We’ll cover the science in a moment. But consider this – it’s a Sunday afternoon and you’re out on a beautiful fall hike with some friends or family by the lake. You take a seat by the edge of the water and take in the sun, breeze, and blue sky. How are you feeling at that moment?

There are exceptions to the rule. But odds are you feel pretty darn good, or at the very least, alright. But alright in the real sense, as in “all is right.”

I often wonder, is our increasing separation from nature the problem – so to speak?

Perhaps a lack of connection to nature is responsible, at least in part, for our present-day issues with chronic illness and mental health issues.

In Rewilding: Meditations, Practices, and Skills for Awakening in Nature, Micah Mortali argues that a disconnect from nature is a disconnect from our nature. It may be that much of this sort of psychological discomfort is born out of a desire to get out of the world of abstraction and mental over-stimulation and into the embodied experience of being interwoven with the natural world.

He uses terms like inter-species loneliness, ecological boredom, and life force deficit to describe the impact of the lost connection with nature. In my words, it’s the “SeaWorld Effect.” There are many stories of the highly intelligent orca whale captured to live out its life in a small, artificial pool forced to entertain crowds. Most of these stories go on with the whales beginning to exhibit psychosis, depression, and their fins becoming so atrophied that it flops over to one side. In some cases, the whales resort to ramming themselves headlong into the walls of the enclosure or lashing out violently against their trainers.

Now, at this point, you may be thinking – “depressed whales, ecological boredom, and – did he just say life force?”

I’m not going to argue that this last paragraph is a totally scientific presentation (although there’s research to come). But it is worth considering the old Yogi Berra saying – “you can observe a lot by watching.”

We are not separate from nature; we come from nature. We are nature. For 99.5% of our species’ history, we lived embedded in the natural world. We actively participated in the community of species in our ecosystems, we were constantly engaged in tasks that were tangible, and easy to get absorbed in: hunting, trapping, foraging (as opposed to staring at spreadsheets). And the natural world was the driving force of our daily life, social life, and spiritual life.

So, like the proverbial “fish out of water” – isn’t it quite possible that this disconnect can lead to what we can only refer to as “nature deficit disorder” with symptoms such as longing, loneliness, boredom, angst, and feeling like we’ve lost touch with the sort of life force?

In Voice of the Earth: An Exploration of Ecopsychology Theodore Roszak makes this same case. Roszak writes – “What the modern cultural environment has required of us is an enormous extroversion of attention and energy for the purpose of reshaping the Earth into a global industrial economy. For two centuries we have been subordinating the planet and our deepest personal needs to that project. This great act of collective alienation, I have suggested, lies at the root of both the environmental crisis and individual neurosis. In some way, at some point, a change of direction, a therapeutic turning inward, had to take place within a culture as maniacally driven as ours has been by the need to achieve and conquer.”

Suffice to say there’s an argument to be made for looking to the natural world when it comes to understanding what is not going so well and what could make us healthier. That’s where the research comes in.

There is an emerging arrow of research suggesting that nature can heal and sustain when it comes to well-being.

Forest bathing, also known as Shinrin-yoku or forest therapy, has been extensively examined in scientific literature for its role in enhancing both physical and psychological health. A meta-analysis conducted in 2017, which reviewed 64 papers, found that forest-based interventions benefit cardiovascular health, bolster the immune system, and improve mental health by alleviating stress, depression, anxiety, and negative emotions. (1)

A 2022 meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials found that forest therapy produced a significant reduction in symptoms of depression. (2) Another meta-analysis from the same year reported large and statistically significant improvements in mental health, particularly for anxiety and depression outcomes. (3)

Additionally, a 2019 meta-analysis focusing on cortisol – a biomarker of stress – found that forest bathing significantly lowered salivary cortisol levels compared to urban control settings, suggesting a robust short-term stress reduction effect. (4) A further review of urban residents, pooling 21 studies on blood pressure and 13 on cortisol, confirmed that forest therapy significantly reduces both blood pressure and stress, though results showed considerable variability. (5)

Taken together, the evidence suggests that nature immersion, particularly through forest-based activities, can act as a non-pharmacological intervention to support well-being. These interventions yield measurable psychological benefits like improved mood and reduced anxiety and depression as well as physiological gains like lowered stress hormones and enhanced cardiovascular function.

That said, researchers emphasize that differences in intervention type, duration, participant characteristics, and environmental context contribute to differences in outcomes. This underscores the need for more standardized, rigorously designed trials. But the existing body of research strongly supports nature as a reliable pathway to improved happiness and health.

For a deeper look into the research literature, visit: anft.earth/research/.

Application: Practices for Connecting with Nature

Again, drawing from Micah Mortali’s work in Rewilding, these are 10 steps to incorporate the natural world into your mindfulness, spiritual, or health practice.

If you live in a rural area, consider a short daily practice. If your location or schedule does not permit, start with a couple hours per week in a green space.

1. Intimacy – Get to know the land through first-hand experience. Simply spending time in a natural environment consistently can deepen your connection to nature.

2. Centering – Try to slow down, limit distractions, and give yourself permission to be without having to do anything.

3. Breathing – Practice some form of conscious breathing to reconnect with the present. The simplest practice is “breathing in I, know I am breathing in; breathing out, I know I am breathing out.”

4. Gratitude – Adopt an attitude of thankfulness for this moment, this experience, and this opportunity to be at home in nature.

5. Embodiment – Consider some intentional movements or warm ups to get out of your head (thoughts) and into your body and senses. You can gently circle your neck followed by your shoulders, arms, torso twists, hip circles, knee circles, then rolling your ankles. Smile.

6. “Fox Walk” – Try mindful walking. Imagine creeping through the forest like a mountain lion or fox. Feel into each and every step. Notice your body and surroundings as you go. Try it barefoot if able.

7. Sensory Expansion – There is an Eastern term called “samyama” which is a psychological state of absorption. It feels as though you have sort of dissolved into the present moment. Tap into the sights, sounds, smells, and sensations around you.

8. Sit Spot – Find a spot to sit down on the ground, on a log, on a bench, etc., and just sit as you savor the nature around you.

9. Bush Craft – As you go deeper into nature-related practices consider adopting a craft or hobby like woodworking, building shelters, fire making, etc.

10. Fire Circle – Get outdoors in this intentional style with a group of family or friends. Sit in a circle and enjoy one another’s company.

In summary, get outside. Bring intention to your time in nature – to rest, recover, and reconnect with your experience of the natural world. You’ll be happy you did.

1. Song, C., Ikei, H., & Miyazaki, Y. (2016). Physiological effects of nature therapy: A review of the research in Japan. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 13(8), 781.

2. Hansen, M. M., Jones, R., & Tocchini, K. (2017). Shinrin-yoku (forest bathing) and nature therapy: A state-of-the-art review. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 14(8), 851.

3. Kotera, Y., Richardson, M., & Sheffield, D. (2022). Effects of shinrin-yoku (forest bathing) and nature therapy on mental health: A meta-analysis. Frontiers in Psychology, 13, 934441.

4. Antonelli, M., Barbieri, G., & Donelli, D. (2019). Effects of forest bathing (shinrin-yoku) on levels of cortisol as a stress biomarker: A systematic review and meta-analysis. International Journal of Biometeorology, 63(8), 1117–1134.

5. Song, Y., et al. (2022). The effects of forest therapy on blood pressure and stress hormone levels in urban residents: A meta-analysis. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 19(15), 9203.

“On my appointment to the Dept. of Sociology established at the University of Bielefeld in 1969, I was asked what research projects I had running. My project was, and ever since has been, the theory of society; term: thirty years; costs: none.” — Niklas Luhmann

As I set out to create this resource, my project has been, and will continue to be, the theory of happiness; term: lifetime; costs: (almost) none.

Here’s the key question behind this work: why?

What a sophisticated question… Why do we do what we do? Why do we want what we want? Why are we here?

Well, maybe that why question is pretty important after all.

I suggest that the “answer” is always happiness.

In some way, shape, or form, we want things because we think they will make us feel good, avoid feeling pain, or survive (you can’t be happy if you’re dead). We do things to pursue these wants or to avoid the things we don’t want. We are here to survive which consists of avoiding danger and suffering (for the most part) and moving towards positive outcomes.

In other words, it’s all about happiness. No, this doesn’t necessarily mean highs and goofy smiles all the time. There is a place for sacrifice, meaning, and discipline in all this (more on that later).

But the point of this initial commentary is to say, of all the things to study, this seems to be life’s most important subject. For if you have mastery of anything else — business, biology, physics, music, etc. — but not happiness, then you will always need something more. But if you have mastery of happiness, then you will need nothing.

This resource is inspired by the Personal MBA and the Andy M. notes system. My goal is to create an encyclopedic scaffolding to capture the “how of happiness”.

I hope this work serves you well…

Jackson K.

Overview

Biology (Physical Health)

Psychology (Mental Health)

Relationships (Social Health)

Work & Money

Miscellaneous

TBD…

When Nicholas said this, he was talking about refining your intellectual perspective as you become a writer. He didn’t realize he stumbled upon some brilliant life advice.

Most people don’t appreciate the full meaning of our species’ name: Homo Sapiens Sapiens. Homo Sapien means “knowing man” or “wise man.” So homo sapiens sapiens is something like “man who knows he knows” or “man aware of being aware.”

This is called metacognition – awareness, observation, and understanding of one’s own cognitive processes. This is important because it helps us to identify and subsequently exert more control over the psychological states that we inhabit.

To this point, Buddhism has a useful bit of terminology. I read that in many Buddhist-influenced languages (like Tibetan), they often don’t have words equivalent to what we would call “emotion” or “thought”. Instead they have a term that is something like “mental formation.” This is an occurrence or manifestation of mindstuff so to speak. It acknowledges that pretty much every thought is imbued with emotion and every emotion imbued with thought. The modern psychological counterpart to this parlance is what we might call mental patterns.

Psychologist Dick Schwartz explains mental patterns are more than just thoughts; they are “discrete clusters of related mental processes” that link together memories, emotions, perceptions, and behaviors.

These mental formations and mental patterns that create our perception are not so easy to control or shut off. So the important thing is to be able to step back and hold them in awareness. Another meditation analogy is the mindstuff being a waterfall and this awareness being the small space behind the waterfall.

Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hanh shares a story about the importance of bringing awareness to these perceptions.

There was a young married couple in Vietnam who just had a baby.

Sadly, the husband was drafted and had to serve for three years. When he came back from the war he was so happy to be reunited with his beloved. She greeted him at the door with their young child in her arms. They were full of love and happiness.

That day they went to the market. While they were there, the dad was surprised because his young child would not call him “dad”. The child said, “You are not my dad. My dad comes home every night. He sits with mom on the bed and they cry together. Then when mom lies down they lie down together.”

In just that moment, the dad’s heart sank to his shoes. He was in disbelief. He did not talk to his wife.

They returned home from the market and he would not even look at her. They never spoke. He left home and drowned his sorrows at the bar.

And on the fourth day, overwhelmed with grief, his wife threw herself into the river.

When he heard the news he returned home that night. He lit a lamp in his child’s room. The child shouted out – “there, there is my dad!” and pointed to the shadow on the wall.

“Dad comes home every night. He sits with mom on the bed and they cry together. Then when mom lies down they lie down together.”

This illustrates the suffering that can come from failing to see mental formations and patterns for what they are: creations of the mind.

Thich Nhat Hanh claims that the Buddha said to ask yourself, “Are you sure of your perceptions?” He suggests you write it down on a card and post it somewhere where you see it every day.

As is often the case, I find it interesting that modern psychology aligns with this ancient contemplative practice.

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) is a form of psychological treatment that has been demonstrated to be effective for a range of problems including depression, anxiety disorders, alcohol and drug use problems, marital problems, eating disorders, and severe mental illness. (1) Many studies suggest CBT leads to improvement in functioning and quality of life – in many cases it is as effective as, or more effective than, other forms of therapy or psychiatric medications.

The first principle of CBT is psychological problems are based, at least in part, on faulty or unhelpful ways of thinking that lead to learned patterns of unhelpful behavior. These biases and faults in our thinking are called cognitive distortions. So treatment usually consists of efforts to identify and reconcile cognitive distortions. Recall, thinking about your thinking as I shared at the outset. The key is learning to recognize one’s cognitive distortions, reevaluate them in light of reality, and reshape them as needed to move forward.

So it goes that if we can identify cognitive distortions, we are on our way to more happiness.

It turns out there are many universal cognitive distortions: common mental formations and patterns that cause you to perceive reality inaccurately. To that end I’ll present to you a brief “glossary of misery” – the most common cognitive distortions to look out for. This comes from David Burns, MD – a renowned expert on mental health treatment. (2)

1. Jumping to Conclusions – You assume something negative or positive without real evidence. This distortion comes in two common forms:

   1. Mind-Reading: You assume you know what others are thinking or feeling.

      1. Negative Example: You’re at a party feeling shy and think, “Everyone can tell how awkward I am. They’re judging me.”

      2. Positive Example: You assume a relationship is going great, even though the other person is secretly frustrated or pulling away.

   2. Fortune-Telling: You predict the future as if it’s guaranteed.

      1. Negative Example: “I’ll bomb my presentation. I just know I’ll freeze up.”

      2. Positive Example: “I’ll just have one drink or one cookie — I can stop there.” But your past behavior shows you usually don’t.
         

2. All-or-Nothing Thinking – You view situations in extreme, black-and-white categories. There’s no room for nuance or “gray areas.”

   1. Negative Example: “I missed one deadline — I’m a total failure at my job.”

   2. Positive Example: “I nailed that project — I’m unstoppable!” You may feel superior or inferior in ways that aren’t realistic or sustainable.
      

3. Overgeneralization – You draw sweeping conclusions based on a single event. One bad moment becomes a sign of an ongoing pattern.

   1. Negative Example: “They didn’t text back — nobody ever likes me. I’m always getting ignored.”

   2. Positive Example: You feel good for a few days and think, “I’m finally cured! I’ll feel this way forever.” You ignore the ups and downs of real life.
      

4. Labeling – Instead of describing behavior, you assign global, negative or positive labels to yourself or others.

   1. Negative Example: “I gave into temptation — I’m a loser with no discipline.”

   2. Positive Example: “I won that board game — I’m such a genius!” This may sound harmless, but it can lead to issues with egotism.
      

5. Emotional Reasoning – You treat your feelings as evidence for the truth. But feelings are often based on distorted thoughts, not reality.

   1. Negative Example: “I feel hopeless — that must mean things really are hopeless.”

   2. Positive Example: “I feel lucky — I just know I’m going to win big tonight at the casino.” Emotions drive your assessments instead of facts.
      

6. Should Statements – You push yourself or others with rigid expectations and rules. These “shoulds” often lead to guilt, resentment, or frustration.

   1. Self-Directed Shoulds

      1. Negative Example: “I should be more productive — what’s wrong with me?”

      2. Positive Example: “I deserve a drink — I’ve had a hard day.” You justify indulgence as a reward, even if it backfires.

   2. Other-Directed Shoulds:

      1. Negative Example: “That guy shouldn’t cut me off in traffic! I’ll show him.”

      2. Positive Example: “People should see things my way — I have the right values.”

   3. World-Directed Shoulds:

      1. Negative Example: “It shouldn’t be raining — this ruins everything.”

      2. Positive Example: “The world should work how I expect it to.”
         

7. Discounting the Facts – You dismiss evidence that doesn’t support your belief, whether it’s good or bad.

   1. Negative Example: You receive a compliment and think, “They’re just being nice — they don’t mean it.”

   2. Positive Example: “I’ll only have one bite” — even though this story has never ended with just one bite.
      

8. Magnification and Minimization – You blow things out of proportion or shrink them down inappropriately.

   1. Negative Example: Looking at your to-do list, you think, “This is impossible! I’ll never get it done.” Everything feels overwhelming.

   2. Positive Example: When tempted to eat ice cream while dieting, you think, “This will taste amazing — totally worth it.” You minimize the guilt and discomfort that usually follow.
      

9. Mental Filter – You fixate on one aspect of reality, good or bad, and ignore the rest.

   1. Negative Example: A speaker receives 99 compliments and one critique. They obsess over the single negative comment and ignore the good.

   2. Positive Example: “This person I have a crush on is so perfect,” you overlook some potential problematic parts of the relationship.
      

10. Blame – You assign fault entirely to yourself or someone else, overlooking complexity.

    1. Negative Example (Self-Blame): “It’s all my fault. I mess everything up.” You punish yourself instead of solving the problem.

    2. Positive Example (Other-Blame): “This fight is all their fault — I did nothing wrong.” You feel like the victim and don’t take accountability for your part.

Use your metacognition to bring awareness to your mental formations and patterns, looking out for the common cognitive distortions. Can you notice any of them at play?

Practice this, and you may find more peace of mind and peace from mind.

1. American Psychological Association. (n.d.). What is cognitive behavioral therapy?

2. Find his work at FeelingGood.com

This refers to a state that is not necessarily “good or bad” but more a feeling of absorption. When you become one with your activity, time slips away, and you lose your sense of “self” – this is flow.

And it seems this, too, brings happiness…

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi is a psychologist who pioneered the concept of flow states. (1)

He grew up in war-torn Europe, where he observed that many adults were unable to live meaningful, happy lives after losing their jobs, homes, and security during World War II. This early experience led him to ask what makes life worth living. He explored philosophy, religion, and the arts but eventually discovered psychology, almost by accident, after attending a lecture by Carl Jung in Switzerland.

Early in his research, he made a surprising discovery. While material wealth has dramatically increased in the U.S. since the 1950s, levels of happiness have not. Once basic needs are met, further material gain does not seem to significantly increase well-being. Realizing this, Csikszentmihalyi turned his research toward moments in everyday life when people feel truly happy. He began by interviewing creative professionals – composers, artists, scientists, etc. – who described moments of deep engagement in their work. Their testimonies didn’t highlight fame or fortune but emphasized that the activity itself felt intrinsically meaningful and satisfying.

He found that during these moments, people often described a feeling of “ecstasy” – not in the euphoric sense, but in the original Greek meaning: stepping outside oneself.

This led him to outline the concept of the flow state – an immersive state wherein one dissolves into their present activity. When in flow, attention is so fully absorbed in the activity that you lose awareness of time, self, and even bodily needs. The composer he interviewed said it felt as if his hand moved by itself as he led the orchestra. Csikszentmihalyi explains this neurologically: our brain can only process about 110 bits of information per second, so when we’re deeply focused, there’s simply no bandwidth left to be self-conscious.

Flow isn’t limited to artists. Athletes, executives, writers, monks, and even friends in good conversation may experience similar states. Across professions and cultures, Csikszentmihalyi found that flow arises when seven conditions are met:

1. intense focus (often leading to an altered perception of time),

2. a merging of action and awareness,

3. loss of self-consciousness,

4. a sense of control,

5. clear goals,

6. immediate feedback,

7. and a balance between challenge and skill.

Think of playing your favorite sport against a gold medalist or a 5-year-old (neither is very engaging). But if you have the right balance, you are getting immediate feedback (based on the score and the movements of the other player). You have clear goals (e.g., score points), a sense of control, loss of self-consciousness (e.g., you’re focused on hitting the ball), and a merging of action and awareness with intense focus. Finally, the activity is rewarding in and of itself.

He suggests that one path to happiness is structuring more of daily life so it falls within the “flow channel.” This requires increasing our skills or taking on greater challenges so that our attention is fully engaged. It may also mean setting aside time for creative works, hobbies, and activities that pull you into a state of absorption.

1. See his TED talk: Csikszentmihalyi, M. (2004, February). Flow, the secret to happiness

“The truth is what works.” — William James

I’m not going to tell you which religion, faith, or spirituality is right for you. But I will tell you, to maximize happiness, you should have some.

If you’re skeptical, please read on.

Research reporting from the Harvard Human Flourishing Program makes a compelling case for the role of faith in happiness.

Large longitudinal studies suggest that religious service attendance has numerous positive effects on well-being such as reductions in all-cause mortality, depression, suicide, and more. (1)

These findings are supported by several meta-analyses including a 2022 project by researchers at the Human Flourishing Program and the Initiative on Health, Spirituality, and Religion at Harvard, under the leadership of Dr. Tracy Balboni. Their systematic review of the relationship between religion and health was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. It showed religious participation was beneficial with respect to longevity, depression, suicide, smoking, drug use, alcohol abuse, and various aspects of quality of life and well-being. (2)

Beyond this research, we can look to some more anecdotal accounts from giants of psychology who seem to have observed a similar picture. In How to Stop Worrying and Start Living, Dale Carnegie cited psychologists Carl Jung and William James as advocates for faith, spirituality, or religion in the good life.

William James said that “faith is one of the forces by which men live.” In his Varieties of Religious Experience he proposes that believing in something, especially one’s ability to achieve a difficult task, can actually help make it true. He believed that faith can motivate individuals to take action, persevere through challenges, and, in doing so, create the very outcomes they envisioned. He also argued that faith, particularly religious faith, could be a powerful motivator for ethical and moral action.

Above all, he ascribed a pragmatic value to faith, spirituality, and religious practice: that it is not necessarily an end in itself (although, if you are a devout believer, it may be), but it is an end to something else: namely, a better life. James observed that it bore beneficial “fruits” – like sense of purpose, contentment, resilience in suffering, and a greater tendency for moral action.

Along those same lines, Carl Jung observed that he had treated hundreds of patients for psychological issues, and the common root of their pathology was lacking a spiritual or religious orientation towards the world. And the common denominator of all those who made a recovery was adopting such an orientation.

So, again, I do not want to prescribe to you a certain religion, creed, or tradition. Our discussion simply centers on research and expert experience that suggest that religion is a useful “tool” in cultivating happiness.

So perhaps “tool” is a good word. I don’t say that in a condescending way. But in the same way that a business philosophy can be a tool for navigating an economic environment. Or the same way a map can help you arrive at a destination. Perhaps a religion, spiritual tradition, or sort of faith can be a psychological buffer and – especially if you have some organized, faith-based community around it – a relationship-building mechanism to promote a better life.

In today’s world, many of us de facto worship cultural values, political ideals, and what we see as objective facts. For many, money, power, status, political dogma, etc. have become their religion.

David Foster Wallace illustrates this point brilliantly in This is Water.

[I]n the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship–be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles–is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness. Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful, it’s that they’re unconscious. They are default settings.They’re the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that’s what you’re doing.

The problem is these secular ideals, as David Foster Wallace points out, often lead us down fruitless rabbit holes, and they don’t have a lot to say about how we should behave or our place in the universe. Perhaps our sort of “secular toolkit” is incomplete.

When it comes to a religious, spiritual, or faith-based orientation, we need not know completely why or how it works, simply that it does. But I wager there are some real practical, tangible mechanisms at work here.

First, faith may help you to bear the burdens of life. Rather than you shouldering the weight of suffering yourself, it gives you a broader psychological base to find meaning in it, fight through it, or come to peace with it. In many cases it gives you a sense of relief in turning over those burdens to some greater operative force.

Secondly, humans are meant for connection. On a practical level, faith-based communities and institutions create a pretext of shared values and activities to promote social connection. Even if you just went to a weekly AA meeting or a happiness book club once per week, there is some value in simply having the structured facilitation of social connect. Further, if you are in touch with a greater being of the universe you will have a means of overcoming loneliness and the fear that comes from the absurdity of contemplating being alone in the infinite expanse of space. There is no need to feel alone when you are one with “God”, “the creator”, “the essence”, “divine love”, or whatever you wish to call it.

Finally, I reckon humans are the only living beings that are able to thoroughly conceptualize the future and the concept of self-identity. This gives us the uniquely terrible privilege of being acutely aware of our own mortality. How can one cope with such an absurd predicament as being alive, aware of being alive, and aware that this aliveness will soon end? It is like a fish trapped in a small puddle under the bright sun. Faith in some divine order may offer a way of coping with this.

To close, I’ll offer a broader perspective on faith. If you have the faith of your youth or some tradition (Hinduism, Islam, Christianity, Buddhism, Shinto, etc.) that is all well and good. I encourage you to practice it with sincerity and within an organized community of some sort.

If not, perhaps you can carve out some philosophy or thesis that fulfills the following requirements:

• (I) you have trust in some higher order power that helps you to cope with lived experiences and feel at peace with your mortality and the many inherent absurdities of the human experience

• (II) you have some shared identity and structure to facilitate quality social connection

• (III) you have some system for morality and ethical action including what you de facto “worship” and ascribe value to in your daily life

You may consider the universe itself as your God. Or perhaps to you the laws of mathematics or physics have some divine power in them. Or maybe deep ecology which ascribes almost a spiritual bent to our place on planet earth.

I’ll leave you with a final thought from Suzuki Roshi who offers a beautiful passage in Zen Mind Beginners Mind. He talks about believing in nothing.

I found out that it’s necessary, absolutely necessary, to believe in nothing. We have to believe in something which has no form, or no color. Something that exists before any form and colors appear. This is a very important point. Whatever we believe in – whatever god we believe in – when we become attached to it, it means our belief is based on a more or less self-centered idea. If so, it takes time to acquire -- to attain perfect belief, or perfect faith in it. But if you are always prepared for accepting everything which we see is appearing from nothing, and we think there is some reason why some form or color or phenomenal existence appears, then, at that moment, we have perfect composure.

Ultimately, we have all come out of nothing. Infinite forms come out of the vast darkness of space to manifest galaxies. The carbon atoms that compose our bodies were born in the hearts of stars billions of years ago. The words that you’re reading now flowed out of the emptiness of my mind and are now a flashing into your consciousness – reaching out across time and space.

Perhaps you can touch the inherent mysticism, grace, or wonder of beingness. Perhaps the universe itself has some element of what we may call divine or God. And considering this, know that you are the universe too. What else could you be?

You are the universe experiencing itself. And that insight alone may be what faith is all about.

1. Sacks, C. A., et al. (2016). Association between religious service attendance and lower suicide rates among U.S. women. JAMA Internal Medicine, 176(8), 1219–1220. | Kim, E. S., & Kawachi, I. (2016). Perceived neighborhood social cohesion and preventive healthcare use. Annals of Behavioral Medicine, 50(6), 876–885. | VanderWeele, T. J., Li, S., Tsai, A. C., & Kawachi, I. (2016). Association between religious service attendance and lower depression among U.S. women. JAMA Psychiatry, 73(8), 845–851. | Stavrova, O. (2020). Religious attendance and physical health: Evidence from a longitudinal study of middle-aged and older Europeans. International Journal of Epidemiology, 49(6), 2030–2038.

2. Balboni, T. A., VanderWeele, T. J., Doan‑Soares, S. D., Long, K. N. G., Ferrell, B. R., Fitchett, G., … Koh, H. K. (2022, July 12). Spirituality in serious illness and health: A systematic review and expert consensus. JAMA, 328(2), 184–197.

This time period includes…

• living with Zen monks for four months

• creating the world’s first major in happiness

• teaching the first course on happiness at the University of Alabama

• teaching thousands of people about happiness from elite special forces operators to high schoolers, truck drivers, and lawyers

• and taking in 1000s of hours of books, articles, lectures, and courses

Below you’ll find an excerpt and a link to order the book — if the spirit moves you!

Prologue: A Short Introduction to a Short Book

The world probably doesn’t need another book on happiness, so I decided to write one.

What a brilliant opening line that is! Let me explain. In the last 20 years there has been an explosion of scientific research into happiness and a simultaneous, much much larger, explosion of random hacks’ and gurus’ two cents on happiness.

In fact, there are ~ 20,000 results on Amazon with Happiness as a keyword or part of the title.

What you have here is the world’s shortest book on happiness.

You can look it up in the Guinness Book of World Records and the Global Institute of Research and Publications (GIRP). I’m kidding – GIRP is an institution that I made up and Guinness has more important things to verify like most piercings (Elaine Davidson, lifetime total of 4,225) and fastest time to assemble a Mr. Potato Head while blindfolded (9.27 seconds by Lim Kai Yi).

My intention is to take my last five years of immersive study of happiness and give you the essential “stuff” as it were, in as few words as possible.

This study included creating the world’s first major in Happiness through an interdisciplinary bachelor’s program at the University of Alabama; reading 100s of books and countless other articles and research papers, winning a lightbulb research grant, teaching the first course on happiness in school history, living for four months as a Zen monk, building well-being and culture change programs for the US military, and speaking and consulting on employee happiness for 100s of associations and companies across North America.

This earned me the title of “happiness nerd” by an unassuming Canadian radio host who didn’t know what else to call me. I have not since found a better title.

That said, I don’t plan to invite you to my “cult of the expert” – I consider myself to be a student – a lifelong student of happiness. My invitation is that you’ll join me as a student and take a brief (but thorough) study of life’s most important subject: Happiness.

Let’s start there: why is happiness life’s most important subject?…

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The Secret to Happiness…

In keeping with the spirit of this book I thought I’d try to give you the secret to happiness in the first couple pages. I came across this story while living at the Zen monastery. If you find this valuable, you may want to read the rest of this book…

A young monk set out to learn the secret of Happiness from the wisest Zen master in the land. He traveled for weeks, crossing mountains and streams, until he reached a great temple.

Upon arriving he found a vibrant scene: monks sweeping the halls, visitors sharing tea and stories, birds singing in the garden, and the fragrance of fresh incense drifting through the air.

The Zen master was speaking calmly with a group of guests, and the young seeker had to wait for three hours before being granted an audience.

When at last he sat before the master, he explained why he had come. The master listened kindly but said that now was not the right moment to teach him about Happiness.

Instead, he handed the seeker a pair of chopsticks. Between them, he delicately placed a single grain of rice.

“Explore the temple and come back in a few hours” said the master. “But I ask one thing of you: do not drop this grain of rice.”

The young seeker bowed and set off, eyes fixed on the chopsticks. He moved carefully along stone paths, through breezeways and halls, up and down the steps, never looking away from the grain of rice. After some time, he returned to the master.

“So,” asked the master, “did you see the rock garden raked just this morning? Did you see the painted scrolls in the hall of ancestors? Did you hear the wind chime in the cedar tree?”

The seeker blushed. He had seen none of these things. His only thought had been not to drop the grain of rice.

“Then go again,” said the master gently. “But this time, notice the world unfolding around you in all its grace and wonder.”

Feeling calmer, the seeker bowed once more and walked again through the temple. This time he noticed the beauty around him—the care in the arrangement of flowers, the slow ripple of waves in the pond, the way the light filtered through old wooden beams. When he returned, his eyes shone with wonder, and he eagerly described what he had seen.

The master smiled, but said, “And the grain of rice?”

Looking down, the seeker saw his chopsticks were empty.

“That,” said the Zen master, “is the only teaching I have for you. The way of Happiness is to experience the beauty of the world in this moment — without ever forgetting the grain of rice between your chopsticks.”

This represents the nonduality of happiness. Can you work towards happiness tomorrow without sacrificing your happiness today? Can you live with the intention to build the life you want but pay attention to the life you have? Can you progress towards the destination that matters most to you: your life tasks – and still savor the journey?

This is the way of Happiness.

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Order a copy in print, digital, or audio: https://a.co/d/01KDpYTW

“Beware of looking for goals: look for a way of life. Decide how you want to live and then see what you can do to make a living within that way of life.” – Hunter S. Thompson

What leads to happiness at work?

This is a big question to unpack, and it overlaps significantly with the psychology section covered before – particularly the part on meaning and achievement. Further, the relationships section we’ve covered applies duly to your work life. But given work plays such a prominent role in modern life, I wanted to share a model that applies specifically to the workplace.

“Follow your passion” is probably bad advice. I first read this in the work of computer science professor turned productivity expert Cal Newport. He makes his case through the lens of Steve Jobs. You probably think Steve was passionate about technology and innovation. But his early life suggests this was not necessarily the case. He studied dance and history at a liberal arts college and bummed around studying Eastern mysticism. In the end, he tried to make a couple thousand bucks flipping switchboards as a side hustle. Thus, he stumbled upon the opportunity to start a company based on the idea that computers would become household appliances. And the rest, as they say, is history.

Cal’s research into what passionate people do for a living suggests this is more common. One begins seeking and learning by doing (as opposed to identifying one’s passion in the abstract) and eventually develops a valuable skill. This skill is then used as leverage to create ideal circumstances.

The problem with passion is illustrated by a survey given by psychologist Robert Vallerand to 549 Canadian college students in 2002. Many didn’t have a clear “passion,” and only 4% of them had a passion that related to a career field. The number one passion in the group was hockey. Planning to become an NHL player is not a great career plan.

So, I – and Cal Newport – suggest a better approach is identifying ideal circumstances for happy-making work and doing what you can to develop your skillset and align your profession with that.

Likely the most established construct of job satisfaction is Self-Determination Theory (SDT).

SDT is about autonomy, competency, and relatedness. This means having flexibility and ownership over your work and success, the capacity to make an impact and experience growth, and feeling trust and connection to those you serve in your work.

So, perhaps Cal’s advice is astute for most of us: don’t follow your passion. Become “so good they can’t ignore you,” and use that “career capital” to create a work life that has ideal circumstances.

Before I totally throw away the “follow your bliss” mentality, though, I’ll share a slightly more nuanced perspective. If you have a passion that is economically viable, then by all means pursue it. If you have that calling but it is not economically viable, then embrace a career that maximizes your free time so you can do more of that thing.

Otherwise, consider trying to maximize the circumstances above: competence, relatedness, and autonomy. Instead of thinking, “How much money can I make?” think, “What is the path with the most autonomy, competence, and relatedness that I can take to get the amount of money I need?”

One of my favorite career stories is a healthcare consultant who, every time he was due for a raise, just asked for the same percent reduced hours (e.g., instead of a 10% raise, how about 10% fewer hours). He now makes a good chunk of coin working remotely 3–4 hours per day on specialized internal projects that he finds interesting. See what he did there? He traded money for autonomy (more free time), competence (choosing his specialization of interest), and relatedness (working with an internal team instead of new clients every month).

Another example is a friend of a friend who loves to write poetry. He could have slogged along trying to become a full-time professional poet in 2025 (a feat that is, I assume, impossible). Or he could have sold out and given it up. Instead, he works as a high-level freelance corporate lawyer part-time and spends about 15-20 hours per week writing poems on his own terms.

So, consider grounding your big career decisions using the SDT scorecard…

• Will this work arrangement afford me freedom and flexibility? Will I get ownership over results as opposed to being micromanaged? Give it a 1 to 10 for Autonomy.

• Will this work arrangement align with what I’m good at and lead to tangible impact? Will I grow and develop in it? Give it a 1 to 10 for Competence.

• Will this work arrangement involve people who are trusting, caring, and social? Will I feel I am of service? Give it a 1 to 10 for Relatedness.

• Will this work arrangement give me the compensation and benefits I desire? Give it a 1 to 10 for compensation.

• (Add any other factors you want to score.)

Aim for jobs that are above a 28, and try to continuously make that number go up. Then, for example, once you get really high up on, say, two of the categories – you have great friends at work and they pay you a ton – you can start to focus on the other variables. Could you work from home two days per week for more autonomy? Could you jump into a new functional area that would allow you to grow and have more of an impact? And so on.

Of course, navigating your working life will be much messier than this. But at least you have a frame of reference now. And if you don’t have the means to approach your career or work from this orientation, then consider job crafting.

This is not my concept; there’s some really excellent research on this, particularly from the University of Michigan. (1)

You can, with or without the direction of management, craft or tailor your job to better align with your interests and design your job to support your own flourishing.

This is where you can take SDT and weave it into your work. Job crafting empowers you to proactively adjust your tasks, relationships, and perceptions of work to better align with your personal strengths, values, and interests. Research shows this self-initiated customization leads to significant increases in engagement, job satisfaction, resilience, and overall well-being. Field experiments – such as tech-company workshops – demonstrate that those who engage in job crafting are rated by peers and managers as notably happier and more effective.

An important caveat here – there are limits. If I’m working in data entry, I can’t suddenly say I’m going to stop taking orders and go try to figure something out in the warehouse. You certainly can have those conversations, but job crafting is more subtle.

There are three subcategories of job crafting:
1. Task crafting
2. Relational crafting
3. Cognitive crafting

Task crafting is about identifying certain tasks that you can do more of or less of – within reason – that support your skills and interests. For example, if you’re on a marketing team and part of your role includes both event planning and writing email campaigns, and you love writing, you might ask to do more of that and less of the event planning.

Relational crafting is about changing how you relate to people. If you enjoy mentorship, maybe you take on more of a mentor role. If you like educating people and you’re in customer service, maybe you shift how you interact with clients – moving from just providing service to actually teaching them how to get more value out of your product. You’re still meeting your responsibilities, but you’re framing them in a way that’s more meaningful to you.

Cognitive crafting is about shifting how you mentally relate to your work. For example, my business partner Paul had a client at a pulp and paper manufacturer. Their product was this gross, white, papery substance. But it turned out that substance was used in diapers and medical devices. So, they ran an internal campaign showing the end users – babies and patients – and helped the employees see the purpose behind their work. That’s cognitive crafting: reframing your mindset about what you do and why it matters.

By sitting down with (or without) your manager and starting to think about how you can craft your tasks, relationships, and cognitive perspective on work, you can try to cultivate more competence, relatedness, and autonomy in your working life.

Imagine you’re a truck driver – this is probably the hardest possible job to craft given it is highly regulated and pretty monotonous. But let’s say you decide to get more relatedness, feel more competent, and have more flexibility. Maybe you offer to help with training new drivers as a way to get more social time; in doing this, you also get to choose when you drive solo or with a new driver, which increases your autonomy; and you do some cognitive crafting to reframe your work from driving to helping mentor someone.

This process is not like simply flipping a switch to get your dream job – but it makes a difference. Use job crafting (cognitive, relational, and task) to tailor your job to increase your satisfaction. And pursue the circumstances – relatedness, competence, and autonomy – that make for more happiness at work.

1. Berg, J. M., Dutton, J. E., & Wrzesniewski, A. (2008). What is Job Crafting and Why Does It Matter? Center for Positive Organizations, University of Michigan.

Most objections or challenges to work–life balance fall into one of two categories:
(A) it’s a myth or it doesn’t matter, or
(B) it’s impossible.

I’d like to challenge both of those.

For those who think it doesn’t matter, it’s usually some version of “success is all about hard work” or “if you love what you do, you never work a day in your life.” And there is some truth to both claims. It’s true that when you feel engaged in your work, in a flow state, hours can pass by in a way that’s quite enjoyable and doesn’t feel like a drain on energy. Hard work, too, is a noble virtue in many cases.

The problem is not everyone can find their dream job. And maximizing professional success and achievement isn’t the way for everyone. To my point, research consistently shows that people are happier when they have better balance.

People who work more than 55 hours per week are 1.66 times more likely to suffer from depression and 1.74 times more likely to suffer from anxiety. (1)

A study in Social Psychology and Personality Science presented this abstract:

“Money and time are both scarce resources that people believe would bring them greater happiness. But would people prefer having more money or more time? And how does one’s preference between resources relate to happiness? Across studies, we asked thousands of Americans whether they would prefer more money or more time. Although the majority of people chose more money, choosing more time was associated with greater happiness – even controlling for existing levels of available time and money.” (2)

In Whillans and Dunn’s 2019 paper, “Valuing Time Over Money Predicts Happiness After a Major Life Transition,” they took a sample of graduating college seniors and measured how they value time versus money. (3) They did this by asking participants which of two hypothetical people they were more like:

Tina values her time more than her money. She is willing to sacrifice her money to have more time. For example, Tina would rather work fewer hours and make less money than work more hours and make more money.

Maggie values her money more than her time. She is willing to sacrifice her time to have more money. For example, Maggie would rather work more hours and make more money than work fewer hours and have more time.

Are you more like Tina or Maggie?

They followed up with participants one year later, after most had started their careers. They measured their subjective well-being and found that those who valued time over money had higher well-being one year later. What’s more, they controlled for other factors (such as initial happiness level) and found that improvements in well-being were partially explained by one’s preference for time over money at the time of the initial sample. So one’s preference for time had a meaningful positive effect on happiness later on.

Final evidence comes from Kasser and Sheldon. (4) They looked at four different studies in business settings and found that time affluence (feeling rich in time) supported happiness. I’ve heard this referred to in less academic terms as becoming a “time millionaire.” This is someone who measures their worth not in terms of financial assets but in terms of ownership over their calendar – the time they are able to take back from work and chores to spend on leisure or whatever they see fit.

You can imagine a Wall Street banker working 72 hours per week to make $200,000 – they’re on Zoom or in the office from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., six days a week. On the other hand, you have an electrician working 30 hours per week making $100,000. I’d argue the latter is much wealthier than the former – and that’s true on an hourly basis as well.

So even if you’re with me (and the research) that having more time and better balance leads to happiness, you may be hesitant. It surely seems impossible to work less – at least without sacrificing income or productivity.

To that, I again respectfully disagree. Proof comes in a man I had the privilege of interviewing years ago: Bill Duane. Here’s the story in his words…

Becoming a Google Executive while working a 4-day week

(You can watch this interview on my Youtube: “Becoming a Google executive while working a 4 day week.”)

So I want to tell you the story about working part-time at Google during its hypergrowth period for a few years. The reason why I wanted to switch to a 4-day week is because I came off a period of intense burnout. I had been working really hard, and then a death in the family hit me really hard. To get through that period, I needed to turn down the dial on my work life, which had been, in Spinal Tap terms, turned to 11 on the work amp.

I wanted to do an experiment of dialing it back. I really wanted to make time in my schedule to de-stress a little and, in particular, to do work on things that I knew would help me grow into future positions of being able to handle more stress — stuff like meditation, reading, therapy. I wanted to make more time for that.

But the key thing I wanted to avoid was disappointing people who depended on me. So before I got approval to do a two-month experiment of working four days a week, I wanted to be really clear that if I was taking a 20% pay cut and a 20% bonus cut, I wasn’t going to be working on my day off. And I wasn’t just going to compress the same amount of work into four 15-hour days.

To make sure I wasn’t letting anyone down — employees, other managers, or upstreams — I asked in all my one-on-ones: “What do I do that makes your life better in some way?” A few interesting things came out of those conversations. Most of it wasn’t a surprise; most of us know what we’re good at. But some things were surprising — helpful things that weren’t really on my radar — and those conversations helped me emphasize them.

The third part was discovering the things I was doing that no one said helped them. In general, those were behaviors I had picked up by trying to emulate other senior managers — things I thought good leaders were supposed to do. But leadership is very contextual. Different people lead in radically different ways that are helpful.

I realized the stuff I was doing that no one found helpful all had a flavor of being performative. I was a little bit out of integrity. I was optimizing not for what helped the people around me, but for what made me feel like I was being seen as competent. Huge difference.

Like I said, my main motivation was to de-stress. But as a result of focusing on what was most important and helpful at all levels — employees, peers, upstreams — even though I had less time, my impact grew much larger.

Surprisingly, not only did my performance rating not slip — it actually went up. And then it went up again. We extended the experiment from a few months to six months, then to a year. After a year, they offered me a promotion. I’d always been the kind of person to go after a promotion, so it was a useful growth experience for me to say no at first.

Eventually, they said I was screwing up the compensation curve. They said I should go for the promotion because it was starting to get weird administratively. So I went for it. HR got curious. They said I was the only person they knew of to get promoted to senior staff while working part-time.

I think what was interesting is that the outcome of working four days a week was quite different than expected. My motivation had just been to take a break after a rough period. But the time constraint forced me to focus and get clear on what mattered. Not only did that help me get promoted — it felt great. I knew I was helping people a lot. That sense of being of service really increased.

That idea of being aligned with your values is huge. When we talk about stress, we often focus on hours or intensity. But one of the best ways to reduce stress is to act in alignment with your values. You can handle a lot more if you’re doing that. I didn’t plan it that way — but it worked.

I stayed part-time for about two and a half to three years, until I was offered an executive position in another part of the company. We all agreed that for that role, it would be a disservice to the people I’d be leading if I wasn’t fully available during the ramp-up period.

If Bill can become an executive at Google working 20% less than everyone else, I think there’s hope for most of us. This also squares with research over the last few years on companies that adopted a shorter workweek. By and large, they see huge improvements in employee satisfaction and morale without any losses in productivity or revenue.

I do, however, recognize that it may not be this simple for many jobs that are more manual or service-based. A security guard can’t work fewer hours and still do their job (by definition), and a truck driver can’t suddenly get from Los Angeles to Tulsa 20% faster.

But I reckon for most of us, if we are more intentional with defining success and managing activity, we can improve work–life balance without sacrificing productivity.

Let’s look at an approach to do just that, then return to a model for happiness at work.

Three Steps to Work–Life Balance…

The problem with many time management systems is that they take too much time to manage.

If you spend an hour per day arranging tasks and lists in your productivity app, that’s not very productive. You’re working on planning what you’re going to work on for 5 hours per week. If you work a 40-hour week, that’s about 12.5% of your time spent not actually working on anything.

So I’m going to give you the simplest possible system, which you can expand upon if you wish.

1. Focus: be intelligent and lazy.

2. Protect your most important time.

3. Run a personal operating system (pOS).

Oliver Burkeman has coined a term for what many of us experience: “productivity debt.” Here’s an explanation in his words –

Apparently I struck a chord on Twitter the other day when I observed that many people (by which I meant me) seem to feel as if they start off each morning in a kind of “productivity debt”, which they must struggle to pay off through the day, in hopes of reaching a zero balance by the time evening comes. Few things feel more basic to my experience of adulthood than this vague sense that I’m falling behind, and need to claw my way back up to some minimum standard of output. It’s as if I need to justify my existence, by staying “on top of things”, in order to stave off some ill-defined catastrophe that might otherwise come crashing down upon my head.

Relatable? The first step to work–life balance is to overcome productivity-debt-driven anxiety, which leads to frenetic and inefficient commotion. This is what I sometimes call motion as opposed to action. Imagine you’ve got 20 things to do on a given day, so you switch between your email, your texts, then a Zoom meeting about the marketing plan, and then a meeting about one of your reports, then back to email, then you need to think about what you were supposed to get at the store on your way home, then your kid calls, then all of a sudden it’s 4 p.m. and you’ve been running around all day putting out fires, but nothing important really got done: all motion, no action.

This neurotic anxiety is the doom of strategic focus. This is particularly true for knowledge workers because not only do you have to do the work, you are responsible for defining the work to do and what “done” means.

The antidote to this way of operating is first psychological and second tactical. So, starting with your psychology, I suggest you adopt a new perspective: intelligent laziness. Rather than starting your day with a feeling of anxiety and dread about digging your way out of a hole of commitments and tasks, consider starting at a zero balance, aiming lower and slower, and asking yourself, “What would this look like if it were easy?”

The most helpful framing for this perspective is the Pareto Principle. The Pareto Principle is sometimes called the 80/20 Rule. It means that in many contexts 20 percent of the inputs, causes, activities will lead to 80 percent of the outputs, consequences, and results. It is not always 80 and 20, but some similar distribution.

This pattern originated in economics when Vilfredo Pareto noticed that about 20% of the plants in his garden produced 80% of the peas. He then observed that 80% of the land in Italy was owned by 20% of the population. In the modern world 8% own about 85% of total wealth (that’s from Credit Suisse in 2013; estimates vary).

This pattern is everywhere. If you work in a company, you can probably see that 10% of employees lead to 90% of the problems, and a different 10% of employees lead to 90% of the productive work. Similarly, it may be that one or two people in your life lead to the vast majority of annoyance and a different one or two to the vast majority of joy. If you look closely at your activity, this is often the case as well (for both happiness and productivity).

Imagine you bust your ass at work week after week, then by chance at a dinner party you meet a friend of a friend who is hiring for a job. She recommends you, and you land a $30k pay increase. Those two hours of networking and interviewing were exponentially more consequential than your thousands of other hours working.

So here are some questions to help you think in intelligent laziness…

• If I could only work 2 hours per day this week, what would I do?

• (If employed) What are the specific measurables upon which my performance is assessed? What if I doubled the amount of time I spent on those areas and stepped back from everything else?

• (If self-employed) What 20% of my customers, activities, or products lead to 80% of my sales, results, attention, etc.? What if I only served those customers, did those activities, or marketed in those ways?

• If I only had one day off for the next month, what would I do to maximize happiness? What in my life (people, places, activities) brings the most joy?

• Where do I want to be in 5 years? How could I get there in 5 months?

I should add: this may be simple, but it’s not easy. Simple but not easy – as so much of this happiness and living business is. If you’re ready to embrace focus with an attitude of intelligent laziness in order to overcome the anxiety to be always-in-motion, then you are on your way.

Charlie Munger probably didn’t think he was giving great productivity advice when he said this, but he did. In the final line of a commencement address he said, “may each of you rise high by spending each day of a long life aiming low.”

Once you have this perspective, it takes us to step two: protect your time with “sacred hours” and “power hours.”

Here’s the reality – not all time is created equal. Imagine you have 4 hours of PTO. Would you prefer to take it Tuesday morning 8 to 12 or Friday afternoon 1 to 5? Imagine you have to spend 2–3 hours writing an in-depth strategic plan. Would you rather have 9–12 on a Monday morning or 30-minute chunks spread out each afternoon over the course of a week?

The idea here is to identify pockets of time and activity that have a disproportionate impact on your happiness and productivity (e.g., work and life in work–life balance). From there, you claim time for each one.

Note that I say claim time. It’s not about making time. You can’t make time, can you? Time is a fixed supply, and yours is probably already accounted for. So don’t make it – claim it.

A cautionary note before I explain this – start with something easy. Don’t try to set aside 2 hours per day of reading, then an hour workout, then your 8-hour workday, then a date night – it’s impossible. Start with claiming maybe a few hours per week maximum. It does not have to be every single day nor does it have to be exactly an hour. Sacred and power hours are just the terms.

Start with sacred hours first. This is claiming time for what is important in your “life” side of the equation first, so it doesn’t get crowded out. Then you hold that time as “sacred” – it is yours and yours alone.

This could be a daily 30-minute meditation and reading time in the morning, it could be your five workouts during the week, it could be every Wednesday-night date night, it could be every Sunday unplug and take a day truly off.

I worked with a senior leader in the Army National Guard who was a full-time police officer. Between his law enforcement and military administrative duties, he was working 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. just about every day during the workweek. I worked with him to apply sacred hours. We said – look, there’s no magic wand to all of a sudden take away a bunch of work from you. But what might be a pocket of time that would bring you more balance and joy?

He saw an opportunity where every day around 6 p.m. his wife got home from work, his kids got home from sports, and everyone was trying to get something to eat. So we worked with his manager and direct reports to restructure his workflow. Each day he’d work in the office from 7:45–5:45, then he’d get home and have a sacred hour from 6 to 7. But remember he still had a couple hours of administrative work to do most days, so he’d telework from about 7 to 9.

Was he still working too much? Probably. But he got an hour of quality time over dinner with his family nearly every day and said he felt a dramatic improvement in his work–life balance even though he worked roughly the same amount of time.

Action – look at your calendar and claim your sacred hours each day and/or week.

The “power hour” is the work version of the above. Often, when I talk to professionals, they feel they are running around putting out fires all day and don’t have time to work on big-picture things or developing their people. Some feel they get behind on email or communication and just can’t get caught up.

In any case, power hours are about claiming a daily and/or weekly block of time when you are at your best for deep, focused work on the things that are important but not necessarily urgent. We worked with another General Staff officer in the military who was basically the head of HR for several thousand soldiers.

She told us that if she could sit down right after her morning coffee and get a focused hour to blow through action items in her inbox with no distractions, she could get through most of the day’s critical work well before noon. So she put up a sign on her door – “Power Hour: please knock for emergencies” – each day from 9 a.m. to 10:30 or so. Many of her reports adopted the same policy, and the productivity of the entire group shot up (not to mention the psychological relief of not having to feel overwhelmed and stuck all the time).

This may be a daily 1–2 hours when you are fresh, or maybe an entire half-day once per week to do strategy or team development. For what it’s worth, I wrote my first book (How to Stick to Meditation) with about six bouts of four-hour (highly caffeinated) Saturday-morning writing blocks over the course of two months.

Action – look at your calendar and claim your power hours each day and/or week.

So you now have a more focused perspective on your work–life balance, and you’ve protected time for your most important things. If you were to just stop here and stubbornly stick to the commitments you’ve made for yourself, then you’d already be 80% of the way to better work–life balance.

The final step is to create a personal operating system (pOS). If interested, I can coach you through building your own (studyhappiness.notion.site/pos-personal-operating-system).

That’s the crux of this approach. I wager that most of the stress, overwhelm, and fragmented attention that we experience comes not from the work itself, but from the workload of managing it all in our heads.

The human brain evolved to hold something like 3–5 separate things in mind at once. You’d be focused on your hunt, then have to remember to pick some berries and build a new spear when you get home. The brain is a thinking device, not a storage device. But when most of us have 100 to 200 unprocessed and unfinished commitments rattling around in there, no wonder we feel dazed and confused.

You’re trying to compose an articulate email to your boss and getting hit with “figure out the kitchen remodel, pick up eggs at the store, send the other email to Mike, figure out how to lose 10 pounds, did I send that bill to accounting the other day?, meet with Jessica,” etc.

The pOS is getting everything out of your head and into an external mind, which is some combination of lists and a calendar.

Capture anything and everything that you’d otherwise keep in your mind. What constitutes something to capture? Any commitment to do something, figure something out, or oversee something that is pulling at your attention. Capture these on a piece of paper, a phone note, an excel, or whatever.

Now, after you capture something, you need to do two things – store it in an organized list and clarify what the next action attached to it is.

“Mom’s birthday” is not an action. “Taxes” is not an action. “Purchase a birthday gift for Mom and send her a text,” or “set aside 2 hours to file taxes” – those are actions.

So after you capture it, you clarify it and add it to a list. I recognize that many of the things you capture aren’t a simple action. Writing a book or figuring out a new product launch will be pretty big projects. So I suggest you subdivide your list into Projects (things that are ongoing and many steps) and Tasks (simple one-step things).

The third list you want can be a separate list or some sort of tag you add to the entries in your other lists. But in any case, you’ll want a “waiting for” list. If you’re in management, this protocol alone will probably double your effectiveness. It is a to-do list, but for things you are waiting on others for. If you send an email to Kevin in accounting and need a reply, you add it there. If you need to get an answer from your friend Deb before you book your flights for vacation, then that goes on your wait list.

Finally, you’ll want some list at the top that includes your main goals and areas of focus. These are more general priorities that are important to you (e.g., stay healthy, be a good mom, get a promotion, etc.).

So far, you are brain-dump capturing all your commitments into some note, paper, app, etc. Then you are, either at that moment or later in the day, clarifying the action and sorting into your lists, which should include Projects, Tasks, Waiting, and Goals/Priorities.

This is where the system starts to work its magic. Once you have your lists, you are going to sit down at the end of each day or the end of each week and plan out your work.

One of my first bosses was one of the top financial advisers in the country, with hundreds of millions in assets under management. He said the secret to success is to say you’re going to do something, then do it. The hard truth is many of us don’t get this right. We’re stuck in reactive mode. It feels like the day takes over and we’re flying around out of control.

In this step, you set out the plan so that the system runs your day. You don’t have to react, and you don’t have to decide. That’s where you get the feeling of effortless effectiveness. Without a systematized plan, we just haphazardly stumble forward in distracted action. See the quote: “I am rather like a mosquito in a nudist camp; I know what I want to do, but I don’t know where to begin.”

So look at your lists and pick the three most important things for the next day or the five most important things for the week. You will want to experiment with what is best for you between a daily or weekly cadence.

Estimate for each one about how long it will take to complete. If it’s a big, ambiguous thing, remember to break it down into actionable chunks. Now take your estimate and multiply it by 1.5x because we always underestimate how long stuff takes. Now put this time into your calendar as an appointment with yourself.

Importantly (!) make sure you leave a minimum of 25% of your time as “reactive” or white space.

This means that you know things are going to come up unexpectedly, so you leave some time in there to field those tasks as they arise. Depending on your role this will vary quite a bit. If you’re a project manager dealing with an active job site, you might need 70 percent of your time to be reactive. If you’re a famous author with no employees, you can probably block 6 hours straight every day for creative writing. You need to suit this to your context.

So, in this hypothetical, you can imagine I look across my goals/priorities and lists and say – “OK, tomorrow I want to make 10 cold calls, which should take an hour. I want to write one book chapter, which should take 90 minutes. And I want to write a statement of work for a new client, which will take 30 minutes.”

I will then plot on my calendar (remember to 1.5X your assumption) 9 a.m. to 11:15 book writing, 11:15 to 12:45 cold calling, and 12:45 to 1:30 statement of work. Then the next few hours will be checking email and texts or whatever other work arises that day. In the event I have extra time, I can look back at my lists and decide what to work on next.

Keep your lists in order and your calendar up to date. On a daily or weekly basis, review your systems and plan your work. Your system drives you, rather than you trying to keep a thousand things in your head, running around like a headless chicken.

Build your pOS around the time you claimed with your Sacred Hour and Power Hour. And embrace intelligent laziness with 80/20 thinking.

If you do this, I promise you will double your sense of work–life balance in the next month.

1. Read a popular press summary at HarvardOnline.Harvard.edu/blog “Prioritize Work-Life Balance”

2. Hershfield, H. E., Mogilner, C., & Barnea, U. (2016). People Who Choose Time Over Money Are Happier. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 7(7), 697-706.

3. Whillans, A. V., Macchia, L., & Dunn, E. W. (2019, September 18). Valuing time over money predicts happiness after a major life transition: A preregistered longitudinal study of graduating students. Science Advances, 5(9), eaax2615.

4. Kasser, T., & Sheldon, K. M. (2009). Time affluence as a path toward personal happiness and ethical business practice: Empirical evidence from four studies. Journal of Business Ethics, 84(Suppl2), 243–255.

This is, unfortunately, pretty accurate wisdom from a mentor of mine. Putting aside the far-reaching implications of this quote (for business ethics and government incentives especially) – money plays a central role in modern life.

It’s interesting to think that for most of human history, this wasn’t the case. Up until a few thousand years ago the concept of money didn’t exist. And before the Industrial Revolution, while money mattered, most people had a subsistence lifestyle far different from the economic environment we inhabit today.

Any discussion of happiness today would be incomplete if we didn’t talk about money and, naturally, what we do to get it: work. So we’re going to explore the role of work and money in the good life.

There are two main questions:
(1) What is the relationship between money and happiness – does money buy happiness?
(2) What’s the right approach to work – what makes for a good career?

Money can’t buy happiness.

“This sentiment is lovely, popular, and almost certainly wrong.” – Dan Gilbert.

Gilbert is a Harvard psychologist who explains that while money doesn’t buy happiness, it buys an opportunity for happiness. Much of it depends on how much you have and how you spend it.

Likely the most famous (and misunderstood) study on happiness and income is Kahneman and Deaton’s 2010 paper: “High income improves evaluation of life but not emotional well-being.” (1) It is often cited to say that beyond $75,000 per year income does not increase happiness. The research is more nuanced than that.

As the title suggests, there are different ways to understand happiness. You can be happy with your life as opposed to happy in your life (as we’ve discussed before). Life satisfaction (with your life) is a more intellectual process of stepping back and evaluating your life as a whole. Emotional well-being, or affect, is the actual experience of negative versus positive emotion in your daily life. It is possible to feel good while dissatisfied with life. And it is possible to be satisfied with life while feeling bad.

The relationship between income and happiness is different based on the type of happiness considered. The authors break up emotional, experienced happiness into positive affect (feeling good), “not blue” (absence of feeling bad), and “stress free.” They use a Cantril Ladder (“Ladder”) to assess life satisfaction. The Cantril Ladder asks you to rate your life as a rung on a ladder where 0 is the worst life possible and 10 is the best.

As income increases, its effects on happiness generally diminish. This makes intuitive sense. The more you have of any resource, the less valuable it becomes on a per-unit level. If you have no car, getting one is very valuable. Getting a second is nice too. Getting a third is probably a pain. Anything beyond that you’d immediately be looking to sell.

So it goes with money. The more money you make, the less useful each dollar is. $10,000 is a big deal to the average person but not to Jeff Bezos.

This pattern applies primarily to experienced happiness. This is known as a satiation point. Like eating – at some point you begin to get full and additional food is not as satisfying. At about $60,000 in household income (~$93,000 in 2026 dollars) you approach a satiation point for stress. Living paycheck to paycheck and facing financial uncertainty is stressful. Once you know your needs are met, you can relax.

The other measures of emotional well-being level out around $75,000 (~$117,000 in 2026 dollars). It is important to note that these are averages and the actual satiation points vary based on cost of living, family size, etc.

Life evaluation, on the other hand, seems to keep rising with income – albeit barely. This implies that we use our income as a shortcut to determine how we are doing in life. And if our income continues to rise, it may slightly improve our subjective life evaluation.

To summarize this first study – once you have enough money to be comfortable, additional income will likely have minimal effect on your experience of happiness (e.g., positive emotion) but it will slightly improve your evaluation of your life.

There has been debate over this finding in recent years. The most well-known example is Matt Killingsworth’s aptly named “Experienced well-being rises with income, even above $75,000 per year.” (2)

Killingsworth devised a clever (and more reliable) way to measure happiness. He created an app that prompts people several times per day to rate their happiness. This app captured data from over 33,000 working professionals in the U.S. He used this data to describe a logarithmic relationship between income and happiness and found that there was no “satiation point.”

Killingsworth’s research is rigorous and sound. Nonetheless, it’s worth considering the practicality of a logarithmic scale. Notice how the numbers on the bottom axis are not going up by the same amount every time (e.g., additional $10k). They are doubling every time. In other words, if you keep doubling your income, you will see a small increase in your reported well-being.

Yale Professor Laurie Santos explains that if you actually plot this out, it implies that if you “change your income from $100,000 to $600,000 your happiness goes from like a 64 to a 65.”

The use of the logarithmic scale can obscure the real effect of diminishing marginal utility. It also does not capture relative tradeoffs. For practical purposes, most people are not in a position to continually double their income. The decisions around income are usually something like: Should I take this promotion for a 15% increase and a lot more headaches? Or should I work an extra 10 hours of OT per week for a 25% increase in income?

In these non-logarithmic cases, it seems likely that these linear increases in income are not as efficient in increasing happiness as, say, investing a few hours toward additional sleep, exercise, or social interaction.

It seems absolute income (not logarithmic) is the more practical treatment here. If you are making $80,000 per year and someone offers to double it, by all means say yes. But on the margin, there are higher-return ways to allocate time beyond the pursuit of additional income – especially if you are already earning in the $93,000-and-above range (in 2026 dollars).

These first two studies took a straightforward look at income and happiness. But the income–happiness relationship is more complicated than meets the eye. Relative income, changes in income, and focusing on income are much more important in influencing your happiness than income itself…

Think of the cognitive processes that go into assessing your happiness in the context of income. Research finds it is hard to assess our situation in the abstract. We need standards of comparison: either across time or other people.

A 1996 paper by Clark and Oswald and a 2005 paper by Luttmer show that your income level in relation to your peer group is more important than your absolute income. (3)

For instance, you are likely to be happier making, say, $80,000 surrounded by folks making $40,000 than you would be making $100,000 surrounded by folks making $150,000. This counterintuitive observation speaks to the role of social norms and anchoring.

Additionally, Kahneman, Krueger, Schkade, Schwarz, and Stone found that changes in income elicit strong emotional responses, but the long-term effects on happiness are small. (4) Imagine your employer cuts your salary by 2%. You’d be outraged. But this would amount to an immaterial per-year change after taxes (maybe a few hundred dollars). In the long run it would not have much effect.

This same paper calls attention to the “focusing illusion.” This illusion occurs when we are asked to assess our happiness in the context of one specific thing. For example, when college students are asked about their happiness levels and about how many dates they have gone on in the last month, there is no correlation. But when the questions are reversed – how many dates, then how happy – there is a 0.66 correlation.

In other words, when prompted, students subconsciously focused on dating success as a standard to judge their happiness. So studies that directly examine the effect of one variable – e.g., money – on happiness are likely to overstate the effect due to the focusing illusion.

What have we learned so far: Does money matter for happiness? The answer is yes, but it’s a long story.

There are diminishing returns between absolute income and happiness. When your income is low, additional income makes you happier. But once you are well off (around $93,000 to $117,000), the impact is rather minimal. Likely it will only increase your reflective evaluation of life. How much you earn compared to others, changes in what you earn, and whether you focus on what you earn before you think about your happiness matter more than how much you actually earn.

So don’t sweat the changes, don’t compare yourself to your more fortunate peers, don’t focus too much on just money, and aim for financial security (e.g., nearing six figures) rather than getting rich.

Remember though – money buys an opportunity for happiness. How you spend it makes all the difference…

To generate happiness from money, it is best to spend on others, spend on experiences, and spend to save time and reduce suffering.

1. Spend on others.

Harvard’s Michael Norton is an expert on happiness–money research. He says that money can buy happiness – the key is prosocial spending that benefits not just you, but other people.

In his most well-known study, he and his team asked students if they would be part of an experiment. (5) Their self-reported happiness was measured. Then they were given an envelope with $5 or $20. They were instructed to either spend it on themselves or on someone else.

You might think that the spend-on-others group would see about the same change in happiness as the other group, or perhaps they would be frustrated that they were forced to spend on someone else. In reality, the spend-on-others group reported higher levels of happiness that persisted for several days.

The researchers wondered if this pattern would persist for higher-dollar-value exchanges. So they replicated the study in Ethiopia, where $20 equates to several hundred dollars. They found the same pattern. In line with their other research, this appears to be a human universal.

“Prosocial spending,” or spending to benefit others, makes you happier. (There are even biomarkers that indicate this.)

2. Spend on experiences.

Van Boven and Gilovich’s 2003 paper, “To Do or to Have? That Is the Question,” shows that spending on experiences translates to greater happiness. (6) Here are a few lines from the abstract that report the survey and experimental findings:

“Do experiences make people happier than material possessions? In two surveys, respondents from various demographic groups indicated that experiential purchases – those made with the primary intention of acquiring a life experience – made them happier than material purchases. In a follow-up laboratory experiment, participants experienced more positive feelings after pondering an experiential purchase than after pondering a material purchase.” (7)

They go on to explore why it is that experiences yield more happiness. They suggest that experiences allow for positive reinterpretations (savoring the memory), are more meaningful parts of one’s identity, and support better social interactions.

This last point is interesting: they found that if you discussed a material purchase, as opposed to an experience purchase, you were rated as less well-adjusted and less enjoyable to be around.

3. Spend to save time and avoid pain (rather than get pleasure).

If you analyze your spending, there is usually one of two motives behind it. You want to avoid something (suffering, stress, hassle) or get something (pleasure, joy, status).

If you pay for a cleaning service or financial management app, it’s likely the first category – to avoid things you do not want to do. If you buy a snack or a luxury car, it is likely to pursue pleasure.

Research finds that you are usually happier if you spend money to save time on unpleasant activities as opposed to seeking pleasure. In their book Happy Money, Dunn and Norton use the example of outsourcing things you hate doing, such as hiring a cleaning service. Such investments generate more happiness than similar-sized investments in the pursuit of pleasure.

According to Whillans, Dunn, Smeets, Bekkers, and Norton’s 2007 paper:

“Surveys of large, diverse samples from four countries reveal that spending money on time-saving services is linked to greater life satisfaction. To establish causality, we show that working adults report greater happiness after spending money on a time-saving purchase than on a material purchase.”

For greater returns to happiness, it is best to spend on others, spend on experiences, and spend to save time and reduce unpleasantries.

1. D. Kahneman, & A. Deaton, High income improves evaluation of life but not emotional well-being, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 107 (38) 16489-16493, (2010).

2. M.A. Killingsworth, Experienced well-being rises with income, even above $75,000 per year, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 118 (4) e2016976118, (2021).

3. Clark, A. E., & Oswald, A. J. (1996). Satisfaction and comparison income. Journal of Public Economics, 61(3), 359–381. — And — Erzo F. P. Luttmer, Neighbors as Negatives: Relative Earnings and Well-Being, The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Volume 120, Issue 3, August 2005, Pages 963–1002.

4. Kahneman, D., Krueger, A. B., Schkade, D., Schwarz, N., & Stone, A. A. (2006, May). Would you be happier if you were richer? A focusing illusion (CEPS Working Paper No. 125). Princeton University, Center for Economic Policy Studies.

5. Listen to the explanation in Norton’s TED talk: “How to buy happiness”.

6. Dunn, E. W., Aknin, L. B., & Norton, M. I. (2014). Prosocial spending and happiness: Using money to benefit others pays off. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 23(2), 109–113.

7. Van Boven, L., & Gilovich, T. (2003). To Do or to Have? That Is the Question. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 85(6), 1193–1202.

The first is grounded in neuroscience. Social-emotional contagion explains how we transmit our emotional context to one another. You know the expression “monkey see, monkey do”? There’s truth to it.

In an Italian laboratory in the 1990s, researchers noticed the monkeys would often mirror the things the researchers did. They studied their brains and found that primates (that’s us) have highly developed mirror neurons that take on the expressions and gestures of others.

In humans, this social-emotional contagion is well documented. Emotional states are transmitted in a matter of milliseconds and can often spread through groups. Think of how yawning and laughter are contagious.

In Peter Kaufman’s lecture on multidisciplinary thinking, he explains how to make use of this:

You’re standing in front of an elevator. The doors open. And inside the elevator is one solitary stranger. You’ve never met this person before in your whole life. You walk into the elevator; you have three choices for how you’re going to behave as you walk into this elevator. Choice number one: you can smile and say good morning. And I say, at least in California, if you do that, 98 percent of the time the person will smile and say good morning back. You can test it. Okay. My guess is you’re going to find that 98 percent of the time, people say good morning. Choice number two: you can walk in and you can scowl and hiss at this stranger in the elevator. And they have no idea why you’re scowling and hissing at them. And I say 98 percent of the time, they may not hiss back at you, but they will scowl back at you. And option number three. This is where the wisdom comes. You can walk into the elevator and you can do nothing. And what do you get 98 percent of the time if you walk into an elevator and you do nothing from that stranger in the elevator? Nothing. It’s mirrored reciprocation, isn’t it? But what did you have to do? You have to go first. And you’re going to get back whatever you put out there.

That’s the practice. Remember that when it comes to emotions, you bring the weather. In most instances, you control the emotional weather and dynamic of the interaction. If you go for a hug, a handshake, or a smile, you get it back. If you frown, scowl, or say nothing, you get that back too.

So, bring the weather of genuine interest in the other person and a context of positive emotion and positive outlook. Try to make them feel important and appreciated. Try to bring happiness – and in doing so, you’re liable to get more of it yourself.

As Oscar Wilde said, “Some cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go.”

So the first principle is: bring the weather. Be intentional about creating genuine interest, appreciation, and positive emotion (assuming that’s the appropriate context).

The second is sort of the inverse application. Nearly 100 years ago, Dale Carnegie explained it best when he said, “The only way to win an argument is to avoid it.”

Think about it. Have you ever really won an argument?

Odds are, you may have gotten a feeling of superiority or self-righteousness – sure. Maybe you even got the other person to feel dumb or give up. But is that really winning?

I sometimes say, would you rather be right or be happy? And there’s an old poem that goes something like this:

Here lies the body of John O’Day,
Who died defending his right of way.
He was right, dead right, as he rode along,
But he’s just as dead as if he were wrong.

Get it?

Striving to be right often undermines our quality of life and our ability to actually move forward and get an optimal result for everyone (see our current political situation, for example). So, if you want to have better relationships, focus on understanding and moving forward – not on right, wrong, or winning.

Continuing on with this point from Dale Carnegie: avoid the three C’s. Never criticize, condemn, or complain. Criticizing puts others on the defensive, condemning erodes cooperation, and complaining creates a negative atmosphere that is rarely constructive. Avoiding these habits isn’t about ignoring problems avoiding confrontation, but rather navigating relationships more skillfully.

The third practice – run your relationships like a business.

I want to be clear: I don’t mean make them transactional or all about work. I mean be intentional about keeping in touch and nurturing your relationships, because they’re truly your most valuable asset. In fact, a better analogy would probably be: be a gardener with your relationships. But I don’t know anything about gardening, so you get business.

Think about how businesses use a CRM – a Customer Relationship Management system – to stay in touch, add value, and deepen connection. Most of the time, they’re quite simple: they have some information on the person and some regular cadence for keeping in touch and building the relationship.

We use them for work, but why not for the relationships that matter most?

So, when I say “run your life like a business,” I mean bring that same level of thoughtfulness and structure to your personal connections that a good company would bring to its customers or key team members. If you’re a CEO, you meet regularly with your leadership team. In your life, you’ve got your spouse, your kids, your close friends, your parents, your old friends – are you putting time on the calendar for them with that same sense of priority?

You wouldn’t just “catch up” with your VP of Sales whenever it was convenient. You’d schedule it, because that person matters. You wouldn’t talk to a potential customer then see what happened. You’d take some notes and keep track of how they’re doing, because the relationship is important. The same should apply to the people who matter most to you in your personal life.

One way to do this is to build a simple system for staying connected. I use a spreadsheet where I list people I care about – close friends, mentors, extended family – and check in to see who I haven’t talked to in a while. That way, if I haven’t spoken to my godfather Marty in a few months, I’ll notice and reach out.

You can also set reminders. On January 23rd, for example, I had a little notification pop up: “Keep in touch with Julio” (a family friend), and another that said, “Check in with Louis” (a longtime college friend). These reminders help me make sure I’m not letting the important relationships fade. It’s also how I remember birthdays and special occasions (like my mom’s, which is also on January 23rd).

One of the biggest reasons people feel lonely is that they stop investing in established relationships. In many cases, friendships fade slowly, then all at once.

There is a term for this in psychology: relational entropy – it describes the natural tendency for relationships to gradually break down over time if not intentionally maintained. You may also see it described as friendship decay.

When we look at trends in loneliness in countries like the U.S., we see this may be a critical driver of unhappiness and mental illness. According to the American Survey Center, about half of Americans have three or fewer close friends, and 12 percent have none.

Perhaps the real lesson here comes not from academic research, but from a quote I heard from a Vedic monk about ten years ago: “One old friend is worth two new ones.”

Having an intentional system prevents this friendship decay.

Some people even schedule weekly development time with their partner or kids. They set aside time to ask: How are we doing? What’s going well? What’s not? That keeps relationships continuously improving.

Scheduling social time in your calendar and using the systems I mentioned above serve the same purpose. When I write “manage your relationships like you would a business,” I mean create structure, protocols, and information management to ensure you are continually investing in life’s most important asset: relationships.

You have a group of mostly 18-year-old guys from the poorest neighborhoods and toughest backgrounds in Boston. You have another group of guys the same age from Harvard. You and your team are going to meet with them and review their lives every single year for the rest of their lives.

As it turns out, it wouldn’t stop there. The study continues to this day, nearly 100 years running, across multiple generations.

What do you think made the difference in the quality of people’s lives?

Was it which of these two groups they were in – privileged or poor? No. Was it what they studied or their grades? No. Was it their fitness or diet? No. Was it how successful they were? No.

The real significant predictor of living “the good life” was relationships. The quality of your relationships determines the quality of your life. Across not only that group but across multiple generations, they found that relationships and social connection predict not only how happy you are but how long you live. (1)

Given the work I do, people often ask, what’s the secret to happiness or the key to happiness? And the truth is, there is no one thing. But I do believe the top priority should be relationships. This isn’t a popularity contest either, or saying you have to find your soulmate. It’s more like this: for those who do have a partner, it’s about having a healthy relationship, and beyond that, having a “tribe” of close friends and connection to community.

So how do we effectively cultivate relationships? That’s what we’ll cover here.

First, let’s step back and consider the different types of relationships. I’d argue that they are all grounded in love. But modern English does a pretty poor job of capturing this. The Greeks had some ten different words for love. I suggest three are most important:

1. Romantic / Partner type love

2. Friend / Family type love

3. Altruism / “Agape” – a care for others, love of humankind and the world – think of how you can “just love people” (or dogs may be easier for some of us)

Research suggests each has its place.

Ed Diener and Martin Seligman – two giants of positive psychology – have written that “social relationships form a necessary (but not sufficient) condition for high happiness: that is, they do not guarantee high happiness, but it does not appear to occur without them.”

Let’s start with romantic and partnership love drawing on the work of social scientist and author, Arthur Brooks. (2) The best romantic partnerships are about complementarity. Think of the phrase “he or she completes me.” It’s like two puzzle pieces that fit together, as opposed to carbon copies.

There are really two processes at work when falling in love. You have a passion component that lasts up to a few years and a companionship component that should continue developing over time. Interestingly, brain scans of people in this first passion state resemble those of drug addicts. So yes, you want to have attraction and compatibility in the beginning. But this is where complementarity – how well you complement each other – comes in. You intentionally build a lasting partnership based on shared commitment, understanding, and stable affection. This, as opposed to the “rush” of passion, is the optimal relationship dynamic.

Recently, I was at a conference with several multi-millionaires in financial services. The conversation took an interesting turn as they each complained about how much they were paying in taxes on their second homes (poor guys!). The subject turned to how alimony and child support were not tax deductible – they found this outrageous.

One guy detailed how he couldn’t write off his payments to his ex-wife on his state tax return. Then another guy chimed in, “Isn’t it crazy?” And a third agreed. Finally, a fourth added that he’s been paying alimony for years and never gotten a break.

And I thought – are you kidding me? How is it that all these wildly successful, intelligent men are so lousy in their relationships?

Continuing on from our recipe from Dr. Brooks, it’s perhaps equally important to focus on what not to do.

It turns out a psychologist by the name of John Gottman has decoded what makes for successful and unsuccessful romantic partnerships. He has studied thousands of couples in a lab and found that those who engage in what he calls “The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse” are heading for trouble.

1. Contempt — Rooting for your partner to fail.

2. Criticism — Seeking and sharing faults.

3. Stonewalling — Shutting down or refusing to engage in meaningful dialogue.

4. Defensiveness — Refusing to open up.

To avoid relationship apocalypse, focus on humor, gratitude, forgiveness, and disclosure. Take your relationship seriously but never yourself. Hunt for things to be thankful for - and share them. Forgive. And share with vulnerability.

Family and friendship, of course, exist on a spectrum from acquaintances to best friends and siblings – often people can be just as close to their best friend as they are to a sibling.

The most relevant research here comes from the work of two psychologists: the Aarons. They brought people into the lab and were able to create a scenario that rapidly brought people together. It is sometimes called the “fast friends protocol.” They had people answer 36 questions that gradually became more deep and intimate. They found that participants often left as lifelong friends. The mechanism at work there was “escalating mutual disclosure.”

Think about what that term means for a second. It means I’m going to push you to open up and share something vulnerable, then I reciprocate with something personal, and then you reciprocate with something deeper. This creates a “tit-for-tat” dynamic where the level of intimacy escalates (so to speak) until you become quite close.

This really just short-circuits the usual pattern of building a friendship or closer connection with a family member. We start out maybe with, “Oh, this weather is really something,” or “How about that baseball game?” Then it may become more like, “How is your family doing?” or “What’s going on in your life?” And eventually, it may get to some deep conversations around challenges, regrets, fears, and so on.

To deepen friendships and family relationships, focus on setting aside intentional time together, give your full attention and curiosity, and don’t be afraid to go deeper with vulnerability.

There is an entire discussion we could have here about the psychodynamics of family relationships and parental dynamics – for the sake of time, I’ll save that for another book.

Finally, we can consider altruistic or prosocial (agape) relationships. Again, this represents social connection with a broader network that we are not as close to. This often-overlooked category of relationships is sometimes called “micro-interactions.”

Our lifestyles these days have seemingly been engineered to remove these small social interactions. And it’s to our detriment.

Dr. Nicholas Epley at the University of Chicago has done research where they ask people to predict how social interaction will affect their happiness. For example, on your train ride to work this morning, if you start a small conversation with a stranger, what will happen?

Most people predict it will be awkward or uncomfortable – it will be a net reduction in happiness. Then they have people actually do it and find a significant boost to happiness. (3) Dr. Gillian Sandstrom’s research supports this as well, finding that “weak ties” are supportive of happiness and wellbeing. (4)

Harvard researcher Dr. Michael Norton did a study where they gave people $5 or $20 to spend on themselves or a stranger. The group that spent it on others showed a sizable increase in happiness persisting for several days, whereas the group who spent it on themselves showed no change. (5)

Again, we see how a prosocial interaction with a “weak tie” can go a long way. This speaks to the role of altruism as well. Studies have linked compassion and this more prosocial orientation to improved health and happiness.

An excellent popular science summary of this research comes from Dr. Stephen Post. (6) In his article “It’s Good to Be Good: Science Says It’s So,” he explores the scientific basis behind the age-old wisdom that helping others improves the helper’s own well-being. Drawing on decades of research, it shows that acts of prosocial behavior (this “agape” idea) – whether through volunteer work, caregiving, or charitable giving – confer measurable psychological and physical benefits to the giver. These include lower rates of depression, improved mood and self-esteem, enhanced immune function, and even increased longevity.

The “helper’s high,” a euphoric sensation tied to doing good, has been linked to activation in the brain’s reward systems, providing a biological explanation for why giving feels good.

He cites numerous studies spanning contexts from addiction recovery and chronic illness support to intergenerational volunteering and philanthropy. Programs like Alcoholics Anonymous illustrate how helping others aids personal recovery, while patients with chronic illnesses like cancer or multiple sclerosis experience improved emotional and physical health when supporting peers. Longitudinal research has shown that those who volunteer regularly live longer, and even adolescents benefit, with increased social competence and reduced risk behaviors. The data overwhelmingly support the conclusion that prosocial behavior strengthens both individual resilience and societal well-being.

That said, the article also acknowledges caveats. Too much self-sacrifice, particularly among caregivers and helpers who lack time for self-renewal, can lead to burnout or “compassion fatigue.” Nonetheless, the evidence suggests that doing good for others is not just morally right but also a practical strategy for a longer, happier, and healthier life.

As the Beatles sang, “love is all you need.” Focus on love for others (altruism), friends and family, and a partner and you’ll have the foundation for lasting happiness.

1. Dr. Robert Waldinger’s TEDx Talk: “What makes a good life? Lessons from the longest study on happiness”

2. Based on Arthur Brooks’ course on Understanding the Science of Love

3. Epley, N., & Schroeder, J. (2014, July 14). Mistakenly Seeking Solitude. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.

4. Sandstrom GM, Dunn EW. Social Interactions and Well-Being: The Surprising Power of Weak Ties. Pers Soc Psychol Bull. 2014 Jul;40(7):910-922.

5. Aknin LB, Barrington-Leigh CP, Dunn EW, Helliwell JF, Burns J, Biswas-Diener R, Kemeza I, Nyende P, Ashton-James CE, Norton MI. Prosocial spending and well-being: cross-cultural evidence for a psychological universal. J Pers Soc Psychol. 2013 Apr;104(4):635-52.

6. “It’s Good to Be Good: Science Says So” by Dr. Stephen Post

In Part 1 of this study, three groups are placed in cages. Group 1 rats were simply put in a cage for a period of time and were later released. Groups 2 and 3 consisted of “pairs.” Rats in Group 2 were given electric shocks at random times, which they could end by pressing a lever. Each rat in Group 3 was paired with a Group 2 rat; whenever a Group 2 rat got a shock, its paired rat in Group 3 got a shock of the same intensity and duration, but their levers did not stop the shock. To a rat in Group 3, it seemed that the shock ended at random because it was their paired rat in Group 2 that was causing it to stop.

Thus, for Group 3 rats, the shock was “inescapable.”

In Part 2 of the experiment, the same three groups were tested in a chamber containing two rectangular compartments divided by a barrier a few inches high. All of the rats could escape shocks on one side of the box by jumping over to the other side. The rats in Groups 1 and 2 quickly learned this and jumped over to escape the shock.

Most of the Group 3 rats, which had previously learned that nothing they did had any effect on shocks, simply lay down passively and whimpered as they were shocked.

This, as you can probably guess, is based on a true story. It summarizes work by Seligman and Overmier to develop their theory of “learned helplessness.” When we feel we will suffer inescapably or cannot influence our life circumstances, we learn to withdraw and give up. This is now a common model for understanding disorders like depression.

Conversely, Seligman went on to develop a theory of “learned optimism.” In the same way we can learn helplessness, we can learn optimism. In a sense, optimism is happiness about the future – a positive outlook. It’s a belief that life will be good and that you can make it so.

How do you do this?

Seligman and his peers in psychology have found that outlook is really about what’s called your explanatory style. As the name suggests, explanatory style is about how you explain the things that happen to you. It is in large part what distinguishes pessimists (negative mindset) from optimists (positive mindset).

The key lies in learning to shape your explanatory style through “the three Ps”:

• Pervasive

• Permanent

• Personal

Imagine something bad happens – say, you’re late to an important meeting.

1. Pervasive – This refers to how broadly you apply the failure. A pessimistic mindset makes it about more than just the one incident. “I’m late for this meeting... I can’t do anything right. I’m a terrible parent. I’m unreliable. I suck at work. I can’t stay healthy. I don’t even like how I look.” What just happened there? You took one failure and let it bleed into every area of your life.

2. Permanent – This is when you view the failure as lasting. “I’m always late. I’ll never be on time. I don’t have what it takes to do this job.” Instead of seeing the failure as a one-off, you see it as everlasting.

3. Personal – This is when you blame yourself entirely. “I’m such an idiot. This is all my fault. I can’t do anything right.” Taking personal responsibility is important, but this is more like “taking it personal.” In reality, there are often external and even random factors that contribute to a negative event. Maybe you spilled coffee and had to change, maybe there was an accident on the highway, maybe your calendar malfunctioned.

People with negative explanatory styles tend to explain setbacks as pervasive, permanent, and personal: “I’m no good at anything, I have so much bad luck, it’ll always be that way, and it’s all my fault.”

Optimists explain events differently.

Let’s say an optimistic salesperson loses a deal. Instead of spiraling into negativity, they may say:

1. Not Pervasive – “Okay, I missed this one. But that doesn’t mean I’m failing at everything. I’m still a great parent, a good friend, and have success in other parts of the business.”

2. Not Permanent – “I didn’t win this one, but I can learn from it. I’ll do better next time.”

3. Not Personal – “There are things I could have done better, but the client did have someone else in mind, and their budget was an issue. They rejected the product; they didn’t reject me.”

Learned optimism comes from awareness of your explanatory style and intentionality in avoiding the three Ps when processing negative experiences. But that’s not all. While you avoid the three Ps for negative events, you lean into them for good ones.

Pessimists do the opposite. When something good happens, they dismiss it: “It was just luck. It’s a one-time thing. It won’t last. I didn’t really earn it.”

But a more optimistic person would say:

1. Pervasive – “I succeeded here, so I can succeed in other areas too. I have what it takes to be good at just about anything if I apply myself.”

2. Permanent – “This good thing isn’t a fluke, it’s a trend. I can do this again.”

3. Personal – “I made this happen. I showed up, I worked hard, and I nailed it.”

Let’s say a high school student makes the baseball team. Look at a negative versus positive explanatory style – note the three Ps as you read.

Negative explanatory style of a positive event: “Well, I kind of got lucky here. I’m not sure if I deserve it. Well, I might have made the team, but I still suck at math and science and don’t have my license yet. I’m probably not going to make it next year after the coach sees me play.”

Positive explanatory style of a positive event: “I earned this spot, and I deserve it. I know if I dedicate myself this same way, I can succeed at everything else I have going on right now. I’m going to build on this and earn a starting spot.”

You can learn optimism by changing your explanatory style.

When bad things happen, process them by limiting the 3 Ps:
It’s not pervasive (it doesn’t define all of me),
It’s not permanent (it won’t last forever),
It’s not personal (I’m not solely to blame).

And when good things happen, lean into the 3 Ps:
Let it be pervasive (I can succeed in other areas too),
Let it be permanent (I can keep this up),
Make it personal (I earned this).

That’s how you shift your mindset to be more hopeful, more resilient, and more optimistic. Ultimately, this will help you to be happier when you think about the future.

You kick back on the couch, overlooking a lovely spring afternoon, and think – wow, life is good…

Then you get a call from the Global Flourishing Study (1) (shout out to them for their excellent research), and they actually ask you questions like:

• “Overall, how satisfied are you with life as a whole these days?”

• “Overall, to what extent do you feel the things you do in your life are worthwhile?

• “If you were to rate your life on a ladder with 1 being the worst and 10 being the best, where would you place yourself?”

This is an actual experience that’s happened to about 200,000 people as part of that study, and they answered many other questions. So, the question becomes: what would you answer? And what’s behind your answers when it comes to life satisfaction?

I suggest two primary components that influence this domain: Meaning and Achievement (relative to expectations).

Just about every psychological framework (and common sense) suggests that feeling like you’ve made something of yourself and that your life has some meaning goes a long way in feeling content with it.

Let’s start with the achievement side first. There’s an often overlooked component here: how achievement influences your satisfaction is a function of both the achievement and your expectations.

This “equation” comes from Mo Gawdat in Solve for Happy. Mo has an incredible story. He spent 20 years making a fortune in big tech and became the head of Google X (their innovation and big ideas group). His beloved son died unexpectedly at age 21, and it set Mo on a new quest – to figure out happiness.

His book is a valuable contribution to the field because, although he’s not an academic, you essentially have one of the smartest people imaginable spending several years intensely studying happiness.

In his book, he presents this equation that’s so simple, yet profound. Is this not how we assess so much of our experience? Imagine your doctor calls after a routine check-up and says you have a serious heart condition and only six months to live.

A few hours later, you get a callback, and she says, “So sorry, we had the wrong number – you actually just need to have your gallbladder removed. It will be painful, and you’ll be in bed for a week.”

All of a sudden, you’re totally relieved! Not just relieved – ecstatic! You’re ecstatic to have your gallbladder removed?! Why? Because of the other half of the equation: expectations.

So, I could write a few pages trying to brilliantly tell you to lower your expectations, but I’ll spare you and just tell you – lower your expectations.

Mo explains it this way: Remember to look down. This means that instead of constantly looking up to others and to the next goal (what we don’t have), pause to look down at what you’ve accomplished and what you do have. Approximately 3 billion people live on less than $3 per day, approximately 1 billion have no clean water, and approximately 1 million people in the U.S. alone are homeless.

Here’s a practice you can try with this.

Negative visualization, or futurorum malorum praemeditatio (Latin for “premeditation of future evils”), is a Stoic practice of imagining worst-case scenarios. Rather than focusing on positive outcomes, this exercise helps build resilience and gratitude by picturing realistic losses – such as the death of a loved one, a failed project, or public embarrassment. People often refer to it using the adapted Latin phrase premeditatio malorum. .

Take some time to consider all the bad that can happen – and may. See how this changes your perception of your life. Again, the idea is not to dwell in fear or pessimism but to prepare yourself, lessen the shock of adversity, and deepen your appreciation for what you currently have. In other words – reset and lower your expectations.

Now, let’s explore more of the psychology of achievement.

A sense of accomplishment or achievement is the result of motivation, mastery (competence), and working toward goals. This contributes to happiness and well-being because individuals can look at their lives with a sense of pride. (2) This is especially true when the achievement is tied to striving with an internal motivation or an “autotelic goal,” which is a goal that exists just for the sake of the pursuit and improvement. (3) In fact, achieving intrinsic goals (such as growth and connection) leads to larger gains in happiness and well-being than external goals such as money or fame.

So, setting goals and working toward their achievement is important – especially when those goals are things you’re intrinsically interested in and relate to mastery of something. Achievement bolsters your self-efficacy and gives you a sense of competence. We have this need from birth – we want to have an impact, an effect on our environment and the world around us. A baby puts blocks together (for no reason) and then says, “Mom, look what I did!”

This is not part of the baby’s five-year plan to set themselves up for a better allowance. No, they just do it to feel a sense of competence from changing their environment.

Making progress and achieving things you care about are important for happiness.

Recognize your accomplishments and achievements, and focus on making progress on things that are intrinsically important to you and push you to grow. As you do so, lower your expectations.

The other critical part of life satisfaction is meaning. What does psychology tell us about building a meaningful life?

You’ve probably heard people say things like, “This is the meaning of life,” or, “The purpose of life is this, that, or the other thing,” right?

Well, that doesn’t square with what we see in the research. Joseph Campbell summed it up well when he said, “What we think we want is the meaning of life, but what we really want is the experience of being alive.”

That’s a different way of thinking about meaning. Meaning is not something we find but something we create. You bring it to life through your life. And I propose a simple, science-based equation for creating a life of meaning and purpose.

If you live a strengths-based and values-aligned life, you’re going to create an experience of meaning and purpose. Again, I write “create” rather than “find” because meaning isn’t necessarily discovered like hidden treasure buried in the woods. It’s something you embody through your way of life.

This is not just my opinion. To create this equation, I draw on perspectives from several fields of psychology, primarily positive psychology from Dr. Martin Seligman. Dr. Seligman offers this explanation of meaning: meaning comes from using your unique strengths to serve something greater than yourself.

Let’s break that definition down. Using your unique strengths means leaning into what you’re naturally good at – your physical, mental, or character-based abilities. It means doing things that you find engaging and intrinsically motivating. Then using those to serve something greater than yourself means aligning with a cause, mission, or set of values that matters to you.

To hone in on your strengths, think about what feels like fun to you but like work to others. What do you find easy that others find hard? What do people say you’re weirdly good at?

For example, some people love networking. They walk into a room and immediately connect with everyone. For others, that sounds like hell. But they might thrive in spreadsheets and analysis. With some good questions, reflection, and intuition, you can start to get a feel for your strengths.

There are also several great assessments:

• CliftonStrengths (formerly Gallup StrengthsFinder)

• VIA Character Strengths

• SIMA – System for Identifying Motivated Abilities

For example, my top strengths from these assessments all coalesce around “learner,” “theoretician” (drawn to collect information and teach), and “woo” (enjoys networking and winning people over). As someone who will take a course on systems thinking for fun, then organize it into an online resource and share it with strangers for no reason, this seems to line up pretty well. At the same time, I often feel burnt out when I have to do too much analysis and strategizing.

So, some combination of self-study and assessment should get you started here.

If strengths are how you work, values are why you work and what you work for. You may identify your values by reflecting on causes, communities, or ideals that matter to you.

What is a cause or belief you’d die for?
What virtue or value do you most admire?
What values does your ideal self embody?

Beyond these prompts, try our Values Tool: happinessmeansbusiness.com/values-tool

Let’s say your top values are faith, work-life balance, and health. If you’re working 80 hours per week at an investment bank, you’re probably violating all three. You’re not expressing your faith, you’re too busy for life outside of work, and your health is suffering. Even if you’re using your strengths, that disconnection from values will leave you feeling empty.

Now flip the scenario. Imagine you become a faith-based family counselor. You’re serving your faith, you’ve got time for relationships and hobbies outside of work, as well as sleep and exercise for physical health. You might be making less money, but your life satisfaction is way up.

Here’s another real-life example for application. Take an Army Chief of Staff named Colonel B. His top strengths are Strategic and Arranger. He thinks big picture and is great at getting people organized. Meanwhile, you have Lieutenant Colonel S with the top strengths of Achiever and Empathy. She excels at connecting deeply, building trust, and getting things done at the same time. They both care about the same mission – say, improving recruiting and retention – but they can and should approach it differently. He’ll build a strategic plan with different courses of action and priorities and then set up the perfect team to tackle it. She’ll visit with her reports to understand what’s really going on, identify the root problems, and start taking action on her to-do list.

On top of this, they may have different values. COL B is all about honor and service, so he feels he’s using his strengths to serve his nation and is willing to sacrifice more in terms of time and effort. LTC S has top values of connection and family, so she’s more focused on building relationships and maintaining balance with time for her family.

There’s no right or wrong – just different ways of bringing meaning to life. Here’s how this would look as a short meaning statement for each of these folks.

COL B – I will create strategies and arrange teams to complete the mission in service of my nation.
LTC S – I will use empathy and my desire to achieve to complete the mission while building relationships and providing for my family.

Meaning isn’t found; it’s made – by living strengths-based and values-aligned.

You now have the knowledge of the main contributors to life satisfaction: identify goals that are important to you and recognize your progress working toward them to create a sense of achievement and competence. And as you do this, use your strengths as tools and your values as guideposts.

If you bring all this to life, through your life, you are on the path to a life of satisfaction: happy with your life.

1. Learn more at globalflourishingstudy.com

2. Seligman, M. E. (2012). Flourish: A visionary new understanding of happiness and well-being. Atria Paperback.

3. Quinn, A. (2018, February 3). Theory of well-being: Elements and interventions. GoodTherapy Blog.

“If you’re so smart, how can you be so dumb?” – Jackson’s mother, circa 2016

As a young man, I was playing goalkeeper for our soccer team. I got scored on in the last play of the game, and in a moment of anger, I punched the wall as hard as I could.

Of course, the wall learned a very valuable lesson that day about trying to undermine my performance. I, on the other hand, needed a few days. Because after about a week, my hand was still the size of a grapefruit. I ended up going to the doctor, getting three metal rods put in my hand, and spending the rest of the spring in a cast.

Now, if you’ve raised or been around teenage boys (or been one yourself), you know we are a very wise bunch. So, of course, I learned an important lesson about emotional self-control… and that lasted about six months. Not long after getting out of my cast, a series of unfortunate events (mostly centered around me being an idiot) led to my then ex-girlfriend’s new boyfriend showing up at my house at 1 a.m.

We had a short skirmish – and thankfully no one was around to record it – because neither of us had the slightest clue how to fight. Next thing I know, I walk into the house and my left shoulder is stuck up beside my ear. My mother, very graciously, had to drive me to the emergency room in the middle of the night so they could pop my shoulder back into place.

Here’s the interesting part. By all quantitative markers (which can be misleading), I was “smart.” I had a 4.4 GPA, was near the top of my class, had almost perfect test scores, and earned a full academic scholarship.

So what’s going on here?

Well, as my mom asked me after all this – if you’re so smart, how can you be so dumb?

It turns out there are many different types of intelligence. But a key distinction to bear in mind is that IQ is not the same as EQ. There’s the intellectual, analytical kind of intelligence – and then there’s emotional intelligence, which is the ability to assess and manage emotions: both your own and others’.

This construct largely comes from the work of psychologist Daniel Goleman. It starts with awareness. You begin by noticing what’s going on emotionally within yourself and in others. From there comes regulation or management – of yourself and of your relationships. Think of it as recognition and response.

Emotional intelligence can be improved with study and practice. That’s what we’ll explore next.

In other entries, we covered most of that first quadrant: Self-Awareness. As you engage in practices that increase your attentiveness in the present, you naturally develop a greater awareness of your psychological state.

To take this further, you can try journaling or other self-assessments. Simply ask yourself things like: What am I feeling right now? What am I experiencing right now? What emotions or thoughts are present right now?

Labeling these states – with curiosity and without judgment – evokes self-awareness. A helpful mindset here is to identify with the container, not the contents. You are not the “stuff” going on inside your mind; you are the witness, the one observing it.

Try a quick exercise. Say your name to yourself in your mind. Now imagine a pink polar bear.

Can you see it? Can you hear your name?

Here’s the odd part: did you say your name or hear it? Did you think of the bear or see the bear? Who’s actually doing the seeing or hearing?

Self-awareness is about stepping back from the stream of thoughts and emotions and learning to observe them without identifying with them. You can feel emotions fully – this isn’t repression – but from a slightly more spacious place. You identify with awareness itself, not with the passing contents of the mind.

All those thoughts and emotions passing through you are not you – they are just mental formations. You are the container, not the contents.

This isn’t easy, and it can sound abstract at first, but it’s true. There’s a level of consciousness that experiences your thoughts and emotions yet remains distinct from them. With practice, you can relate to your own psychology from that level of awareness, noticing thoughts and feelings arise and pass away. From there, you have more choice in how – or whether – to react.

As Jon Kabat-Zinn likes to ask, “Is your awareness of your anxiety anxious? Is your stress stressed?” You are not these things; these things exist within you.

Practice for Emotional Intelligence: Self-Awareness

Take five minutes privately without distraction. Close your eyes and bring your attention to your mind and body. For 2 minutes practice labeling any thought or emotion or image that arises. Do so without judgment. In your own mind simply say: planning, emails, tiredness, frustration, boredom, anxiety, daydreaming, Sarah, whatever comes up. Just practicing noticing and identifying whatever comes and whatever goes.

For the next 2 minutes reflect on something that makes you upset, angry, or frustrated. Think of that thing and put yourself in that place. Do this and as you do it just notice – how does it feel? Does it have any weight, color, or pressure? Where does it show up in the body? What is the quality, type, pace of thought with it? How does this emotion present itself and what might you call it?

For the last minute reflect on this practice of evoking self-awareness. What did you notice? And how can you bring this into your daily life?

The next quadrant is awareness of others: Social Awareness.

Empathy is the ability to understand and feel what another person is experiencing – not just intellectually but emotionally. In Goleman’s framework, it lives at the intersection of awareness and relationship. To recognize others’ emotions, you must first cultivate awareness.

Empathy isn’t about agreeing with someone or fixing their problems. It’s about being present enough to notice cues, feel what they’re going through, and respond in a way that makes them feel seen.

Empathy is grounded in mindful, active listening – giving someone your full attention while listening to understand, not just to reply. You’re also listening for more than words: for tone, body language, and emotional patterns.

To take this further, focus on curiosity over judgment, and practice both paraphrasing and asking open-ended questions.

Examples:

• Exploring a situation: “Can you tell me more about your experience with that?”

• Emotional impact: “How do you feel about that?”

• Motivation: “What would you like to achieve in this situation?”

• Understanding: “What challenges do you see?”

• Evoking change: “What are the potential positive or negative consequences of that?”

Here’s a checklist for mindful, active listening:

• Take a deep breath as the interaction begins – feel your feet on the floor or hands together to ground yourself.

• Bring full attention to the person as if they’re your meditation object.

• Listen to understand; ask open-ended questions.

• Paraphrase what you hear to confirm understanding.

• Listen for emotion and tone, not just words.

• Share authentically but hold space for the other person.

Practice for Emotional Intelligence: Social-Relational Awareness

Think of someone you have rapport and trust with who may be open to letting you practice with active listening. Explain to them you’re working on your listening skills. Ask them if they have anything that they’ve been thinking about that they could use some time to talk through or think about (don’t pick the most dramatic difficult problem ever).

Set aside 10 minutes with them. Invite them to discuss it. Start with something like this: “okay I’m going to do my best to really listen to you – what’s on your mind?”

Then implement the above checklist as you go.

At the end, reflect on how it felt and ask them how it felt. What went well and what could you improve in the future?

From this place of awareness we have recognized our own emotion and the emotional context of others. So how do we respond?

Let’s start with the quadrant of Self-Management.

I like this practical framework based on the thinking of scholar and Buddhist monk Matthieu Ricard. Here are three strategies to deal with negative emotions.

1. Harness

2. Dissolve

3. Make into…

I remember it as HDMI…

Harness means using emotion productively – not unleashing it. Emotions are energy. You can direct that energy constructively. Say you’re angry at your partner for showing up late. Instead of snapping, harness it to communicate respectfully: “When you’re late, it makes me feel…” Then sit on it, edit it later, and share calmly if needed.

The same goes for outrage. Destructive if it leads to arguments, but powerful if channeled into volunteering or advocacy.

Dissolve means seeing the emotion for what it is and letting it fade. Label it and watch it dissipate. I once heard of a monk who suffered panic attacks. It wasn’t until he learned to say “Hello, panic” and observe it arise and fall that he found peace. Emotions are like shadows. Once you turn the light on, they lose their power.

Make into means applying an antidote – transforming the emotion by cultivating its opposite.

• The antidote to hate is love.

• The antidote to anger is peace.

• The antidote to fear is courage.

You can shift emotions through both mind (focus) and body (physiology).

Feeling stressed? List ten things you’re grateful for (mind) and fake laugh for sixty seconds (body).

Feeling anxious? Bring attention to sights and sounds around you (mind) and take ten deep breaths (body).

Feeling angry? Watch a funny video (mind) and jump up and down for thirty seconds (body).

You have far more control than you think. If no one’s around, hold a pen between your teeth (forcing a smile), take a deep breath, and do jazz hands for ten seconds. You can’t do that without feeling a little lighter.

Practice for Emotional Intelligence: Self-Management

We all tend to have one or two negative emotions we gravitate towards. I never really get angry or depressed but I often get neurotic stress and what I call “achiever anxiety” to get stuff done. Identify what is your negative emotion “greatest hit”?

Now, what is the opposite of that emotion? There’s no “right answer”. Maybe the opposite of rage is serenity. Maybe the opposite of depressed is excited. Maybe the opposite of anxious is grateful.

What is one physical antidote and one mental antidote you can apply to yourself when you are feeling that state? Example – when I am feeling angry, I will apply serenity by saying a short prayer and relaxing my shoulders. When I am feeling depressed, I will jump up and down for 10 seconds then think of something I’m looking forward to for 20 seconds. When I am feeling anxious, I will list three things I am grateful for and do three long exhalations.

Next time you feel this negative emotion actually stop and apply your antidote. See if you can do it a few times in the next few days and note the impact.

This takes us to the intersection of social-relational and regulation: Relationship Management. The Relationships section of the book dives into this so for the sake of an organizing structure we will not go too deep here. But there is one core idea that we can examine to round out our mastery of emotional intelligence.

You bring the weather.

This is how I summarize the art and science of the relationship management piece. Quite literally, you shape the emotional climate and the felt tone of every interaction you engage in.

Social emotional contagion explains how emotions spread from one person to another, often unconsciously, through mirror neurons. When we observe someone expressing an emotion, our brains activate similar neural patterns, especially in areas tied to empathy and emotion regulation (like the anterior insula and amygdala). This automatic mimicry and synchronization help us “catch” others’ emotional states, aligning our mood and behavior with theirs. It’s a key part of how humans connect and coordinate socially, but it also means that emotional environments are essentially contagious.

Thus, with intention, you can actively shape the weather of that interaction with respect to the emotional context so that it serves you and serves them. If you notice the interaction is overly negative or unproductive, you can shift your emotional posture to try and uplift the mood. Going into an interaction, you can try to generate an internal state that’s maybe 10% more excited or upbeat than you normally would be.

I’m not saying be inauthentic here. Rather, you’re being intentional with the weather you wish to bring to your relationships.

Practice for Emotional Intelligence Relationship-Management

Think ahead to an interaction or meeting you have coming up. What would be the optimal emotional weather for that scenario? As you engage with this person or group, think of being 10% more outgoing, confident, relaxed, stern (whatever you’ve elected is the optimal weather). Do this through changing your body, your speech, and your inner emotional state. Try to bring the weather to this interaction.

Afterwards, take some notes. Did it feel different? Did people react differently? How can you practice this consistently?

We’ve covered a lot in this section and there is still more to come. But if you start with mindfulness and emotional intelligence you have so much power to control your moment to moment experience and psychological state.

There’s nothing truly “outside” of that to experience. If you’re a multimillionaire and you spend all day stressed and anxious, what’s the quality of life there? Rich and miserable. Your experience of reality passes through your psychological state.

So, how do we experience more of the positive and less of the negative in our day-to-day, moment-to-moment experience? First, it’s worth saying that we should be careful when categorizing emotions as “positive” and “negative” or “good” and “bad.” If you’re nervous before a talk and it compels you to prepare, is that negative? If you’re grieving the death of a friend, is that bad? We don’t want to attach too much judgment to any emotion, and we don’t want to get in the habit of obsessing over the positive while repressing the negative. But at the same time, there’s a place for discernment. We can ask: are certain states beneficial or not? Do they serve us? Are they pleasing or painful?

And on the whole, we’d like a greater balance of useful, nourishing, pleasant psychological states – and to limit destructive, diminishing, painful ones. Fair enough?

The main way we can do this is through emotional intelligence – which starts with mindfulness.

Mindfulness: Be Where Your Feet Are.

There’s a lot of suspect research out there about what actually leads to happiness. But one of the most robust, well-constructed studies comes from the paper “A Wandering Mind Is an Unhappy Mind” by Killingsworth and Gilbert.

The title gives it away: the more your mind wanders, the less happy you are. Conversely, a focused mind leads to higher levels of happiness.

This paper, published in Science, studied a sample of 2,250 adults and devised a way to contact them throughout their daily lives.

The primary questions they asked were: What are you doing? and What are you feeling? For example, someone might respond, “I’m cleaning up the house,” or “I’m watching TV,” or “I’m doing work tasks,” or “I’m exercising.” These were real-life, natural environments – not laboratory conditions.

Then they asked about emotional state – happy, unhappy, or neutral. And interestingly, they also asked where attention was: were participants focused on what they were doing or distracted by something else?

So, you have three points of inquiry: What are you doing? What are you feeling? And where is your attention?

They found that regardless of activity type, the tendency to mind-wander – to have attention drift from the current activity – predicted lower happiness. Most fascinating: this was true even during unpleasant activities. It was better to remain present or focused on the task – even if you didn’t necessarily enjoy it.

They also examined whether the mind tends to wander toward pleasant or unpleasant things. Interestingly, we tend to mind-wander toward pleasant topics about 43% of the time, unpleasant ones about 27% of the time, and neutral ones about 30%.

But – and this is crucial – even when minds wandered to pleasant topics, people were no happier than when they were simply focused on their current activity. Being focused on what we’re doing is incredibly potent for happiness. Regardless of whether the activity itself is pleasant or not, and regardless of whether the mind is wandering to pleasant or unpleasant thoughts, we are better off when we’re present with whatever we’re doing.

That may sound counterintuitive. You might think that if you’re doing something unpleasant and your mind wanders to something enjoyable, you’d be happier. But that’s not the case. The researchers’ evidence strongly suggests that mind-wandering is the cause – not the consequence – of negative emotions.

When we’re not focused, not present, and not engaged, we tend to be less happy. So, what can we do about it?

The paper itself doesn’t go too far into that, but it sets us up to discuss meditation and mindfulness practice.

Mindfulness meditation is essentially training your “attention muscle.” Now, “the mind is a muscle” is an oversimplification of neuroscience, but it’s a useful analogy.

Imagine focusing on your breathing. Your mind wanders into thoughts of the day, lunch plans, and your to-do list, and then you bring it back to your breathing. Every time you bring it back, you’ve just done a repetition. You’ve grabbed the wandering mind and anchored your attention back to where you want it. You’ve regulated your attention. As you do this over and over again, it reshapes and rewires your neural circuitry to have a greater tendency toward attentiveness in the present moment with more capacity to regulate one’s own attention.

Let’s briefly examine the mechanism behind this.

Remember the piano study I mentioned at the beginning of the book in our discussion of neuroplasticity and learning?

In that study, volunteers practiced a simple piano rhythm for two hours per day for five days. (1) They wore a metal strip running from the crown of the head toward each ear through which a brief magnetic pulse was sent to detect neuron activity (the patterns of activity in the brain). After a week of practice, they found that the activation area of the brain corresponding to the piano-playing muscles had rapidly expanded.

This was in line with other observations of neuroplasticity – the brain changes based on how it’s used. It allocates more neurological resources to a given brain area the more that area is used.

In the piano study, the experimenters took another step. They had a second group just think about practicing the piano for two hours per day.

Surprisingly, this thought-only group showed just as much reorganization and increased activity around the piano-playing muscles as the group that had actually played the piano. This speaks to the power of thought alone to produce significant changes in the physical brain.

Now, meditation is distinct from thinking or visualizing, but it shows that we can intentionally direct the development of our brains – even when we’re not “doing anything.” Meditation may seem like doing nothing, but it’s practicing a certain mode of being: “awareness that arises through paying attention, on purpose, in the present moment, nonjudgmentally” (quoting Jon Kabat-Zinn).

When we practice mindfulness, we’re intentionally spending time in the mode of awareness, openness, curiosity, and attention. This causes a gradual “rewiring” of the brain to naturally favor this state. That’s what’s really meant to happen in a bout of meditation.

Here are a few popular science references that explain this (if the spirit moves you):

• Mindful Meditation and the Brain from psychologist Shauna Shapiro, Greater Good Science Center (YouTube)

• How the Brain Rewires Itself by Sharon Begley, TIME Magazine palousemindfulness.com/docs/brain-rewires.pdf

• How Meditation Changes the Brain from neuroscientist Sara Lazar (TEDx, YouTube)

Nearly anything can be meditation if we get the fundamental mechanism right: bringing your attention back again and again to something in the present.

Meditation starts with an object of meditation to anchor your attention to. This can be breath, body, sounds, movement (e.g., yoga or walking), or even awareness itself. Notice each of these “objects of attention” exists in the present. You can only breathe in and out right here, right now. Your mind, on the other hand, can be back ten years ago, or at dinner last night, or in your meeting three hours from now. Every time you lose awareness of your object of attention, you come back to it.

So, I’m sitting on my cushion focusing on my breathing. I realize I’m ten minutes into a fantasy about something or other, and I go back to breathing. I’m doing walking meditation and realize that I’m planning my lunch. I go back to walking.

Every time you bring yourself back to the object of meditation, that’s like a repetition on the bench press. It’s a rep of building your focus, awareness, or mindfulness “muscle.” In fact, the thing that most people miss with meditation – that leads them to think they “can’t do it” – is that every time you fail, you actually succeed. Every time you notice your attention has wandered off and you bring it back, you’ve just engaged in attention regulation. As you do that again and again, you build your capacity for attentiveness.

And I estimate that in a 10-minute bout, you might experience this forty or more times.

The nature of the mind is to secrete thoughts just as your salivary glands constantly secrete saliva. So again, it’s not about “clearing your mind” or relaxing necessarily. If you have no thoughts for more than five minutes, you’re probably sleeping (or worse).

It’s about noticing and observing your own attention so that you can bring it back to the present again and again. In doing this, you effectively train your awareness. As the titan of psychology William James said, “The education of attention would be an education par excellence.”

Any activity that you engage in with this intention becomes meditation. When you wash dishes, washing the dishes is meditation. Every time you drift into thought or daydream, come back to the dishes. When you’re playing with your kids or hanging with your friends – being there for your kids or friends is the meditation. When you’re eating or lying down for bed – two of the most wonderful forms of meditation – those are the objects of meditation.

To summarize what we’ve discussed: mind-wandering reduces happiness. Staying with our theme of study and practice, we can address that. With regular mindfulness practice (meditation), we can develop a greater capacity to remain engaged in the present moment.

In fact, 13 minutes per day over eight weeks decreased negative mood states and enhanced attention, working memory, and recognition memory, while decreasing anxiety scores on the TSST. (2)

Brief instructions for mindfulness practice.

Make and schedule a simple plan for daily practice. For example, I will do seated meditation for 15 minutes before breakfast on a cushion in my living room because I want to experience my life more fully. I will do a 20 minute walking meditation at 8am on the street outside my house because I want to learn to be where my feet are. I will listen to a guided meditation for 25 minutes on my way home from work in my car at 5:30 because I know it will bring me happiness.

Remember going from knowing to doing with a clear implementation plan is key!

As you begin, simply bring your attention to your breathing, to your footsteps, or to the instructions in the audio if you’re following along with one. Pay attention. And whenever your mind wanders off (it will!) gently bring your attention back to the object of focus. As you do this, have a little attitude of celebration - because you just did the meditation. Continue on and bring the attention back again and again. If you really struggle with the simple walking or breathing consider breathing to a count: 4-6 seconds in, 8-10 out or counting steps to 10 then starting over.

Upon completing your time period (which is best marked with a timer) smile and acknowledge your practice session.

For further support in starting and sticking with meditation, consider reading How to Stick to Meditation by Jackson Kerchis.

(1) Pascual-Leone A. The brain that plays music and is changed by it. Ann N Y Acad Sci. 2001 Jun;930:315-29. doi: 10.1111/j.1749-6632.2001.tb05741.x.

(2) Basso JC, McHale A, Ende V, Oberlin DJ, Suzuki WA. Brief, daily meditation enhances attention, memory, mood, and emotional regulation in non-experienced meditators. Behav Brain Res. 2019 Jan 1;356:208-220. doi: 10.1016/j.bbr.2018.08.023. Epub 2018 Aug 25. PMID: 30153464.

The general advice here is to eat actual food. Have you ever considered that most of what we eat is not food? It’s some sort of hyper-industrial manufactured widget.

Take the humble fruit snack. What on Earth have we done? Instead of eating fruit, we decided to grow a bunch of different agricultural products, process them into raw materials, take some industrial waste to make Red 40 and other colorings, then use an injection molding system to recreate a cartoon caricature of the original fruit, wrap it in plastic, and sell that.

We could have just eaten the damn fruit!?

It’s ridiculous. So, suffice it to say, I recommend you eat mostly single-ingredient, unprocessed foods. Here’s a simple rule for weight loss and health: if it doesn’t have a face or it doesn’t grow, don’t eat it. Focus on eating things you would find outside or on a farm.

To this point, research by Dr. Felice Jacka and Dr. Ruut Veenhoven suggests that healthy eating (whole foods like fruits and vegetables) is associated with greater happiness. Dr. Jacka often explains it as the “food and mood connection.” (1)

So, taking our simple approach, let’s give some more research based guidelines.

There’s a lot of controversy in nutrition: should you do keto, paleo, vegan, or whatever? The research I’ve seen suggests simplicity wins again.

The common ground with many of these diets is more fiber and more protein. Just about every study of mortality risk and fiber finds that more fiber is better. More fruits and vegetables are great for your health, and one of the main reasons they’re so important is that they help you feel full. (2)

A major cause of the obesity epidemic is the proliferation of high–caloric-density foods. You could eat three Hershey kisses or you could eat an entire handful of grapes and get the same calories.

Even if you were to keep your same diet but, before each meal, drink a glass of water and eat one large apple, it could do wonders for you. You’ll feel fuller for longer and naturally limit your caloric intake.

The same pattern holds for healthy proteins. Not only does protein help you feel satiated, it’s important for maintaining muscle mass, and the creatine it contains supports brain health.

The ideal amount of protein is probably above the government’s recommended daily allowance and below the “golden rule of bodybuilding” of one gram per pound. Studies show that beyond about 0.69 grams per pound, the effects of additional protein on muscle protein synthesis are essentially nonexistent. (3) So, let’s say, aim for something like 0.7 grams per pound. If you weigh 150 pounds, that’s about 105 grams – that’s still quite a bit more than most people eat. Aim for roughly 35 grams per meal. That could look like five eggs for breakfast, a protein shake at lunch, and a chicken breast with dinner.

Once you use protein and fiber as your pillars, you can layer in your remaining calories with complex carbohydrates and healthy fats based on your ideal weight. You can go that route if you want, but keeping it simple, take your ideal weight and multiply it by 0.7 to get your protein target in grams. Then divide that by three for each meal. Eat that amount of protein with a generous serving of fiber (fruits and vegetables) at every meal, and you’ll go far.

For optimal health and happiness, you don’t need a fancy crash diet. Focus on eating real foods rich in protein and fiber, and ensure you don’t consume too many calories, as that undermines physical health.

On the hydration front, your needs will vary depending on your age, weight, activity level, indoor temperature, and a constellation of other factors. But 50 to 80 ounces of water per day is a good bet – roughly one and a half glasses with each meal.

1. Felice Jacka’s Lab FoodandMoodCentre.com

2. Ramezani, F., Pourghazi, F., Eslami, M., Gholami, M., Mohammadian Khonsari, N., Ejtahed, H.-S., Larijani, B., & Qorbani, M. (2024). Dietary fiber intake and all‑cause and cause‑specific mortality: An updated systematic review and meta‑analysis of prospective cohort studies. Clinical Nutrition, 43(1), 65–83. doi.org/10.1016/j.clnu.2023.11.005

3. Tagawa R, Watanabe D, Ito K, Otsuyama T, Nakayama K, Sanbongi C, Miyachi M. Synergistic Effect of Increased Total Protein Intake and Strength Training on Muscle Strength: A Dose-Response Meta-analysis of Randomized Controlled Trials. Sports Med Open. 2022 Sep 4;8(1):110.

I do this to serve you as I find this formulation from the author Steven Pressfield most useful.

You’re due to write an essay, tackle a big project, figure out your career, have that tough conversation, go to the gym, start meditating, etc. and the moment comes…

And you just can’t quite seem to do it…

It’s as if some invisible force is interrupting you, pushing you away, or feeding you distractions.

Resistance is the powerful, universally experienced force that keeps individuals from realizing their potential. Resistance is elicited most commonly by any action that rejects immediate gratification in favor of long-term growth, health, or integrity. Or, expressed another way, any act that derives from our higher nature instead of our lower.

It is the insidious force that, somehow seemingly by magic, keeps you from doing the work you know you ought to do. Rationalization is Resistance’s secret weapon. It comes when faced with the following (including but not limited to)...

• Any creative calling writing, painting, music, film, etc.

• Launching any new venture

• Any diet or health regime

• Any efforts designed to overcome an unwholesome habit or addiction

• Education

• Any act of political, moral, or ethical courage, including the decision to change for the better some unworthy pattern or conduct in ourselves

To overcome Resistance…

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In an interview with the pioneering professor of Happiness Studies, Tal Ben-Shahar, he was asked what he thought was the most important thing for happiness. I was surprised by his answer.

He said that if he were a therapist, the first thing he’d ask every client is, “Are you exercising?” He explained that it’s not even about exercise making you feel better, so to speak. As humans, we are meant to move. If you’re not exercising regularly, you’re not even at a baseline level for mood, focus, and energy.

This claim is backed up by science. Studies suggest that exercise is as effective as prescription antidepressants. (1) Neuroscience offers an explanation for how exercise improves mood, energy, and brain health (see Wendy Suzuki’s TED Talk).

A final perspective comes from Peter Attia, MD – he is one of the world’s top experts on longevity and human performance. He explains that exercise is the most effective elixir we have for overall health. “Exercise might be the most potent ‘drug’ we have for extending the quality – and perhaps quantity – of our years of life.”

When we think about exercise there are really three main areas to note. If you’re a fitness enthusiast, pro athlete, exercise physiologist, etc. I apologize in advance as I keep this simple.

You want to train mobility (think flexibility, injury prevention, stability, etc.), cardiovascular capacity, and resistance (strength, hypertrophy which means bigger muscles, power, etc.).

So here is a simple guideline. If you do this you’ll be in a pretty high percentile of physical fitness. I want you to (almost) every day break a sweat and/or move heavy things.

The DHS, CDC, and most other physician-informed guidelines suggest 2.5 to 3 hours of moderate-intensity exercise per week as a healthy minimum.

That may sound like a lot, but think: 36 minutes, five days per week, gets you to three hours.

Those sessions should be some combination of moderate cardio where you break a sweat and full body resistance training. Aim for Zone 2 cardio primarily which is about 75% of your max heart rate – you can look up that figure for your age and gender. And aim for about 8 sets per muscle group per week in the 10 or so rep range. These should be pretty hard sets where you approach failure (if you’re physically able to do so safely). Then once every week or two, I suggest VO₂ max cardio, which is just a different sort of cardiovascular training. It is tapping into your maximal heart capacity. VO₂ max, like the sleep data above, is associated with reductions in all-cause mortality. Again, it’s hard to be happy if you’re dead. A good VO₂ max protocol is the “Swedish 4x4,” which is four minutes pushing yourself at 90% of max heart rate, then four minutes of rest, repeated four times.

Lastly, mix in a bit of daily stretching, yoga, or mobility work.

Here are two sample programs, but again, you can keep it simple to start: 5 days per week at 40 minutes each or 3 hours per week total. Move your body: break a sweat and lift heavy things. Follow that as the main objective and suit it to your context, physical abilities, and needs. And of course, consult your physician before beginning a new exercise program.

Your ideal program will vary. Consider working with a trainer or physician to develop the right plan for you. And if you want to go above and beyond, you might incorporate heat and cold exposure into this routine, as both sauna use (20–60 minutes per week) and cold exposure (~50°F water for 3–5 minutes) are associated with improved mood and health.

But one more time, let’s keep it real simple: call it three hours or so per week breaking a sweat with cardio and/or lifting heavy things—and once in a while, push your VO₂ max. Or, of course, just start with more than you’re doing now!

1. Babyak M, Blumenthal JA, Herman S, Khatri P, Doraiswamy M, Moore K, Craighead WE, Baldewicz TT, Krishnan KR. Exercise treatment for major depression: maintenance of therapeutic benefit at 10 months. Psychosom Med. 2000 Sep-Oct;62(5):633-8. doi: 10.1097/00006842-200009000-00006.

— Jackson

• He explains that “the heart of business is the idea of purs…

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Sleep is probably the most important, highest-ROI activity for happiness and high performance.

And it’s most neglected. Every time I think about investment bankers and consultants billing their clients upwards of $200 per hour whilst running on 5 hours of sleep, it makes me shudder. When I hear about our most elite special forces operators running on a few hours of sleep for weeks at a time (when it is not a tactical demand or part of intentional training), I have the same reaction.

What if we just lit our money on fire instead? At least it would be a bit more enjoyable than walking around like a sleep-deprived zombie…

Christie Aschwanden is a journalist with a focus on science writing. She said in one interview: “If I could give you my Top 3 Recovery Strategies they would be: sleep, sleep & sleep.”

Top sleep scientist Matthew Walker said, “Sleep is the greatest legal performance enhancing drug that most people are neglecting.”

And a less “scientific” reference here, Robert Heinlein, an aeronautical engineer and one of the most prolific science fiction authors of all time quipped, “Happiness consists in getting enough sleep. Just that, nothing more.”

So why are the experts (and one random but super brilliant guy) saying this? (1)

• ⅔ of adults worldwide do not get the recommended 8 hours of sleep per night.

• “This study [sleeping 5 hours per night over 5 days] found that skipping sleep reduces a young man’s testosterone levels by the same amount as aging 10 to 15 years.”

• An observational study of 23,000 adults in Greece showed switching from an afternoon nap to a traditional Western schedule led to a 37% increase in heart disease.

• Roughly 1.2 million car crashes occur in the US each year from drowsy driving.

• Less than 6 hours of sleep per night causes a 40% increased risk of cancer.

• The sleep-deprived ate, on average, 300 more calories per day translating to an extra 10-15 pounds of body weight per year

• SAT tests for one school district rose 26% when they moved start time back 65 minutes.

• Overall, short sleep predicts higher incidence of mental health issues and all-cause mortality (e.g. likelihood of death).

It’s hard to be happy when you’re sick, dumb, and dead. So prioritize sleep.

Here are the main things you need to know to optimize your sleep. (2)

Sleep needs vary from person to person but the minimum is 7 hours. Many need more like 9. If you are – or care for – school-aged children they need 10+ hours and preschool-aged children need 11+ hours. Newborns – should sleep 16+ hours per day. Another parenting note, due to the hormonal effects of puberty, teenagers have an altered biological clock pushing them towards wanting to stay up later and sleep in. Older adults have a shift in the other direction. But that said, we should bust an important sleep myth: there is no evidence that older adults need less sleep than younger adults (not referring to teens and children, of course).

Average sleep efficiency is about 85% for adults. This means that to hit your seven hour sleep goal you should be in bed for eight hours and 20 minutes.

Think you can cheat yourself on sleep and make up for it on the weekends? Think again. Recovering your sleep debt is better than nothing, but it doesn’t make up for physical and mental impairments from chronically insufficient sleep.

Quality of sleep is as important as quantity.

Caffeine has a half-life of about 10 hours, so your last sip should be about 10 hours before bed (Not-so-fun fact: diet cola has about 55 grams of caffeine in a can – that’s half a cup of coffee, and a full cup if you drink an entire bottle). Nicotine is also a stimulant that disturbs sleep. And alcohol, while it can make it easier to fall asleep, prevents REM sleep and often leads to waking in the middle of the night. Finally, as great as it is, avoid intense exercise within 2 hours of bed.

As the body falls asleep, core temperature lowers, so having a cool room can be helpful. Taking a hot bath or shower also helps as your core temperature drops when you get out which can produce sleepiness. Limit screens and stimulating devices as well.

Finally, your sleep regularity is important for sleep health. Try to keep a consistent bedtime and wake time. Consider designing a 30-minute wind-down routine triggered by a “bedtime alarm,” just like you have a wake up alarm. During this period, if you are a troubled sleeper, try a relaxation or mindfulness technique. Physiological sighs (I’ll explain later, but Google it if you want to try it), body scan meditation (same), and journaling (brain dump thoughts and to-do’s on paper) are helpful.

I know that many of us are not in the privileged position to maximize our sleep. If you’re pulling back to back shift work jobs just to make ends meet, or raising a newborn, all I can really say is – sorry, try to do your best.

Let’s get a practice set up.

Create your sleep routine or pick a sleep habit. Write out your plan and get it into your schedule.

Here is an example: Schedule your wind-down routine with an alarm at 9:30 p.m. Lights out (or dimmed). Do a relaxation technique, read for 10 minutes, then take a hot shower. You’re in bed in a cool, dark, quiet room by 10 p.m. Your wake-up alarm is set for 7 a.m. You do your best to do this every night and adjust as needed. Upon waking you immediately try to get sunlight in your eyes (outside) or turn on bright overhead lights.

Three bonuses on sleep…

1. Studies show even just light exposure impacts mental health. One study found exposure to blue light during sleeping hours was associated with impaired mental health. And others have shown bright light or sunlight in the morning is beneficial for regulating your hormonal rhythms. (3)

2. If you struggle with sleep apnea (chronic snoring), please get a sleep study done.

3. Sleeping pills are not the solution. See a summary here: HealthRising.org — Why We Sleep Pt II: Walker on the Dark Side of Sleeping Pills – Plus a CBT That Works?

References

1. These data points are from Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker. I can’t say he is the “best” because I’m not a world class sleep scientist, but he’s probably the most well-known expert on sleep science.

2. This draws from several evidence-based summaries: Health.Harvard.edu/topics/sleep, NHS.uk How to Fall Asleep Faster and Sleep Better, NIH.gov Healthy Sleep PDF.

3. This study is pre-print meaning it still needs peer review: doi.org/10.1101/2022.10.16.22280934