Your Brain Is Lying To You About Happiness

[00:00:00]First and foremost, I want to apologize for the immense mess in here, okay? This room is brand new. I've just moved.

[00:00:06]That's why this video is a little bit late. But, it's got a lot of potential.

[00:00:11]It's coming together rapidly, but a good video waits for no one. So, here we are doing it in the huge mess that we're sitting in. Just bear with me, the content's great, okay? As you can see, not only is my room not optimized, my lighting is not optimized, my sound is not optimized in here, but we're going to give it our best. But, the reason I wanted to jump on here and talk to you about something before everything was ready and set up was because I wanted to talk about something that's really been sitting with me for a while. And the more I think about it, the more I think it might be one of the most quietly damaging things happening to people who are actually trying to do the right things. And that's probably you if you're here right now. As I've been reflecting, I think that there is a certain kind of person that's driven, self-aware, that person who genuinely wants to build a good life, okay? They read books. Now, that's not necessary, just an example, right? They're They're doing the work. They're working out.

[00:01:05]They're being kind to others. They're doing great things. They're always looking for that next thing to improve, that next stone to turn over. And that's the key point. That person, though, they're absolutely exhausted.

[00:01:19]And they're exhausted from the opposite of laziness, which is the opposite of most people's problems. I know this person well. I've been this person. And I still catch myself slipping back into it sometimes. I don't think it's obvious, at least to the world, because it just looks like ambition from the outside. And I've started to recognize this more in myself and a lot of other people.

[00:01:40]But, there's a version of self-improvement that becomes a prison.

[00:01:45]And your brain, left unchecked, will keep you in that prison willingly and indefinitely. And as I progress through this, do not worry, I'm going to move pretty quickly, mainly because I can't find the fan that cools my camera and it will overheat if I don't finish this quickly. What I want to talk to you about today is what is actually happening psychologically when you can't stop optimizing. Why turning every stone stops working. And then I want to share two genuinely opposing approaches to find peace with where you are because I don't think one answer fits everyone here. It hardly does. Both do have real merits and both are worth understanding.

[00:02:25]If this is resonating with you right now, this could be the most important video that you watch this year. So stay with me. I'm going to move quickly.

[00:02:32]There's a concept in psychology called the hedonic treadmill. Okay? The basic idea is that human beings are remarkably good at returning to the baseline level of happiness regardless of what's happening to them. Good things happen, you feel better for a while. Then you adjust.

[00:02:46]The target moves and you start looking for the next thing. This was probably adaptive at some point, I imagine. You keep striving, you keep improving, never fully settle.

[00:02:56]As we came up in a world where survival was dependent on constant improvement, that drive likely served a very important purpose.

[00:03:04]The problem is that drive doesn't know when to stop and in a world where you can optimize almost everything now, it just keeps running.

[00:03:12]I've watched this in myself in a pretty specific way. There's a point where you achieve something that genuinely mattered to you.

[00:03:18]And instead of sitting in that, like really feeling it, the mind and your brain, it starts scanning again. Like what's next? What still needs fixing? What's next on my to-do list? What could be better?

[00:03:30]And I've got a lot better at really enjoying the moment and enjoying the wins because I went very long period of my life with multiple master's degrees, medical school, social media achievements, this amazing thriving career and I was just as like, "Okay, cool. Anyways, next."

[00:03:47]And that is no way to live, trust me.

[00:03:49]5 years, 10 years passes along and you've built something real, you've built something incredible, and you barely remember building it because you were always looking for what was still missing.

[00:04:01]That is not ambition.

[00:04:03]That is a defective thought pattern that is running on its own again and again.

[00:04:10]And if you need to hear that again, that is not ambition.

[00:04:14]So, let's talk about stepping back.

[00:04:16]There's something that happens when you force yourself to stop and look at where you actually are.

[00:04:21]Not in a complacent way, but in an honest way.

[00:04:25]When I've done this, and I mean really done it, what I find is usually pretty surprising.

[00:04:30]The distance between where I started and where I am is much, much larger than I've been getting myself credit for.

[00:04:38]Because when you're always focused on that gap, you stop seeing the ground that you've already covered. And I'm telling you, like, that's just no way to live life. Like, I think we built this hyper-optimized society when really we were probably just supposed to sit around and smell the roses. When you actually start seeing this on a regular basis, there's this very settling feeling that happens.

[00:05:01]And this kind of whole-body feeling and energy comes back online that you were suppressing and was being drained by the constant striving. What I've noticed both in myself and watching other people is that this isn't just like a feel-good exercise. People who can genuinely acknowledge how far they've come tend to move forward with more ease, like, less friction, less white knuckling. It's as if like finding this peace actually freed up the path moving forward. This is a very real process, and I feel like things happen in my life so much more naturally and more effortlessly now that I'm adopting these strategies. I guess the best way I can describe this is progress made from a place of being grounded looks a lot different from progress made from a place of chronic dissatisfaction. And I think more people need to hear that and more people need to think about it. Now, this is where I think it gets interesting cuz I think there's a completely legitimate counter argument to everything I just said, and it comes from people I respect enormously. And so, I want to give this a very fair hearing here, okay? The Stoics had a practice they called negative visualization. I believe it's pronounced premeditatio malorum, the deliberate contemplation of loss.

[00:06:10]The idea was pretty simple here.

[00:06:12]Imagine losing the things that you have, your health, your relationships, your work. Sit with that image very seriously, not as a catastrophizing exercise, but as a way to genuinely understand what you actually value.

[00:06:27]Although, it kind of is a catastrophizing exercise.

[00:06:30]Marcus Aurelius wrote about this.

[00:06:31]Epictetus practiced it. And the argument was that a person who had vividly imagined losing something moves through their life with a different quality of attention, a different urgency. They're more present, they're more grateful, and they're less numb to what's actually there.

[00:06:48]More recently, I have seen people like Huberman talk about this in more of a modern context. That's actually what introduced me to this even though I've read plenty of Stoicism, I had not heard this concept before.

[00:06:59]The research on motivation suggests that for certain people and in certain context, imagining the absence of what you're working towards actually sharpens drive more effectively than positive visualization does, which I think's really interesting. I don't think I'm really one of those people, but interesting nonetheless. There is something very real about this approach that I find hard to dismiss because gratitude as a concept is easy to talk about and we usually talk about it in a very positive light, but negative visualization is one way of actually accessing it rather than just performing it, I guess. So, which one is right?

[00:07:35]I think the more useful question is which one is right for you, and maybe even which one is right for you right now. I say that because we change and things aren't always going to be stationary for you. We are human beings.

[00:07:49]Please recognize this. I say this in all my videos. It feels like every day I found myself becoming more and more like my attendings. I used to have an attending in residency who would look at me and every time you asked him a question about some patient, he would say, "It depends."

[00:08:04]And we're not taught normally that it depends, but he's right. It does. I say all this because I don't think these things are actually opposites. Stepping back and acknowledging how far you've come and sitting with the imagined loss of what you have, both are pointing towards the same overall thing.

[00:08:22]Presence.

[00:08:23]They're pointing towards real engagement of what is actually here in front of you in life, rather than just living permanently in what comes next. The person who can do either or both of these things well, genuinely, not just as a mental exercise, has developed something that most people chasing optimization never find.

[00:08:44]They develop a kind of relationship with their own life where they are actually in it.

[00:08:49]And that is something that I'm telling you, when I watch all of these beautiful Instagram highlight reels of people's lives, I don't know them personally and and this this is a judgment. This really is.

[00:09:01]But I'm just from what I'm analyzing from a very outside lack of knowledge of their life point of view, I'm not seeing this. It seems like constant chasing. And what I keep coming back to is the most grounded, effective people I have ever been around are not the ones who optimize their way to contentment. I'm telling you, I I know billionaires, I know hundred millionaires, I know all these people, right? They are the ones who have found a way to want what they already have while still caring about where they are going.

[00:09:35]That combination is so much rarer than it sounds, and I think it's worth working towards way more deliberately than most of us do. So, let's bring this to a close. You've made it a very long way in this video. If you've made it this far, your brain is probably sharper than 99% of the rest of the population, but good job. But, your brain is going to keep telling you the next thing will do it for you. The next achievement, the next level, the next stone to turn.

[00:09:59]Sometimes that's true. Growth matters a lot. Ambition matters. I don't want you to be stagnant in life, but at some point, the story your brain is putting out and is telling you about what happiness requires starts costing you the very life that you were trying to build.

[00:10:18]And if that sounds dramatic, good. It was meant to be. What I'm trying to do in this video is help you see this concept clearly enough to do something about it. I talk more about this about this concept and many, many more about how to live a fulfilled life in its entirety in my opinion. And I built frameworks around this, things that are way longer than I can discuss in a single YouTube video here. It's about how I actually think about performance, peace, and what a sustainable good life and overall health and diet and exercise look like.

[00:10:49]That is what I put in my book, From Dull to Doctor. I usually have it sitting on my desk, but it's a little farther away now cuz I haven't got it fully moved in.

[00:10:57]This is the book that I spent over 3 years trying to get to you about how I taught my brain and body to thrive and how you can, too. It's a step-by-step guide. The reviews and people say it is written like a very knowledgeable friend is talking to you, and I love that because that's what I went for. If you like my YouTube videos, you'll probably like how I work things here. It's in all formats on Amazon. You can check it out.

[00:11:19]I will link it in the description for you. And if that's not for you, if you want a free 30-day blueprint that is completely free for you, you can check that out, too. I will drop that in the description as well. I'm trying to meet with where you're at. If you found value in this video, if you enjoyed it, please like, comment, and subscribe. Hit that notification icon. It will notify you when I post a new video. I post one every week, although this one was a little bit late, but there's been a lot going on with the move.

[00:11:46]And I don't want you to miss another life-changing video like this. And please, again, if you found value, share this video with a loved one. It's completely free, and it's the least that you can do to help someone that you care about. And as always, I'm Dr. Mike Jones. Thanks for watching, and I'll see you in the next one.