How to find your faith

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You shouldn't care about your feelings so much.

Feelings are liars.

They lie to you.

You will never get anywhere with that.

Feeling, belief, practice is the wrong order of operations.

The way to actually bring this into your life, to get the benefits that I've talked about

before, is to start with practice.

Practice first, feel later.

And I want to give you a three-part plan to actually explore parts of your life that

may have been unexplored.

Welcome to Office Hours, I'm Arthur Brooks.

This is a show about love and happiness, about faith and hope, about your life, how you

can make it better, using science and ideas, and how you can bring these ideas to other

people.

I want you to be a teacher of well-being.

That's what I am.

That's literally how I make my living.

And I need people with me in this, whether you're doing it for a living or not, the information

that I give you in this show is based in science.

I'm not trying to make you into a behavioral scientist like I am, but I want you have enough

information that you can share these ideas in the spirit of public education, but more

importantly in the spirit of bringing the best life to the most people.

That's the world that we want, and we need to do that together.

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Today, I want to talk to you about faith and spirituality.

This is a topic that people have been asking about and asking about since the inception

of this podcast and today I'm bringing it to you.

Why?

Because this is one of the most important ways for you to find more meaning in your life.

And as you know, this is the topic that I'm all about these days because that's my new

book, the meaning of your life, finding purpose in an age of emptiness.

That's it back there.

That's the meaning of your life.

That's my new book.

And faith and spirituality, or at least life philosophy, are one of the most important

powerful ways that you can invite more meaning into your life.

And that is one of the most important ways that you can become happier.

Do you know the meaning of your life?

If you don't, or at least you don't enough, then this episode is really going to be for

you.

Now, I'll fold this closer.

Let me talk to you about faith in my own life.

And the reason I do this is because I want to know what you know where I'm coming from.

I am a traditional practicing Roman Catholic.

I go to Mass every day.

Now, that hasn't been the case every year of my life.

On the contrary, I was raised in a pretty traditional Christian home.

Protestants, as a matter of fact, I had a mystical experience when I was 15 years old,

the Shrine of Guadalupe in Mexico, where I discovered I was Catholic.

Some say it's adolescent rebellion.

My parents said, well, I guess it beats drugs.

One way or the other, I became Catholic, and I'm really glad that I did.

It's really worked for me.

I also married a Catholic girl, and we built a family that is practicing in our Catholic

faith.

It's really important to me.

It's a really important source of meaning.

It's a source of consolation and times of trouble.

It's the way that I can connect with a lot of other people.

It's sense-making in so many different ways.

But I'm not going to tell you that my path is your path on the contrary.

What I'm going to tell you is you need to find your path, whatever that happens to

be.

I invite you to try mine.

It's great.

But I want you to find yours.

That's what I'm really all about in this episode.

I'm not trying to convert you to my particular religion.

I want to talk to you about the effects of religion per se and non-traditional experiences

that are spiritual and even philosophical experiences that expand your understanding

of coherence, why things happen the way they do, purpose, why you're doing what you're

doing and significance why your life matters by using parts of your brain that you typically

don't use when you're just going about your daily business and surfing and scrolling

Instagram and doing all the kinds of stuff that you ordinarily do.

I want you to actually explore parts of your life that may have been unexplored.

Now, let's start with the data on faith and spirituality.

It's in decline.

It has been for a long time.

Examples in Gen Z have been more likely than any generation since we've been keeping

data of declaring their religious affiliation as none.

And I don't mean NUN, like wearing a habit.

No, not that kind of nut.

N-O-N-E, none, like no religious affiliation.

That was really unusual back in the day.

I was born in 1964, do the math.

I'm old.

And in 1964, 1% of the American population listed none as their religious affiliation.

Not much.

1% is a very low number.

Today, especially for people under 35, it's in the low 30s of people that are saying,

and it's going, it's been going up for quite a long time.

One caveat on that coming up.

Now, I'm not regretting that.

I'm just reporting that.

You decide whether that's a good or bad thing or whether it's neutral.

In general, Americans are still far more likely than people in other developed nations to

practice religious behavior.

So if 30, something, 30 low, 30s, 32% of millennials, for example, say none, that still means

that most don't say none.

And traditionally, we find that 25% to 30% of Americans attend some sort of weekly religious

observance.

That's way higher than most countries.

I mean, there are countries where it's much higher, like the Philippines, for example,

is a much more religious country than the United States.

But the United States, compared to Europe, for example, is far and away more religious.

I lived in Barcelona.

I have lived in Barcelona, often on, for 35 years, as a matter of fact.

And in Barcelona, 3% of the population goes to religious services every week.

That surprises a lot of people, like Spain, such a Catholic country.

No, no, no, no.

It's a post-Christian country, to a very large extent.

3% is like Denmark, for example.

And the United States is trending in that direction, is the way that they go.

Some people really celebrate that, I think, because they think

religion is a bad thing.

I'm going to try to make a case that whatever your religion and observance of that religion

is, that religion on its face is a generally very good thing for you, for your sense of

life's meaning, or spirituality, or whatever it is that we're talking about in your case.

In 2017, the Pew Research Center, the gold standard for research in the United States

on these topics, in 2017, 18% of Americans claimed to be neither spiritual or religious.

48% said they were both in 27%, they said they were spiritual, but not religious.

I don't think there's very many people who say they're religious, but not spiritual, for

some reason.

So that's kind of what the sort of what the lay of the land is, but once again, that's

higher when it comes to non-spiritual, non-religious than we've seen in the past.

People, scientists, people in my job have always predicted that our societies can move

toward secularization.

They've been saying that since the onset of the Enlightenment, and it seems to be at

least recently coming true.

Well, until just very recently, more than that in a second.

The percentage of the U.S. adult saying religion is important in their daily life, fell

17 points from 66% in 2015 to 49% in 2025.

It's the largest 10-year drop that polling organizations have seen before.

Now, here's the little caveat to that.

Some of these gallup and pew in other places have started to see a little uptick, just

a little kind of little fish hook at the bottom of this downward trend, especially among

men in their 20s, which are really interesting findings that we're starting to see.

Men in their 20s are more likely than before to be practicing a traditional religion.

That's starting to uptick a little bit.

We don't know.

Is that a beginning of a trend?

Is that a blip?

Is that a statistical anomaly?

With women, it's still going down, but with men, it started to tick back up again.

Time will tell what actually that means, but the general story has been one of decline

in religious activity.

Now, why do we care about this?

This brings me, and we're going right to the science here, because this stuff is so

cool, as you're going to see.

This brings me to the work of a friend and colleague of mine who teaches at Columbia

University.

This is Lisa Miller.

She's a psychologist and neuroscientist at Columbia who studies the brain on faith.

How faith affects neurological activity is what she studies.

It's really interesting the stuff that she does.

For example, she shows a lot of the benefits that having religious experiences of all

types actually have.

In the experiment, I'm going to put this in the show notes, by the way, this is the

book to read.

It's a awakened brain, the new science of spirituality, and the quest for an inspired

life.

It's a great book.

I really strongly recommend this book.

She is practicing, she practices Judaism very quite seriously.

Last year, I was giving a Sukkot meditation at Temple Bethelochem in the outskirts of

Boston in Welsley in terms that she was watching me online of all things, and she said,

not bad for Catholic.

Anyway, she has found in her research that if you remember a spiritual experience versus

remembering a stressful experience, that memory of a spiritual experience, which mimics

the spiritual experience itself, it activates the medial phalamus, which is a region of

the brain associated with emotional processing.

In other words, you're having a unique emotional experience just from the experience or memory

of an experience of something spiritual.

So in other words, there are unique, neurocognitive experiences that come from spirituality, they

come from religion.

This is what she finds in her work over and over again.

Similar work shows that spirituality is linked with a part of the brain called a periaqueductal

gray.

That's a brainstem region.

That's an ancient part of the brain that's associated with a moderation of fear and

pain and feelings of love.

About that.

In other words, less fear, less pain, more love when you're having spiritual experiences

is what happens.

In this primordial part of the brain, the reptilian brain itself.

Now this is in accord with a finding that a lot of anthropologists have suggested, which

is that human beings are made to worship in some way, shape, or form.

They're all made to worship the same way, and certainly that has changed over time.

The assertion is that there's never been an organized group of homo sapiens that has

not had religious experience.

We're just born for it, and this work by Lisa Miller and different neuroscientists suggests

why that is, which is that these spiritual experiences, they come with ancient parts

of the brain.

We have onboard capacity.

We have onboard processing that naturally occurs.

Using stuff, using electroencephalogram technology that are on memories of strong spiritual

encounters, and this is among nuns and monks.

We typically see this.

There's a bunch of studies.

Some are on Carmelite nuns, Catholic nuns, and some are on Buddhist monks.

They show a lot of the same results.

One of those that are quite interesting is that when Carmelite, Catholic nuns in one study

are instructed to recall really, really mystical experiences.

These are people who are very adroit at deep prayer.

What happens is very clearly that when people are just good at praying, because they pray

a lot, they have more mystical experiences, because their brains are trained to get into

a translate state when they do that.

When they do or when they even recall their most mystical experiences, they see a significant

increase in theta wave activity in the brain, which is associated with dreaming, which

means that they have experiences that are very different than their conscious experiences

where they have, but they're still awake, all quite interesting, all quite beneficial is

what we see.

In other words, when it comes to your brain, spiritual experiences and religious experiences

are pretty good for you.

Now, over to the psychology side, spirituality protects against depression.

It protects against anxiety.

These are almost blanket statements.

Again, I know, I know.

You're going to write in the comments and I welcome you to talk about your experiences

in which really bad religious experiences, they provoke depressive episodes and generalize

anxiety.

I know almost anything that we do is human beings, we can screw it up.

We're very good at screwing stuff up and that includes religion to be sure.

I'm not talking about that.

I'm talking about, in general, that you have that religious activity, healthy religious

activity, spiritual activity, and even philosophical depth has a neuroprotective effect against major

impressive disorders and generalize anxiety.

It's not perfect.

It's not a silver bullet.

I know lots of very, very religious people who also are being treated as psychiatrically

for major depression, people in my family, under those circumstances, but this is really

a really good adjunct to therapy for sure.

Spirituality and religion are also really good for relationships.

They strengthen the social bonds.

Good 2019 study.

This is in the psychology of religion and spirituality, journal.

2019 study asks 319 people to evaluate statements like, I have a personally meaningful relationship

with God.

That has a strongly negative correlation with loneliness.

The more that you say, I have a good relationship with God, notwithstanding all your other relationships

with people, you're a lot less likely to be lonely.

This is protective against loneliness, or protective against depression, protective against

anxiety, protective against loneliness, and that's the kind of the three-part problem that

we see with the psychogenic epidemic of unhappiness, especially for adults under 30.

There's one thing that I could recommend to a lot of young people who are suffering from

those three maladies that are going together so strongly for people in their 20s today.

It's not just my religion, it's religion and or spirituality and or a deep involvement

in philosophy.

These things are neuroprotective.

So how do you do it?

What are your protocols for that?

Again, I could go on for days talking about the neuroscience and the psychology of all

this, but I think I've made the point.

If you're like me, you actually at this point, you want to get to what to do because here's

the question I got.

I get this in office hours all the time, which is not just the name of my show.

It's kind of what I do with my classes.

That's why I call my call and I show this.

People say, how do I get started?

Maybe I was raised in a completely secular household.

My parents were really non-religious.

I want to do something, but I don't know what to do.

I don't know how to get started.

I don't know even how to think about it or maybe they say I was raised religious, but I

walked away from it.

I didn't like it.

I didn't see it right.

It didn't make sense.

I'm going to talk about that too here in a second and I want to give you a three-part

plan.

Again, you can use this if you're talking about a traditional religion.

You can do this if you're talking about trying to start some sort of a spiritual practice

that's non-religious.

You can do this even if you're trying to get into a mainstream philosophy as an organizing

principle in your life, my old buddy Ryan Holliday, the world's leading expert on popular

stoicism.

I should say stoicism in popular culture.

He's not religious, but he practices stoicism and is tremendously beneficial in much the

same way that religion is in my life.

Either one of those three paths, how do you get started?

Here's the way to do it.

Number one, practice first, feel later.

One of the biggest mistakes that people make about religion and spirituality, about faith,

about philosophy is this.

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To be a person of integrity, I can't do something unless I feel it.

That's wrong in almost everything in life.

That's wrong in your relationships.

You know, if I said, I'm going to be a good husband only when I feel like being a good

husband.

Very good husband very often, quite frankly.

I know what it means to be a good husband.

I fail a lot, but I also do that notwithstanding my feelings because my feelings are very transient.

You know if you watch this show a lot that feelings are a limbic phenomenon.

They're a neurobiological phenomenon.

They're about threats and opportunities that my reptilian brain is sensing out there.

And if I'm relying on my feelings for the way that I'm going to treat the people that

I love the most of my life, I'm going to be horrible as a partner.

Terrible as a family member, a terrible friend.

I don't want to do that.

I want to decide how I'm going to behave, notwithstanding my feelings.

That's what it means to be a self-governing individual.

And the same thing is true with my religious practice.

Like I mentioned before, I go to my house every day, every morning, it's 6.30 when I'm

home with my wife and when I'm on the road, I find a church wherever I am because, you

know, the Catholic church is like Starbucks, it's, you know, a franchise system.

They're easy to find.

So I don't go because I feel like going, I go because I'm decided to go.

And then sometimes I feel it.

So here's the wrong way to understand religion.

You feel these religious things.

And then you develop some actual beliefs.

And after you have your beliefs, then you actually practice that religion.

You will never get anywhere with that.

Feeling, belief, practice is the wrong order of operations.

The way to actually bring this into your life, to get the benefits that I've talked

about before, is to start with practice.

You start with practice, and then you just practice something.

And then you'll develop some belief, some of the time.

And then occasionally you'll have feelings.

That's the way to do it also with your marriage.

That's the way to do it with almost anything that really matters.

With your job, for example, you start by practicing your job.

You start by showing up and doing a good job.

And then you develop beliefs around it.

Sometimes you actually have feelings for it.

And that's the way to live.

So that's how to think about it.

When people say, OK, I grew up in a practicing observant Jewish household.

My students will say to me, for example, and I want to get back into it, but I'll feel it.

What do I do?

I said, I don't care.

I don't care about your feelings.

You shouldn't care about your feelings so much.

Feelings are liars.

They lie to you.

What you do is you start going.

And then on the basis of that, and what you're seeing and hearing and reading, and reading

in your own, and treating as an interesting intellectual experience, you'll develop some

beliefs around it.

And then occasionally, you'll have deep feelings as well.

And that's what it means to actually bring this into your life.

Then the miracle really happens for you.

That's when you start to experience the difference in your peri-aquaductal gray and that stuff in

the brainstem.

It requires a conscious act.

And this is why it's so important to understand that the discipline, the moral aspiration, how

to link to the animal impulses, how the miracle of what we have is minds, bodies, heart,

souls, and brains, how it all hangs together, and this glorious miracle that is each one of us.

This is a classic example of how that actually works.

So run the algorithm in the right direction.

Practice first, feel later.

That's step one of the protocol for bringing more faith, spirituality, or philosophy in your

life.

Get smaller.

What do I mean by that?

Mother Nature, with whom I'm very impressed, obviously, I mean, I talk about all the things

that Mother Nature does all the time, nonetheless lies to you in many ways.

And a case in point is the lie that you're the center of everything.

The psychodrama of your life is me, me, me, me, me, my job, my car, my money, my television

shows, my lunch, it's so boring.

I mean, think how many dreams you had last night.

You were the star of all of them.

If you're left for your devices, you're going to be looking in a mirror all day long.

Why is it that it's hard to pass a mirror?

Because the psychodrama, where you're the star, why is it that you check your notifications

on social media because you want to hear what people are saying about you?

But that will drive you start raving mad.

It will make you effective in some ways to understand your position in the hierarchy

of homo sapiens, I guess, that will make you an expert in social comparison.

But you already know the social comparison is the thief of joy.

You need to actually fight that tendency.

And the way that you do that is not by getting bigger, the world famous star in your psychodrama.

It's getting smaller.

It's a funny thing.

I have worked for the last 12 years, as many of you know, with his holiness, the Dalai Lama.

It's a treasured and beloved relationship for me.

I've learned a huge amount from him.

I've learned a lot about Tibetan Buddhism along the way, which has been incredibly enriching

to me as a person of faith.

But just him as a person, extraordinary.

And as one time he told me that there's this one photo that he saw in 1969 that really

affected it was, oh really what photo effects that Dalai Lama, he says, the photo that was

called Earthrise.

And for those of you who don't know it, go Google it.

This was the first photograph of the Earth taken from the moon.

And you'd see it now, you'd be like, it was like mind-blowing.

My dad told me what he saw.

He just like, he just rocked his world.

Then he saw the world.

He saw the earth from space and it was like this blue orb from the surface of the

moon.

And the Dalai Lama said, it blew him away too.

I said, we didn't say that because he just didn't use that kind of American vernacular.

He said, it was amazing to him.

I said, why?

And he said, because it helped him remember how small he was and what a gift it was to

remember that he was simply one of at the time four billion people, which is important

in and of itself, but that the smallness puts into perspective, what each one of us actually

is.

And he said, it brought him peace and perspective.

Now that's the Dalai Lama, that's me too.

And that's any of us.

And you will see it for yourself.

Why is it that, at most, university is one of the most popular classes is astronomy.

If you ask them, which I have, I've asked undergraduate students, they're like English

majors and communications majors.

Why do you love your astronomy class?

They're like, I don't know.

On Thursday morning, I go in and I'm super stressed out because I had a big argument with

my mom and because my boyfriend is probably going to break up with me.

And an hour and a half later, I come out of my astronomy class and I'm like, I'm a

speck, I'm a speck, I'm a speck, and I'm a piece.

Transcendence is what we need to actually be a piece and to do that, we need to get smaller,

not larger.

One of the best ways to do that is your observance, if you're religious faith or your spirituality,

is to stand in awe of something much, much, much greater than yourself.

This is one of the reasons that when people go to church or their house of worship, that

they feel so much better because they've been small.

Now again, that doesn't mean they're nothing.

I mean, if you're Christian like me or if you're Jewish or you're Muslim or for that

matter, if you're a Hindu, especially, there's this intense love that God has for you.

As you, as an individual, but you're small and in awe compared to the Godhead, compared

to Brahmin, compared to the Creator, the Divine.

And that in and of itself, that smallness creates a perspective on a life that's accurate.

It can put you at peace and it's doing that.

You'll actually experience in that moment many of the benefits and a short-lived, but

it'll give you a little bit of those benefits that I was talking about.

This relief from the melancholia that characterizes our day to day, the anxiety, the loneliness.

That smallness per se will give you this intense kind of equanimity that you may not have

felt in a long time.

That step two is get small.

And here's number three.

Number three is about how to get over what I've found is the biggest barrier that a lot

of people actually have toward religion, which is their own dogma.

We hear all the time about religious people being so unbelievably dogmatic, my way or hell

or whatever, right?

I got no time for that, right?

Obviously, I have no time for that.

I love all of it, really.

I mean, I have my way that I really believe in.

And I'm not making the case here, who is metaphysically right?

That's above my pay grade.

I'm not clergy.

I have my opinions, but that's not the opinions I'm talking about here.

I know as a social scientist that these things are really, really good for you, okay?

And I hear all the time, people who are super dogmatic about their faith, people who are

fanatical, people who are even violent with respect to their faith, and I have the same

opinions that you do about that's horrible, right?

But the kind of dogma that I often see are people who reject faith, unbelievably dogmatically

or spirituality or even, you know, a philosophical life.

There's a rejection about it.

And when it comes back to the nuns that I talked about before, N-O-N-E-S, increasing percentage

of the population, now increasing, especially quickly among women in the 30, this nun

is a dogma in and of itself, this I'm nun.

I've rejected it.

Now, why?

Now, this gets back to the why about why people actually do this.

Gets to the work of a sociologist named James Fowler, who talked about different kinds

of religious experiences that we go through at different phases of life.

He's got all the, like, I think it's five stages of religious observation that typically

happen at different points in our lives.

And one of the things he talks about is why young adults often walk away from the faith.

And what he talks about is generally that there's this cognitive dissonance, whereas a kid

you grow up thinking, for example, if you grow up in a traditional religion, God is good,

it loves you, and God is all merciful, and loves all of us.

And then you look around, you're like, yeah, but starving kids and war and pestilence

and suffering.

So what gives?

You know, what's the deal, right?

And that's an ancient, ancient thing, the book of Job in the Old Testament, where Job

was a righteous man, a man of God, and then God really tests him.

All these horrible things happen to him.

And at the end of the book of Job, he kind of has God in the doc saying, you know, I was

your boy, and I did everything right, and you said it was righteous, and then you did

all these horrible things to me.

Why?

And then what God says is this, God says, and in no small, again, I paraphrasing.

So those of you who are theologians, please forgive me.

God says, well, I mean, yeah, I'll tell you, and they have any direct conversation at

this point, which is awesome.

He says, I'll tell you, but first, you tell me, why did I create the heavens in the earth?

You must know, because you're so smart, I mean, you're so smart, you're asking me for

an explanation about your own little suffering.

So since you're so smart, before I tell you why you suffer, tell me why I created the heavens

in the earth, huh?

Huh?

Smart guy?

Huh?

Huh?

It's awesome.

Yeah, hard to understand, and a lot of young adults walk away from their traditional

faith, because it's, you can't sort that out, right?

But here's the thing, that's why people often come back after 40.

They come back after 40, because they have that joe moment, where they say, you know what?

There's a lot I don't know.

There's a lot I can't figure out.

It's super messy.

Life is super messy.

And since I can't figure out a lot of things that I know exist, I don't know why I would

rule this one out in my life, that ability, that maturity to be able to live with the cognitive

dissonance of a great deal of suffering, including your own, and a theology that, as imperfectly

translated into human terms as it is, talks about God in a particular way, that ambiguity

is something that people tend to be able to live with a little bit better after 40.

And one of the things that makes it harder is if you define yourself as saying, nope, nope.

So step three in the protocol is just don't be none.

At least question that.

I recommend that if you're a traditional religious person, you question it your whole life.

I do.

I interrogate my faith all the time, but I would recommend that you also interrogate

your non-faith.

That's kind of what it means to be fully alive is to be questioning everything, including

all the things that you believe so that you can learn and grow.

And people who don't get tied down to something that they believe when they were 21 are able

to change what they think and live in a way that they find more satisfying and deeper

in all the ways that we're talking here when they're in the 30s.

So step three of the protocol is don't stay tied down to anything because it just might

change.

And as it does, you might just get happier.

Now if you want to know more about the science of this and all the things that we're talking

about here, about the psychology, about the neuroscience, about the philosophy, about

the protocols, go to my book, the meaning of your life, finding purpose in an age of emptiness.

There's a whole chapter on transcendence.

It doesn't just include faith, also spirituality, also philosophy, also charity and love for

other people because that's another way to transcend is by transcending yourself by serving

other people.

So lots, I'm leaving out of this episode here, go read the book if you want to actually

know more about it.

And I promise you, it's not going to be threatening, it's not going to be weird, I'm not going

to be doing something that actually suggests that it is my way or the highway because that's

not the only way.

It depends.

I want you to find yours.

All right.

So modest questions, folks.

Here's one from my old friend Anonymous by email.

In spite of my exercising, spending time with friends, eating a healthy diet, talking

with a therapist, getting good sleep, good for you, my spouse's anxiety and depression

makes me unhappy.

It's just my wife writing it anonymously at this point.

Do you have any suggestions on how I can feel happiness again?

You can't give somebody else happiness, you can't, you can't do it.

And I wish you could.

You can help people by teaching them, by making suggestions to be sure, but you can't make

somebody else happier because that's something outside of yourself to be sure, two things

to do.

Number one, going to go on a learning journey together.

And this is one of the things that I recommend to a lot of people who say, not just about

their spouse, they say, how do I, how do I give these ideas to my teenage kid?

Now, teenage kids are horrible about this because when you say, you need to do, do, do,

do, do, do, do, is that in one ear and out of the other or complete rejection because

you said it.

I know.

I've had teenagers, those, in those, in those scenarios, I suggest saying, I just read

this book by this, you know, nerd, who has a podcast called Lovers Hours.

And I don't know what I think about it.

Would you read it and tell me what you think about it?

Or I just saw this podcast.

Maybe this is not the one to show them because it'll be in on the, on the, on the trick.

But I just saw this podcast and it's kind of making me think, but I would love to know

your point of view.

That's the appeal to an outside authority.

And that's when you're studying something together.

That really works with teenage kids, but that can also work with your spouse.

Second, modeled behavior, modeled behavior of the greatest gift that you can give to

somebody who's depressed is to not be depressed.

That's a really great gift.

And you got it.

That's why they say on the airplane, put your own oxygen mask on first.

You got to take care of yourself first along these lines.

The greatest gift you can give to somebody who's sad is not being sad.

That's what it comes down to.

And I realize it actually brings you down, but you got to do more work on yourself, understanding

that your happiness is under your control and not under the control of another person

and that your happiness is not a betrayal of an unhappy person.

Your happiness is a gift to the other person.

Next, this is from Jack V.

What explains why missionaries are happier and psychologists more depressed than the

general population?

I know the first is true, that clergy and missionaries are happier than the general

population.

For all the reasons I've talked about in this episode, I don't know that psychologists

are more depressed than the general population.

I'll take you at your word for that, that you're looking at data on that.

It's not opposites of the same phenomenon.

What we find is that missionaries and clergy, they're doing all the things right that

we're talking about here.

This is probably one of the reasons that highly spiritual people who are not missionaries

are clergy are much happier than general population.

So this episode is the reason for the first one.

For the psychologists and for that matter, for behavioral scientists to study happiness,

who are below average in happiness.

Right?

We've talked about this in the show.

I'm getting better, way better.

I'm up 60% of my happiness, and so I've gone full time in the happiness trade, my friends.

Why?

Because I studied happiness because I wanted it.

A lot of therapists that I meet, they go into therapy because they have problems that

they want to solve in their own lives.

It's not research.

It's me search for a lot of people and behavioral science is that this is what people are really

into is issues that they're dealing with themselves.

There's a reason that my wife, Esther, she wouldn't actually become a happiness specialist

because she's super happy as a person.

That would be like me studying oxygen.

I got plenty of it, right?

But if it got scarce, I'd want to learn a lot more about it is the whole idea.

And that's probably one of the reasons that we actually see.

Finally, last email today from Patty Peterson, will you suggest resources for grief?

I lost my husband unexpectedly and I'm officially lost.

I'm really sorry for your loss, Patty, I am.

And grief, which is a form of very intense and elongated suffering, it's not going to

help you for me to talk about the neurobiology of what actually is happening in your brain.

But suffice it to say that your brain is working the way it's supposed to.

If you're grieving the loss of your husband, it means you're healthy and you're normal.

And it will lessen over time, which actually is paradoxically really painful for people

when they're seeing their grief lessen and they're able to do something for the first

time like go someplace alone or go out in a date and they have a good time and they feel

really guilty and horrible about that.

So grief is a funny phenomenon in the way that it actually makes us feel, but it's evidence

that you're alive.

It's evidence that you can love as a person, which is a beautiful thing in and of itself.

Let me just say this, there's one way that people who are experiencing grief, grief from

the loss of a spouse, which is very intense, that's generally speaking not as intense as

losing a child because that feels wholly unnatural to very many people.

So there are some studies on losing a child and how to provide some relief.

And there's one thing that actually works.

And here it is.

It's helping somebody else who's also experienced that loss, somebody who's newer in that loss.

You find that if you've lost a child, which is this un, un, you know, remitting sadness

and it's permanent because, I mean, not the same intensity of sadness, the sadness does

lessen.

It does because you're moving on with your life and you're supposed to be able to move

on with your life, but you'll never forget.

But the people who actually make more from their grief, more productive, something more

productive with a grief and who actually have more relief from it, who are able to actually

have more moments of joy are those who actually find a way to serve other people who are

fresher in their loss.

And so that's what I recommend.

There's a lot of people out there who are suffering the same thing that you are and

as the months go by, you're going to meet people for whom the wound is fresh and serving

those people, you're going to find is this, is the, is the probably the most efficacious

way that you can actually trigger grief and do a source of benefit, into a source of

love.

And that's what you deserve.

Let me know your thoughts, folks, on this episode or any other episode of office hours

at earthenworks.com.

That's our email address.

Like and subscribe on Spotify, YouTube, Apple, leave a comment, I'll read it.

Even if it's negative, that's all good.

And if I've gotten anything wrong, as far as you can tell, I want to hear about it.

Follow me on Instagram, LinkedIn, other platforms for content that's original on those

platforms, order the meaning of your life, finding purpose in an age of emptiness.

And while you're waiting for it, go back and listen to some of the episodes that you

haven't heard before, and make sure you're sure I'm with your friends.

Thanks for listening.

I'll see you next week.

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