How to Enjoy Your Life
5/4/202636 min
Want to miss (or forget) life’s sweetest moments? Easy: don’t savor anything. My late mother, an artist, knew this was a terrible strategy for happiness. Through her art, she was an expert at savoring—and the first to teach me its benefits.
In this episode of Office Hours, I connect her lesson to what we now know from behavioral science: because of our built-in negativity bias, we tend to overlook positive experiences unless we make an effort to notice them. I’ll share three simple ways to do that—so you can experience your life more deeply, remember it more clearly, and find meaning even in the hard moments.
Want to go deeper on this—and other ideas from the podcast—and actually put them into practice? If you’re ready to do that work in person, I’ve partnered with MEA, a transformational science-backed retreat center, to bring these principles to life through a series of retreats in Santa Fe. You can find the details at retreats.arthurbrooks.com.
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Brought to you by:
• David Protein—The most effective portable protein on the planet https://davidprotein.com/arthur
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Where to find Arthur Brooks:
• Website: https://arthurbrooks.com/
• Newsletter: https://www.arthurbrooks.com/newsletter
• X: https://x.com/arthurbrooks
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/arthurcbrooks/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ArthurBrooks/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/arthur-c-brooks/
• Email: officehours@arthurbrooks.com
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Timestamps:
(00:00) Intro
(09:52) What savoring really is
(10:39) How savoring affects your brain and body
(14:54) How savoring shapes your memory
(17:16) Negativity bias and why it’s hard to savor
(20:18) #1: Savor in all three time zones
(24:34) #2: Expand your savoring techniques
(27:21) #3: How I do it–what are you looking forward to
(29:12) How to savor difficult experiences to support growth
(31:19) Q&A: Making space for relationships in a demanding season of work
(32:39) Q&A: Finding a religion that resonates
(34:08) Q&A: Finding a calling
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Referenced:
• The Meaning of Your Life: Finding Purpose in an Age of Emptiness:themeaningofyourlife.com
• Meaning Membership: https://hub.arthurbrooks.com/the-meaning-membership
• Arthur’s newsletter: https://www.arthurbrooks.com/newsletter
• The Happiness Scale: https://learn.arthurbrooks.com/the-happiness-scale
• The Pursuit of Happiness with Arthur Brooks: https://www.thefp.com/s/the-pursuit-of-happiness-with-arthur
• Savoring the past: Positive memories evoke value representations in the striatum: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4254527
• The Miracle of Mindfulness: An Introduction to the Practice of Meditation: https://www.amazon.com/Miracle-Mindfulness-Introduction-Practice-Meditation/dp/0807012394
• ...References continued at: https://www.arthurbrooks.com/office-hours
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Production and marketing by https://penname.co/.
Transcript preview
First 90 secondsSpeaker 00:00
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Arthur Brooks· Host0:29
As a kid, I would come home from school and I would practice my French horn, and then I would paint with my mother, and it was just bliss. But my mom was better than me, not just because she was older, but because she had more ability. I remember asking her, I was probably 13 or 14 years old, how I could improve as an artist. She said, "Look deeply at the thing you're trying to draw, that you want to draw. Think about it and look at it again. Stare at it. Look at the nuances, then try." Savoring experiences in life, neutral experiences, good experiences, even bad experiences can be fundamentally game-changing in your wellbeing. One of the biggest ways that we miss our happiness is that we're not here, we're not fully alive. And I promise you that if you learn to savor your life, your life's gonna change. [gentle music] Hi, friends. Welcome to Office Hours. I'm Arthur Brooks. This is a show about how you can lift people up and bring them together in bonds of happiness and love