How to Stay Happy During Elections, with Dr. Arthur C. Brooks

(bright music) Headspace Studio. (soft music) Hi, welcome to Radio Headspace, and Monday morning. I'm your guest host for the week, Arthur C. Brooks. I'm a social scientist, a Harvard professor, and the bestselling author of several books on happiness and wellbeing. Over the years, I've dedicated my work to understanding what truly makes us happy and how we can cultivate joy, even in challenging times. As we find ourselves in the thick of an election season, it's easy to feel overwhelmed, stressed, and even unhappy. But today I want to talk about how we can navigate these stressful periods by focusing on what I call the four pillars of happiness. These are the elements that, when nurtured, can keep us grounded and content, no matter what's happening around us, whether it's a personal challenge or something as widespread as an election. Today, I'll be sharing practical strategies to strengthen these pillars in your daily life, and I'll even dive into how they've helped me through some tough times. So let's explore how we can maintain our wellbeing during stressful periods and ensure that our happiness isn't just a fleeting feeling, but a sustained state of mind. This time of year, people are actually, usually, if they're paying attention to politics, unhappy than they are in other parts of the year. There's a lot of research that actually backs this up, and you might be saying to yourself, well, wouldn't we all be happier if we didn't have any elections? Well, I don't know about that, but I do know that during elections, if your candidate loses, you're quite a bit unhappier. And if your candidate wins, you're actually not much happier at all. Meaning that elections, while they're good for democracy and no doubt good for our society, are not necessarily so good for our happiness. One of the reasons is that there's just so much disappointment that happens when you want a particular candidate to win. You're all tied up in the ideas that the candidate presents to the public. You've been convinced by the media and by the candidate, her or himself, that it's a catastrophe if that person doesn't win and then they don't. Well, that's gonna bring you down, and that's one of the reasons that people are unhappy during this part of the year. Politics is both scary and tense, and also, let's be honest, kind of boring, and it's all around us, all the time in the news and social media and the conversations around the water cooler. And so we're getting this content that we don't really like, but we can't really turn away from, and that's no good. When people want to be happier, which is, you know, pretty much all the time, we don't need to find some political savior. We don't need to find the ultimate social media app. Those are mistakes. That's the wrong way to go. The happiest people, well, they have a lot in common. They're...