The Surprising Research-Backed Secret to True, Lasting Happiness
Greetings from Milan!
I love to travel because it’s such a fantastic way of throwing a bit of a shock to your system, breaking you out of your existing patterns and reminding you of how big the world is beyond your own personal little slice. It never fails to remind me of the narrowness of my views and experiences, and how much more I can learn about our big, beautiful world.
When I see new slices of the world, I’m filled with love for the people, cultures, and sights that I see. And that’s what I want to talk about today: the practice of love, why it leads to happiness, and how to bring it to your own life.
LOVE IS THE SOURCE OF HAPPINESS
My research has taught me that happiness comes from the process of cultivating love and wisdom within us and translating it to the world. (This is a big topic in and of itself. So big that I’m writing a book about it!)
In brief, cultivating love and wisdom is a skill that you can learn and practice. Love and wisdom are infinitely extensible, with a new depth and breadth to always be experienced. When we offer up our love and our wisdom outwardly, we can live our purpose, find meaning, and change the world. Happiness ensues.
Today, we’re going to focus on one small part of this: love!
Love is my very favorite topic to write about. What I’m sharing in this newsletter is the most important information I’ve ever learned; it was the knowledge and practice that lifted me out of depression and into a joyful, meaningful existence.
THE UPHILL BATTLE
You know what love is. You have loved and felt loved. I very much hope you have love in your life right now.
I’d like to expand your understanding of love, starting with the concept that love is just another word for connection. Love can happen, then, at any moment that you connect with yourself, with another, or with the world around you.
Love is amazing, and we all want more of it. However, we are fighting an uphill battle against love. And to win this battle, you have to know who you’re fighting: your brain.
All of us possess something called a negativity bias: it is the tendency of our brains to focus on the things that are negative in life and to be excessively impacted by negative experiences of fear, anxiety, and frustration.
One of my favorite scientists, Dr. Rick Hanson, describes it perfectly: “The brain is like Velcro for negative experiences, but Teflon for positive ones.”
Negative events carry more weight in your mind than positive ones. It takes many, many successes to offset one failure; many, many gestures of kindness and love to outweigh one rejection.
When you are not doing anything in particular, your brain shifts into the ‘default network’, whose primary function is to constantly scan your environment for possible threats. This happens at a background level, of which you have no conscious awareness.
The negativity bias works hard to keep you out of the present moment: it drives you to ruminate on the past and what went wrong, and to anticipate the future challenges and losses that you might face.
Because of all of this, it fosters negative emotions like sadness, guilt, shame, anger, and depression.
Your brain’s design wants you to do two things: first, to view yourself as separate from others and the world; and second, to make you grasp for stability and solidity in a world that is always changing. These predispositions do not lead to happiness, but away from it.
That’s the bad news. However, we do have a secret weapon which we can use to battle the negativity bias.
One of the very most important research findings of all time (to me, at least!) was the discovery that our brains change frequently throughout our lives, and more importantly, that we have the ability to direct the way that they change. This is called neuroplasticity.
The mental activity that happens inside of your brain when you think and engage creates new neural structures, which then change the way that Future You thinks and engages. Neurons that fire together, wire together. For example, if you constantly see the world as a place where you are victimized, over time, it will become more and more automatic, wearing a victim ‘groove’ into your brain, until you immediately slide into a victim mindset with every thought.
Neuroplasticity means that you can look at your negativity bias, something that was handed down from our long-ago ancestors and doesn’t really serve us in today’s world, and politely say, “No, I won’t settle for this mind I’ve inherited - I’m going to make my own.” What an amazing, empowering choice.
Choosing to view your brain in this way is a profound mindset shift. You are saying that you believe that you can change and grow, that your intentions are powerful enough to make that change happen, and that you take responsibility for enacting it. It also says that you acknowledge that your future self is influenced by the choice that you make right now.
So… what do you do with your mind?
You incline it towards love, which moves you towards happiness.
A very important note:
Inclining towards love does not mean relentless positive thinking.
I don’t believe that positive thinking is a good strategy for well-being. It’s been shown to backfire in a lot of ways: when times are hard, when you’re working towards goals, when you’re trying to be resilient.
Remember that love doesn’t equate to positivity; it means to connect.
We can take advantage of neuroplasticity to beat our negativity bias and choose an inclination towards love, each moment building more and more into making it a default response. The brain will always settle for what is familiar and what is known. Each thought and act of love adds to the ‘groove’ in our brain that will lead us more quickly towards a loving response.
HOW TO INCLINE TOWARDS LOVE
We need love to survive.
In the thirteenth century, the Roman Emperor Frederick II decided to investigate what the inborn language of mankind was, by raising a group of children in seclusion who would never hear any form of speech. The babies were physically cared for, but never spoken to or held. Before he could discover what the inborn language was, all of the babies had died.
To incline to love, I recommend taking up the practice of loving-kindness meditation.
This really helped me change my default state - which was the navel-gazing contemplation of everything I wanted in life and had infuriatingly yet to receive, achieve or procure - and slowly create a new state, where I recognized that every single person out there in the world is someone who wants to be happy, just like me.
When we realize that just as we aspire to happiness, so does everyone else, it becomes far easier to offer love to others - we are all just attempting to find our way, and doing so imperfectly but still, trying as best we can.
Loving-kindness meditation is designed to help us to cultivate a more loving and kind self, by teaching us that loving is something that needs to be developed as a skill, strengthened through practice. A meditation generally involves an individual placing his attention first on himself, then on a loved one, then on someone who challenges them, and ending with the whole world, offering these wishes from a place of sincere love:
“May you feel safe and protected.
May you feel happy and peaceful.
May you feel healthy and strong.
May you live with ease.”
I will never forget the first time that I did this practice.
It was so challenging for me to offer love to myself that I had to ease into it by imagining someone I loved, then slowly bringing those feelings to the general vicinity of me. As soon as I got close, I began to sob, realizing that I had never said these types of things to myself, that I had never allowed a helping hand to come from within to say these things that we are constantly searching for from other people or from a line on a resume or a possession on a shelf. Instead of that script, I had been telling myself for years and years that I was not enough, that I did not yet deserve to be happy, that I was not worthy of peace or love or ease. To realize that I could give myself what I had so desperately attempted to win through being smart, accomplished, funny, skinny, pretty, or perfect was so radical that it shook me for days to come.
An eight week study found that practicing loving-kindness meditation led to an increase of positive emotions and an increase in personal resources such as self-acceptance, positive relationships, and physical health, which resulted in greater satisfaction in life and fewer depressive symptoms.
Loving-kindness meditation builds love as a more automatic inclination, helping you see how many chances you have each day to offer love to others: from the barista serving you coffee, to the cleaning lady at work, to your aggravating boss, to your beloved child or soulmate, all of us have the opportunity to connect with those people who inhabit our lives. Social interactions are embedded within all of our lives, and having positive relationships is the single most important contributor to well-being.
We humans are complicated and messy: we are a mixture of positive and negative, self-interested and other-interested, constantly balancing between the satisfaction of our immediate desires and the gratification of long-held goals. We possess a rambunctious mixture of a bunch of traits that are paradoxical and difficult to manage, frequently capsized by our environments, and easily swayed by biases or others in one direction or another.
This was the value of many of the world’s religions: they recognized this reality and tried to help us train ourselves through pathways like service, attentional practices like meditations, or storytelling and myths.
The decision to direct one’s consciousness towards this expression of love has enormous personal benefits to you as the one who loves. We begin with ourselves, clearing the natural self-absorption that we all possess, helping to refocus our attention on what matters most. The practice of loving-kindness meditation is about training our minds, clearing out our old habits and rewiring our neural pathways, making love more of a default state than it is today. You cannot feel love and hatred at the same time, in the same instant; by practicing what it feels like to embody a state of loving others, you slowly learn how good it feels to love, how much the state benefits you and others, and even notice the reduction of long-felt mental ills, such as frustration, sadness, and hatred.
And those who receive the love benefit enormously as well. Take this 25-year long study as an example. Researchers studied 91 women who had been rescued from dysfunctional families as children and placed in an orphanage, attempting to understand who of them would become a good mother. There were two predictors of good motherhood: the first was the ability to build relationships with their teachers, and the second was their husband’s quality of love and caring for them. Receiving love allowed these women to transcend their past traumas and to become more loving themselves.
LOVE IS A WAY OF BEING
I’d like to share a bit about how impactful this information was to me upon learning and practicing it.
The cultivation and expression of love became my guiding philosophy in life, something that I called ‘love as a way of being’: choosing to bring love to all moments and all beings.
I then made a vow to practice love as a way of being at every moment.
I know how impractical it sounds, and of how insane it is to presuppose that it is possible to achieve this vow. I know, every morning when I wake up, that I will fail to fully express and experience love at all times. We are too hardwired for negativity, too naturally prone to fear, too easily aggravated when our expectations are not met, for this to be something that is possible. However, I also know what I feel - the difference between a life that is focused on cultivating and giving love, and one that is not - and I would take all of the failures for the moments of transcendent joy and peace that I regularly experience now.
Despite my limitations, I believe that I must still try, because for me, trying to be loving and wise is the main thing that matters in this life, both for my own well-being and for the well-being of our world as a whole.
I will likely never be able to offer unconditional love to others (or the far more challenging one, to myself), but I can do the very best I can today and seek to be better tomorrow. I can dust myself off and get back up again.
WE CAN CHOOSE NOT TO LIMIT OUR LOVE
“A human being is part of a whole, called by us the ‘Universe,’ a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest—a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness.
This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”
When we have brought love to ourselves and to those we know, we can move to an even greater challenge: loving the whole world.
Our definition of love is often limited to those we are closest to. We close ourselves off from loving others because they are not a part of our ‘circle’. Another bias we have is called the in-group bias, where we prefer our own groups above those that we do not belong to. This hurts us, at the end of the day. When we limit our love, we limit our own happiness. Remember that love is connection, and it is possible to connect with anyone and anything.
If you poke around the biographies of our most revered members of the human race, you will come to notice a trend. The majority of our heroes - Martin Luther King Jr, Gandhi, the Dalai Lama, Lincoln, Mother Theresa, Jesus, Albert Einstein, and other average folks like them - all shared a common message: We must love all beings, everywhere, without exception.
This is where inclining towards love gets real.
Martin Luther King Jr. defined love as "creative, understanding goodwill for all men" - a definition I appreciate for its active approach to the concept. Love, when we are applying it to all beings, is not easy, nor is it stagnant, familiar, or instant. This is love as sweat equity, the kind of activity that requires deep self-awareness and purposeful work.
I believe that those of us who are equipped with the ability to love others safely, the awareness to want to do so, and the desire to serve the world, must take up the mantle of love in our own lives.
We can attempt to cultivate love in our individual lives and extend it to ever-increasing swaths of humanity, because it seems to me that this is the only way for us to address the rising tides of hatred in the world today.
Loving all of humanity, even those people who really annoy you or who are different from you, begins with recognizing that this person is a flawed human being, just like me, who yearns to be happy and reduce their suffering. We can love people without liking them. We can love that person as a brother or sister of humanity, and refuse to condone their actions as right or moral. I believe that we can hold the space for those contradictions.
Learning to love the whole world is about recognizing that we are so interconnected that the pain that I experience will soon become your pain, if I do not address it appropriately; I will take out on you what I have not learned to love in myself, at great cost. Loving others means recognizing that their needs and desires are just as valid as our own.
The more individuals who take personal responsibility for the state of our broader world, the more who might be inspired to find their own pathways and make their own contributions. It has to begin, though, with recognizing that we are all inextricably connected, that our determined pursuit of self-interest is not going to work for much longer, and that there must be a better way forward.
I am reminded here of Martin Luther King Jr.'s famous quote, that "darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”
Everybody loves this quote. But it would behoove us to stop and deeply consider how unbelievably hard it must have been for him to choose to live this every single day of his life, maintaining this standard for himself in the midst of the political and social climate. How easy would it be for him to slip into hate, to divide the world up into people who are good and people who are evil, and to say that hatred is okay under the terrible circumstances he faced? So, so easy.
Many of humanity's heroes were actively dismissed by those in power, had nothing to offer in the way of resources, or were hunted for their beliefs and actions, and yet, they still chose to rise every single day with a goal of love in their hearts. They recognized that love has an almost alchemical-like ability to transform what it casts light upon: when we choose to see someone at their best, they rise to the occasion; sadly, the opposite is also true.
(A simple way to prove this to yourself is to go express kindness or compassion to someone, and watch the way that they respond.)
As we seek to love the world, we are humbled. The vast majority of our lives is spent inside of our own heads, running the controls of the great S.S. Self. Loving at such scale reminds us that we are not, in fact, the center of the universe; but also, that when we are imbued with love, we are more powerful than we could have possibly previously imagined.
Those who have lived through the direst of circumstances beseech us to remember this; Etty Hillseum, a Jewish woman who was murdered at Auschwitz, wrote in her diary: “Ultimately, we have just one moral duty: to reclaim large areas of peace in ourselves, more and more peace, and to reflect it toward others. And the more peace there is in us, the more peace there will also be in our troubled world.”
We are always equipped with a choice of how we react to situations in life. We know what it looks like to rise in hatred. But what about rising in love? What about choosing, from this moment forward, that you will love boldly, bravely, and without reservation? What about choosing to do this, even though you know that you will fail a hundred times before the week is done, and committing to getting back up again each and every time? What might your heart look like? What might your life be? Who might you serve, support, inspire? What changes might occur that serve the collective humanity?
Personally, I see no more compelling purpose for living than to live in love, as often as I can, for as long as I can, in order to serve my fellow human beings.