, what? Use your words, or something like this. No, no, no, distract them. Because the amygdala is in charge of distraction actually affects the amygdala. Attention is something that highly implicates the amygdala.
So if you change their attention, so you're a little two-year-old, you're like, oh, oh, oh, do you see what I brought home from work today? I brought home something you really got to see. And you're like, pull something out of your briefcase. Bullshit. Totally, because they never figure it out. Because they're an idiot.
But what happens is that you stop the activity, the amygdala that's leading to the freakout, and you put it into attention. So that's basically what's going on. You're distracting yourself. through workaholism, through a reliable way to distract yourself. That's what it was about. That's so great. I remember my therapist last year said to me, pay attention to fleeting thoughts.
There's this line that she had, the whispers that sort of come, Rick Rubin would call them whispers, these little transient little things, little bits of smoke. And if you're living in chaos, I'm about to go back on tour this week. I mean, got three shows in three states in four days. It's awesome. You know you love it. It's great. I love the chaos, but...
If I've got something that I've been trying to hide in the fog for a while. Oh, it's five piece of piss. I've got caught. I've got lobby call at 9 00 AM. We're going to get on the flight. I'm going to go skiing in Salt Lake city. Then I got the sound check. I got sound check. I gotta do sound check. And then by the time we get there, someone brought a cake. Look at this cake. Isn't this nice?
And then you just manana, manana, manana. And I think that this is why chronic touring musicians have problems with alcohol. I had Aaron Gillespie from Under Earth here, and he said, I don't know how many times, like hundreds, hundreds of times, he checked himself into the ER on tour because he was sure he was having a heart attack.
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Chapter 4: What are the key lessons about managing emotions?
So I'm going to get a head start feeling better today. You understand yourself. You understand the nature of the experience. It's the sort of transient nature of these things. This is a big sort of lesson for me that I really struggled earlier on and I still struggle with now, which was... this is going to be the way it is forever.
And it causes you to not savor things that are good that are happening and overly fear things that are bad that are happening. When the world's on top of you, it doesn't last for as long as you're worried about. And when you're on top of the world, it doesn't last for as long as you hope.
right that's the hedonic treadmill i mean the fact that emotions are transient because emotions are not there to give you a good day emotions are there as a signal that there are threats and opportunities in the environment and that you need to avoid them or approach them that's all your emotions are they're just neurobiological signals to you negative emotions fear anger disgust and sadness there's only four and they're in response to four different threats
Thank God for those threats. They keep you alive. But when you understand them as particular signals, then you can metacognitively manage them by understanding them better. And that's one of the great, that's one of the reasons that people get remarkably less neurotic. It's one of the ways that personality reliably changes as people get older. They become more agreeable.
They become more conscientious. They don't become more open to experience, but they almost always get less neurotic because they have a better understanding of the fact that life is suffering. When it comes to negative experiences, what are the most reliable levers to lower negative feelings? So the most reliable is anything that's metacognitive. It's understanding of negative emotion.
That's really what it comes down to. So, okay, so there's two different questions here. Number one is, what will actually help you with negative emotions? Number two is, what is the technique in your life? And so the least... productive ways are drugs and alcohol and workaholism, like we talked about, and now it'll be mindless internet use or something like that. Sedation through distraction.
Sedation through distraction, et cetera, et cetera, which kind of goes into those categories. The techniques that work really well and are extremely productive because they make you better through your suffering and they actually alleviate a lot, and they're non-resistant in their way. Number one is religious activity, and number two is picking up heavy things and running around.
So people ask me, do I get happier when I go to the gym? No, you get less unhappy. If you have naturally low negative affect, if you're naturally a very low intensity unhappiness person, which is to say that you're a cheerleader or you're a judge, you're not going to be able to stay in the gym because you're not going to feel better. You're going to be like, it just hurts.
So you're saying that as we look around the gym, the more jacked people are, the harder they find life generally. Yeah, that means they have high intensity negative affect.
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Chapter 5: How can metacognition help with negative feelings?
That's the reason you love the gym. They're being alleviated. Yeah, and you get lots and lots of, you get a lot of relief when you go to the gym from your intense negative affect. Jacked guys are sad guys. Jacked guys are guys with issues. Jacked guys are guys with issues. If you're a 61-year-old and you look like you go to the gym a lot, it means that you're... Hey!
But the other thing is religious activity and religious activity is really, really important. And that's part of, by the way, that's one of the reasons that I, that my own morning protocol starts with number one, I get up at 4 30, 4 45 to 5 45 in the gym. Every day I have a gym in my house. Then I go to mass every day.
I'm Catholic mass every day because it goes body and soul because I have a negative effect problem. You're saying that you're using church and religion as a performance enhancer for your happiness. That's right. And it's completely legal. Yeah. Wow. Okay. So take me through your, if you were to create an evidence-based morning routine, maximizing wellbeing, what would it look like?
So I maximize both wellbeing and productivity. So this is really, really important because I have, I'm in a creative profession. I got to write, think, speak, teach. I got to work every day on, on having creative output because I have a weekly column and I write books and I have to give talks, et cetera, et cetera. Your output's terrifying. Good. And I have a podcast.
I mean, it takes a lot of work, this whole thing. So I need to be super productive. And that means my brain has to be optimized for that. And I want to alleviate high levels of negative effect. So number one is the Brahma Mahurta, which is in Sanskrit means the creator's time. That has been around for 6,000 years. And the whole idea is if you get up before dawn, you've already won the day.
Because that actually gives you better concentration, better focus, and better creativity. If you get up when the sun is warm, you've already lost the first battle. And now a lot of people are like, yeah, my chronotype. I'm a night owl. No, I used to think I was a night owl too. I was actually just a musician who drank too much.
Morning larks, the chronotype is probably 60% environmental and only about 40% genetic. So everybody can be a morning lark. It's harder for some. I never get up with an alarm clock ever, ever, ever, ever.
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Chapter 6: What techniques can alleviate negative emotions?
And year after year after year, I still have to. I would sleep in if I could. But that's the first battle. And that's really a big swinger in improving your negative energy. Yeah, you've really started off with a difficult one that, especially if you're in summer somewhere and you think, oh, that's 4.30. No, no, of course. If you're in Helsinki in July, you're not going to be able to do it.
No sleep. That's right. You had to get up. You had to get up before you went to bed. So, I mean, your results may vary. You got to figure out how to, I mean, you never make the perfect the enemy of the good on this. The second part of that is what you do first thing, and that's substantial physical activity. Exercise is really important.
So a lot of guys will write to me, 22-year-old guys, graduated from college, feel aimless, don't know what to do, feel really depressed, living with mom, whatever. I say, okay, you don't have to go to the gym and pick up heavy things and do something insane, like your routine. I recommend getting up a half hour before dawn and walking for an hour without devices outside. Walk.
Not on the treadmill, outside. Hear the crunch of the gravel under your feet. No devices. This will give you a sense of transcendence. It will wake up the right hemisphere of your brain, which is what you need for a sense of meaning and mysticism. It's important. I mean, it's great to listen to modern wisdom, but not during the walk. Right.
And doing that while the sun comes up has special benefits. Huberman talks about that an awful lot, but there's, it's very well studied that this is really important.
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Chapter 7: How do morning routines impact productivity and well-being?
Okay. So combine these two for me, if you're saying that it's great to pick up heavy things and some people like to pick up heavy things, but you're also saying it's great to be out on a walk outside. Those are incompatible unless you're working out outside. I know. Right. And, and that's great. If you can actually do that, if you've got an outdoor gym, because you know, you're.
Lift ATX, shout out lift ATX in Austin, Texas. Venice beach, whatever. Yeah. Yeah. So, so, but, and so you got to make choices along those lines. I have a gym in my house. So I go downstairs to the basement from 445 to 545 every day. Um, I get about, I take about one, one day off per month because of travel. So I'm on the road a lot. Then I clean up and I go to Mass every day.
And that's important to me. These are my religious beliefs. And by the way, I go with my wife. We go to 6.30 Mass every day when I'm home. And I'm home about half the time. And here, I'm in Austin, Texas. I'll go to Mass tomorrow morning at 6.30. There's a church near my... Being Catholic is great. It's like Starbucks. It's a complete franchise system. It's the same every place.
There's one in every corner. It's unbelievable. I know exactly what you're going to get. Yeah, exactly right. But that's important to me. But the whole point is not Catholicism. My path is not the only path. The point is transcendence and transcendence by getting smaller and making the universe larger.
For some people, Vipassana meditation works really, really well, but that's getting soul in line with body first thing in the morning. And there's a lot of neuroscience research that talks about why that's so important because I'm driving toward high well-being and high productivity. Those are the twin goals. And doing this alignment really works, really helps a lot.
Because by seven, then you're ready to, and I haven't taken any nutrition yet, except for, you know, 15 grams of creatine monohydrate and, you know, electrolyte, something salty. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, so I'm not getting any calories. That's when I apply the second stimulant. That's when I apply the caffeine. Because you don't want to use caffeine to wake up. You want to use caffeine to focus.
Yes. We all know about how the, the A2A adenosine cycle works. Right. in the brain. No doubt everybody in your show knows about this. I piped on about it. Look, I got a ton of shit because for a long time, Element, that's been a great partner on the show and I fucking love them. They're terrific.
My big pitch was for the first 90 minutes of the day, your adenosine system isn't what's in charge your adrenal system is. And salt acts on your adrenals more than it does. If you want to fuck about with cortisol and you want to like increase that using caffeine, but so many people have a mid- afternoon, early afternoon slump, and then need to crank the caffeine lever again.
But this is- They cranked their caffeine too early. Correct. Yeah. But just push it. I'm telling you, New Year's resolution, push it back by two hours, by three hours, and just see what happens. Especially if you're using something like Nutonic as well, because the L-theanine is going to smooth out. Or just take L-theanine. You don't need to use Nutonic.
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