Approach your life as a startup, taking charge and making deliberate decisions rather than reacting to feelings. As the CEO of your own enterprise, do what is right, not just what feels good in the moment, to achieve progress and happiness.
View happiness as a direction, not a destination, aiming for “happier-ness.” Achieve this by acquiring knowledge about the science of happiness, actively working to change your habits, and sharing what you learn with others to solidify it in your own consciousness.
Develop discipline of the will to consistently engage in practices that optimize your body and soul (e.g., exercise, spiritual practice), regardless of how you feel in the moment. This deliberate action, rather than relying on fleeting feelings, is crucial for long-term well-being.
Experience emotions in your prefrontal cortex, not just your limbic system, to decide how to react and learn from them. This allows you to become a more evolved human by consciously processing and managing your emotional responses.
Actively create space between your limbic system and prefrontal cortex to allow your executive brain to process emotions appropriately. Techniques like therapy (CBT), meditation (observing emotions), or prayer can help you consciously experience and manage emotions, preventing reactive responses.
Recognize that in-the-moment emotions, even negative ones, do not necessarily reflect your overall state of happiness. Avoid confusing fleeting feelings of uneasiness with your broader picture of happiness.
For intense emotional types, avoid constantly seeking emotional highs, as they don’t provide lasting benefit. Instead, manage your emotions through metacognition, experiencing them in your prefrontal cortex rather than letting your limbic system dictate your responses.
Recognize that Mother Nature prioritizes survival and gene propagation, not your happiness, and often tantalizes you with fleeting pleasure. To achieve true happiness, you frequently need to resist natural impulses and stand up to Mother Nature’s imperatives.
Take the PANIS test (Positive Affect, Negative Affect Schedule) to understand your predisposition to types of happiness and your emotional personality pattern. Knowing your type (Mad Scientist, Cheerleader, Poet, Judge) is crucial for self-management.
Understand your genetic predispositions and tendencies (e.g., for mood balance, health, or addiction) to effectively manage your habits. This knowledge empowers you to compensate and make conscious choices to improve your life.
Recognize that your strengths can also be your weaknesses across all personality profiles. Learn to manage these traits by wiring to your strengths, actively remediating your weaknesses, and seeking complementarity to complete yourself.
Understand that happiness requires a balance and abundance of three “macronutrients”: enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning. Develop strategies and practice exercises to skillfully attain each, recognizing they are complex and not straightforward.
Do not pursue pleasure alone, as it is a temporary, limbic signal that can lead to addiction and misery. Instead, cultivate enjoyment, which is a more complex phenomenon involving the prefrontal cortex.
To achieve true enjoyment, take a source of pleasure and intentionally combine it with people you love and the act of making memories. This engages your prefrontal cortex and prevents the ruinous pursuit of pleasure alone, which often leads to misery and addiction.
Recognize that the joy of satisfaction, which comes after struggle, is temporary due to homeostasis. Mother Nature veils this truth, leading people to believe new achievements or possessions will bring permanent happiness, which is a common misconception that leads to the “hedonic treadmill.”
Counter the hedonic treadmill by focusing on a “want less” strategy rather than a “have more” strategy. Manage your desires and learn to want what you already have, as this approach leads to more lasting satisfaction.
Instead of a traditional bucket list, create a “reverse bucket list” on your birthday by listing all your worldly attachments and crossing them out. This metacognitive exercise helps manage cravings and attachments by moving them from your limbic system to your prefrontal cortex, making you feel lighter and freer.
To address a potential “meaning crisis,” seek genuine answers to two fundamental questions: “Why are you alive?” and “For what are you willing to die today?” If you don’t have real answers, embark on a “vision quest” through reading, experiencing, meditating, or seeking advice to discover them.
Regardless of religious affiliation, take your spiritual life seriously as a crucial component of happiness. This involves engaging in practices that provide transcendence, whether through nature, art, meditation, or formal religion.
Transcendence is not just a feeling, but a deliberate decision. Actively choose to experience transcendence by putting yourself in circumstances that foster awe, whether through nature, art, music, or spiritual practices, even if you don’t feel it spontaneously every time.
Engage in practices of transcendence, whether secular (like experiencing awe in nature or human genius) or religious, to feel “small.” This provides peace through perspective and is a common phenomenon that contributes to deep well-being.
Find peace by reconciling the seemingly conflicting ideas that your existence matters, yet the universe will be fine without you. This balance between personal significance and universal insignificance is a key to well-being.
Around age 50, embrace the “Vanaprastha” phase of life, a “retirement into the forest” where transcendental things become more salient. This involves asking deep questions, developing spiritual practices, pursuing challenging fitness goals, or changing careers for more creative significance, all as a quest towards enlightenment.
Understand that faith and reason can coexist, like understanding a painting and its painter. Avoid taking religious texts too literally; instead, appreciate the awe-inspiring evidence of creation through science, which can deepen spiritual understanding.
Shift focus from the “me self” (being observed, self-obsession, social comparison) to the “I self” (observing the world outward). Excessive “me self” focus, often amplified by social media, leads to misery, while looking outward fosters happiness.
To cultivate the “I self” and increase happiness, minimize literal self-reflection by removing mirrors and reduce “me self” obsession by turning off social media notifications and avoiding mentions. This encourages looking outward and reduces focus on self-image and external validation.
Ration your access to news, consuming it for a limited time (e.g., 15-30 minutes daily, all at once) to protect your bandwidth and prevent it from intruding on your work. Process information metacognitively, making conscious decisions on how to use it, rather than letting your limbic system react to it.
To manage anxiety (unfocused fear), force your prefrontal cortex to take over by writing down the specific things you are most afraid of. This strategic technique helps to focus and bound your fears, making them feel less threatening and more manageable. Journal consistently and then discard the entries.
Maintain a “failure and disappointment journal” by writing down negative experiences. After 30 days, reflect on what you learned, and after six months, identify something good that resulted from it. This process helps convert negative experiences into positive growth and learning.
When you feel angry, count to 30 and simultaneously envision the consequences of what you are thinking of doing. This creates space between your limbic system and prefrontal cortex, allowing you to process emotions metacognitively and make appropriate executive decisions.
Prioritize cultivating hope, which is the belief that something can be done regardless of circumstances and that you can act on it, over mere optimism. Hope is empowering and tied to happiness, whereas optimism is just a prediction and doesn’t inherently make you happier.
Do not identify yourself as a victim, even when experiencing legitimate grievances or being victimized. Adopting a victim identity is a recipe for hopelessness and despair, as it disempowers you.
When seeking romantic partnerships, aim for a minimum baseline of compatibility combined with complementarity, rather than maximum compatibility. Differences can lead to adventure and mutual discovery, fostering stronger connections.
Recognize that love is a commitment and a decision to “will the good of the other as other,” rather than merely a feeling. This discipline of the will to love, even when not feeling it, is transformative in relationships and transcends day-to-day experiences.
Subject yourself to controlled, aversive emotions (like cold plunges or extreme sports) under your own power. This allows you to use the experience of stress hormones and negative emotions in an enjoyable way, as it’s under your control.
Create a personal spreadsheet to track your happiness by rating dozens of “micronutrients” (e.g., warmth of marriage, relationships with kids, career value, friendships, philanthropy, professional interest, intimacy, conflict avoidance). Weight these dimensions and evaluate them twice a year (e.g., birthday and half-birthday) to make progress on your strategic happiness plan.
When assessing your happiness using a multidimensional tracking system, avoid doing so on days with significant emotional highs or lows (e.g., major conflicts or great successes). This prevents your neurochemistry from unduly affecting your assessment and ensures a more accurate evaluation.