Find Purpose and Joy, with Dr. Arthur C. Brooks

(mouse clicking) (ethereal percussive music) Headspace Studios. (ethereal percussive music) (upbeat electronic music) Hi, friends. Welcome to Radio Headspace, and Thursday morning. I'm your guest host for the week, Arthur C. Brooks. This week, we've been exploring the various ways to maintain happiness during an election season. Today, we're turning our focus to how engaging in this process and engaging in civic activity can actually improve your happiness. In a world that often feels chaotic and divided, finding a sense of purpose can be a powerful source of happiness. People often ask, "What is happiness?" And I say it's not a feeling, and I tell them all the things that it's not, and they say, "No, no, no, no, professor, tell me what it is." So here's happiness, it's a combination of enjoyment and satisfaction and meaning. And they say, "Okay, okay, great. I get enjoyment, and I understand satisfaction, what's meaning?" And I say, "Aha. There's a large body of literature on that from scientists, neuroscientists, social psychologists, economists, and especially philosophers, and they all agree meaning has three parts as well. Coherence, why things happen the way they do. Significance, why your life matters. And most importantly, purpose. Purpose is the set of goals and direction in your life. Purpose is one of the linchpins to living the happiest life. There's one way that will reliably bring you more meaning through this channel of purpose in your life. Now, you might think it's to go sit in the mouth of a cave in the Himalayas and consult with a guru, great, if that's your thing, but, you know, you might not have time to do that or even know where to look, I have an easier way to do that. Go serve others. Go help other people. Why? Because you'll be getting the attention off yourself and you'll be able to make progress in your life in a way that's not so intensely self-obsessed. We understand the mechanism of action behind this as well, psychologists, and especially neuroscientists, have been very interested in the pathways through which people feel good when they serve others and get involved in their communities. We find, for example, that the neural reward circus, the part of your brain that is stimulated to make you feel good, that those are highly activated when you're helping other people. One of the things that I studied as a scholar much earlier in my career, as a matter of fact, I wrote my doctoral dissertation on the topic of charitable giving, and how it helped people. I did so much work on it, and at one point, I was working on a book on the subject and I was finding a really funny thing, that one of the best single ways to feel better in charitable giving is not just doing a tiny little bit for millions of people, but doing a lot for one person. I remember writing about it because I found all these...