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Aug. 28, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams

19:43

Episode 644 Scott Adams: The Happiness Formula

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	There's not much news today, so that's the news.
	I wanted to teach you how to be happy.
	I've spent my life trying to turn into a formula how to be happy.
	And I did that in my book, How to Fail at Almost Everything, and still win big.
	But I'm going to give you the quicker synopsis for those who don't know how to be happy.
	And as obvious as this will be to some of you, For many of you, this will be the first time you've ever seen it explained this way.
	Let me explain happiness.
	So happiness here is at the top.
	That's your goal. We'd all like to be happy.
	In order to be happy, there are three chemicals in your body and your brain that need to be at the right level.
	Now, I'm going to grossly oversimplify the chemical nature of human beings.
	There are certainly lots more than three chemicals involved in keeping you happy.
	But, as a general statement, if these three are where they need to be, you're probably going to be happy unless there's some terrible problem in your life that, you know, is unsolvable.
	So, did I spell serotonin wrong?
	I may have spelled it wrong.
	Tell me if I spelled that wrong.
	Anyway, so these chemicals can be boosted through lifestyle.
	If you don't know that, you don't understand how happiness works.
	Most people that I talk to are under the mistaken impression that happiness is something you can think your way into.
	In other words, if you put some happy thoughts in your head, or you don't have any problems, there's somehow a mental process.
	Your happiness is not a mental process.
	If you think it is, you can't help yourself.
	You're going to be lost forever.
	So whether you have a mental problem that keeps you low in these things, which is typical, you know, depression, anxiety, OCD, there are a number of mental conditions which are at least associated with lower levels of these things.
	If you treat happiness as a physical process The end result of which is you feel happy, then you have a mechanism to do something about it.
	If you think it's a mental process, there's nothing you can do about it.
	You are a victim of your environment.
	But if you understand that you can do things in your life that will boost these chemicals, and then these chemicals in turn will make you feel good, then you have a mechanism.
	And for each of these things, let me explain these things.
	So oxytocin is the chemical that makes you feel connected to people, makes you feel in love, makes you feel bonded, and that's mostly from social interaction, especially touch.
	You can get it from sex, hugging.
	I think you can get it from your pets, you know, playing with your cat or your dog.
	And you can get it from a massage.
	Yeah, and children can get it from their parents, from touch.
	But these other things, dopamine and serotonin, are sort of lifestyle-related.
	And if you get a system for all of this stuff, a system for your diet and exercise and sleep, You're going to have a lot more of it.
	How many people do you know who believe they're unhappy, but all they're doing is they're doing this stuff wrong?
	They're doing the lifestyle stuff wrong, and they think, hey, I'm unhappy.
	There's something wrong with the way I'm thinking.
	There's something wrong with my brain.
	Probably not. There's probably, and when I say probably, I'm going to say 80% of the time.
	For 80% of you, the feeling of not being happy or fulfilled, all of those feelings, are because you don't have a system in place to work toward improving these over time.
	So for diet, for example, I talk about this in my book, How to Fail Almost Everything and Still Win Big.
	It should be a lifelong process of learning about diet and experimenting with what works for you.
	In my case, if I eat too many bad carbs, if I eat too many bad carbs, I'm unhappy.
	Every frickin' time.
	Every time. If I have a burrito for lunch the rest of the day, I'm not happy because my energy will crash.
	And I can't be happy when I have a sugar crash.
	So learn about diet by making it a lifelong system to chip away at it and experiment.
	Learn that protein is good for you.
	Learn that simple carbs are bad for you.
	Always. Always.
	Don't have cheat days.
	If you have a cheat day, you don't understand how anything works.
	There's a longer explanation for that, but don't have a cheat day.
	Exercise, again, my book, Out of Fail, teaches you how to create habits and how to organize your life so it's more likely that you'll do something active every day.
	It doesn't matter what you do, but be active every day.
	You will find that if you get exercise right, most of your days are better.
	Everybody who has an exercise routine will confirm what I'm saying.
	On days that you exercise, you feel happier.
	It's pretty much a one-to-one thing.
	So learn to do that. Get enough sleep.
	A lot of people Think that sleep is somehow out of their control.
	Sleep is something you absolutely control.
	Now again, these are 80% true statements.
	20% of the people may have some medical problems.
	They've got something they need to deal with.
	But for 80% of us, go to bed the same time, wake up the same time every day, Don't put your, you know, don't watch TV in bed.
	Don't do things that get you excited.
	Don't watch a scary movie before you go to bed.
	You know, there are some very basic things, which all you'd have to do is Google some articles about how to sleep.
	Follow the steps.
	There aren't that many of them. Every article on how to sleep would be pretty similar.
	Learn a system for sleep.
	If you're the kind of person who likes to stay up really late on weekends, but then during the week you've got to go back to your, you know, your 8 to 5 life, you're just killing yourself.
	You don't have much chance of being happy if you think that you can mess with your sleep and still be happy.
	You can't. You can have a good evening, but your week is not going to be happy.
	Make sure you get some nature.
	There's, you know, meaning get outside.
	Sun is important, but it seems to be important to your chemistry to just interact with nature.
	So get out of the house, get around some trees, get around some grass.
	That helps. Do what you can to improve your social life.
	I recommend the Dale Carnegie method of learning how to talk to people, learning how to be good to people.
	Here's the big trick for a good social life.
	You ready? It's hard for me to believe I have to tell you this.
	But probably the vast majority of you don't know what I'm going to say next.
	And it will change your life.
	You ready? If you don't have a good social life, that's your fault.
	Totally. It's your fault.
	Because you don't know the technique.
	Having a good social life is a technique.
	Now, I can't get into all of it.
	The Dale Carnegie courses will teach you.
	But you should know how to talk to strangers.
	You should know how to talk to people and have good conversations.
	But the main thing you need to do to have a good social life is give more than you get.
	That's it. Think generously.
	And people will say, well, that's somebody I want to hang around with.
	That person just asked me if they could do me a favor.
	I barely know. That's somebody you want to spend some time with.
	Invite people to your place.
	Set up an outing yourself.
	Buy somebody lunch.
	Solve a problem for somebody.
	Offer to help. Social life is completely under your control.
	Stop thinking that people will like you for who you are on the inside.
	Nobody cares who you are on the inside.
	They can't see it. They can't see the inside of you.
	They only know what you do.
	They can't read your mind.
	So do things that are generous.
	If you do that, you will have a social life.
	It might not be the first day, but you're going to have one.
	So get out in the real world.
	Get involved in some groups where there are people.
	Go make yourself a social life.
	I find that it's useful to have a purpose in life.
	A purpose, the best way to find one, is to be useful to society and to other people.
	If what you're doing all day is good for no one but you, you will not feel like you have a purpose.
	And that will eat at your chemical state.
	It will decrease your happy chemicals.
	So find a purpose.
	It's easy to find a purpose.
	Figure out what you're good at, or at least you can become good at, and you're willing to do.
	Then try it. If it doesn't work, try something else.
	You've watched me, most of you watched me try to be useful for the Blight Authority, Bill Pulte's thing, trying to clean up the inner cities, as well as Bill Pulte's philanthropic efforts.
	I've been trying to be supportive of that, and a number of other things I try to be helpful on.
	Those things give me meaning.
	When I have quiet moments, I think about those things because I say to myself, yeah, I'm doing stuff that might not help.
	I don't know if it'll make a big difference, but at least I'm doing things that make sense, could work, are part of a solution, perhaps a little bit helpful in these different ways.
	Somebody says loving your family.
	Correct. You could build a sense of purpose around your family.
	Now there's a trap there, because that usually means around your children, because the children leave eventually.
	So you want to be able to find ways to find meaning that are not dependent on one or two people.
	I also find that when I'm learning and growing, in other words, I'm getting better at something, I feel more fulfilled And my body chemistry feels better.
	So it doesn't matter what you're learning or growing at.
	It could be your career.
	It could be something useful in some other way.
	And it could be just learning the things that you need to take care of yourself.
	It could be just learning that.
	But build your talent stack.
	Add talents all the time.
	You should never be...
	Here's my advice.
	You should never be in a state of not learning.
	Period. Now, you might be so busy that you have to reduce the time that you're spending learning something to a small part of your day.
	That would be normal. But never have a day where you didn't learn something.
	You can Google something.
	You can read an article.
	You can talk to somebody who knows more than you do.
	You can use my app, Interface by WenHub, and call an expert to learn something you needed to know.
	But try to learn something every day.
	You'll be amazed what that does to you.
	You'll have a sense of moving in the right direction.
	Alright, so, in summary, happiness is not some internal mental process that you can just think your way to a better happiness.
	It is a chemical state.
	If you get your body chemistry right, mostly these three chemicals are the ones you hear about, you will have a feeling of contentment and happiness.
	To get those chemicals right, science is very clear what works.
	Got to get your diet right, your exercise, your sleep.
	Got to get out in nature, touch some people, improve your social life.
	Avoid stress. I didn't talk about this one, but it's obvious.
	I do not watch movies that are dramas.
	I do not watch movies that are scary or have bad endings.
	I won't even watch a comedy if it has a bad ending.
	I don't expose myself to fiction which is negative.
	Because even if you think you're entertained, and you are, you're adding stress to your life.
	You just don't know it. I avoid stressful people.
	If you are toxic, I'm just not going to talk to you again.
	That's it. Do I feel bad when I cut people out of my life and I don't talk to them again?
	A little bit, but not as bad as I feel when I'm with them.
	The horror is spending time with toxic people.
	The horror is not the embarrassment or the discomfort or the awkwardness of getting rid of them.
	You have to get rid of toxic people.
	And learn and grow, and that will give you a purpose if you're being useful to the world.
	Yeah, the news can be quite toxic as well.
	I'm addicted to the news at the moment because a lot of the Trump news is entertaining.
	It's literally funny and nobody's getting hurt most of the time.
	Sometimes it devolves into bad stuff.
	Do I make an exception for Game of Thrones?
	Yeah, I kind of do.
	I do. But when I watch Game of Thrones...
	I don't feel tension or stress.
	It's well made and it's funny and it takes me into a different world and it doesn't seem like a real world, so I don't take that too seriously.
	I would say if you're watching Lord of the Rings, which you would say is a drama action, a lot of people getting killed, Lord of the Rings is just sort of a fantasy fun thing, so I wouldn't worry about that.
	I would never watch a Quentin Tarantino movie again.
	I've watched his movies and they just make me feel bad.
	Period. They're well made.
	Apparently, Quentin Tarantino is an amazing filmmaker.
	All the critics agree.
	But a lot of his films make me feel bad, so I don't watch them.
	Same with Spielberg.
	Spielberg is on the top of my list of directors to avoid.
	Now, if he does a comedy movie or something lighthearted, I would certainly watch that because he's a great filmmaker.
	But if he does something like anything about the Holocaust, for example, Schindler's List, it's going to be so well made that it brings you into this horrible world and it's like you were there.
	I'm still scarred by movies I've seen years ago, and some of them are Spielberg's.
	So, that's your happiness formula.
	The main point is to understand that it's a chemical reaction, and that you control your chemistry by your lifestyle, and specifically you can develop systems over time where maybe you don't know too much about diet, but you can learn it.
	Don't know too much about exercise or systems, you can learn it.
	And that just changed Some percentage of those watching this, their lives just completely changed.
	I guarantee you.
	Now, I don't know what percentage it is.
	It could be 1%. It could be 10%.
	It could be 30%.
	But for a lot of you, your life just completely changed.
	Because for the first time, you're seeing a completely practical path to get from wherever you are to how you want to feel.
	And... And once you see that this works, and the only way to see it is to actually practice it, start paying attention to your diet, your sleep, and your exercise, and also your touch, and your nature too.
	Start paying attention to what you did that day, and then pay attention to how you feel about your day.
	Once you notice there's a one-to-one correlation between doing those things right that get your chemistry right, And having a good day, you're all set.
	That's what you need. You need that realization to make it real.
	And you have to do it and try it to be able to actually feel that it makes a difference.
	All right. I'm just looking at your comments.
	Now, I hear every day from people who say their life was completely transformed By thinking of their life in terms of systems versus goals.
	The goal would be to be happy, but how?
	How? You need a system to get there.
	So as soon as you remember that the goal doesn't tell you how to get there, the systems do, then you've got a formula for working your way through life to a better solution.
	All right. I'll take a picture of the whiteboard here.
	I will put that That will be part of the YouTube posting.
	So everything I do here in Periscope gets posted on YouTube within a few hours, and we'll post the photo on this.
	It'll be at Real Coffee with Scott Adams on YouTube.
	Somebody says, isn't it true that some people don't need daily relationships?
	Well, there are people who are introverts.
	I would consider myself one of them.
	People who find that spending a lot of time with other people can be draining.
	Other people find that spending a lot of time with other people can be more fulfilling and energizing.
	But even if you're an introvert, you can't escape nature's requirements.
	In other words, your chemical situation It has a lot in common with somebody who's not an introvert.
	And so even the introverts do need human contact.
	They just need less of it and a certain kind, and they've got to control it a little better than other people.
	I will put the photo of this on the blog, so that will be part of the process.
	My blog is moved to at scottadamsays.com.
	All right. Somebody says, make that segment its own YouTube video, please.
	Maybe. I'll think about that.

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