You might ask yourself, how can somebody be a professor of a feeling?

The truth is that it's so much more than that, and yet most people don't know that.

Everybody wants to be happier, I mean, not everybody acts like they do, but everybody wants to be happier, deep in their souls, I do believe, but most people don't know how to define it.

I ask my students at the university, what is happiness?

And many of them will say, well, it's the feeling that you get when dot, dot, dot.

As a matter of fact, they all talk about feelings at the very beginning, and I say no, no, no.

That's not the true definition of happiness.

It's so much more than that.

If I asked you, what's the definition of the Thanksgiving dinner?

You wouldn't say, it's the smell of the turkey.

No, that's an indication that there's something special going on in the kitchen.

It's an indication that dinner's coming, and the happiness feeling that you get is an indication of a much deeper psychological and even neuroscientific phenomenon.

Happiness is a combination of three big things.

They're kind of like the macronutrients in food, you might say.

If I ask you to define the Thanksgiving dinner, you might say it's proteins, carbohydrates, and fat, and you would be right.

And similarly, if I ask you the definition of happiness and you're getting it correctly, you would say it's a combination of three things, enjoyment, purpose, and satisfaction.

Now, each one of these things has a big literature unto itself.

There are people studying each one of these things.

They're not obvious.

Enjoyment, for example, is not the same thing as pleasure.

Maybe you'll see that in the dictionary, but it's not true.

Pleasure is something that happens to you.

It runs through a very ancient part of your brain called the limbic system.

It's a reward for something that happens automatically so that you'll do something again and again.

Enjoyment is an elevation of that, where you take pleasure, but you add your true humanity to it.

You experience it with other people.

You move it literally to a different part of your brain called the prefrontal cortex, and there you can remember it, and it becomes a part of your happiness.

If your Thanksgiving dinner gives you pleasure by filling your belly, the enjoyment comes from consuming that delicious dinner with your family members and the people that you love, thus becoming enjoyment and thus becoming part of your happiness.

Similarly, purpose and meaning are not quite so straightforward either.

Everybody knows that they want meaning in life, but they can't quite define it, and it's hard to find sometimes, isn't it?

But even beyond that, the great paradox of meaning is that as part of happiness, it requires suffering.

I ask people, when did you find your resiliency, who you were, the purpose in your life, and inevitably people talk to me about suffering, about challenges, about loss, about grief even.

When their heart was broken, when somebody died that they loved and they survived, that's when they find their true meaning in life.

The irony of that is that happiness requires unhappiness to get meaning.

Just like those first two, satisfaction is a bit of a paradox.

As a matter of fact, it's the most difficult of the elements of happiness for us to master.

Satisfaction is the great question of life.

We want it.

We try to get it, but we can't keep it.

Now what is it?

Satisfaction is the joy at a job well done.

It's the reward for a goal met.

You know that feeling.

If you want to be satisfied, you'll be satisfied when you graduate from your university, when you marry the person that you love, when you get the house you've always dreamed about, when you retire after a long career, and then you'll finally be satisfied.

You'll be joyful at the goal that you actually met, and furthermore, you'll be satisfied forever, right?

That's what your brain is telling you.

That's what the marketing around you in the world tells you.

That's what Mother Nature tells you.

But it's wrong.

You know perfectly when you think about it a little bit that you hit your goals and they give you a whole bunch of joy, that's satisfaction, and then it wears off.

You get that car and that new car smell reminds you how wonderful it is, and a couple weeks later it's just a car.

You move to California because you want the sunshine, you want the beautiful weather, and six months later you're driving around just cursing the traffic.

That seems like one of the cruelest fates in life, almost as if it were a hoax from Mother Nature, but it's not.

It's actually part of Mother Nature's plan.

See, you can't keep satisfaction because you'd die if you stayed satisfied with those worldly things.

Let me explain a major and important concept in the world of neuroscience.

It's called homeostasis.

Homeostasis is the tendency to go back to a baseline, either physiologically or psychologically.

It's the equilibrium that we always go back to, that we need to go back to, so we'll be ready for the next set of circumstances in our life.

For example, perhaps you went to the gym today, you got on the treadmill and your objective was to raise your pulse rate for cardiovascular health, and you raised your pulse rate to 140 beats per minute, and after half an hour you got off and within 15 minutes your pulse was back down to 60 or 70 or wherever it's supposed to be.

Thank goodness for that.

If you didn't have homeostasis, within a week and your pulse remained elevated, you'd be dead.

Now, similarly with your emotions, you need to go back to your baseline.

For example, you feel fear as something that happens, but the fear doesn't last.

Why?

Because you need to be ready for the next thing that might make you afraid.

You can't be distracted with the last thing or you wouldn't survive.

Your ancestors wouldn't have passed on their genes.

With happy feelings, it's the same way.

You can't say happy with something that's happening right now, because you need to be ready for new happiness or new unhappiness, as a matter of fact.

This is a survival mechanism.

This is Mother Nature's purpose.

But she also has a slightly nefarious purpose for you, which is to make you think you're going to keep your satisfaction, even though she won't let you keep your satisfaction.

Why?

So you keep running and making progress and trying harder.

See, if you knew it wasn't going to last, you might just stop and sit down.

Mother Nature doesn't want that.

So you run and you run, and you think you'll always get to keep it.

The Rolling Stones sing, I can't get no satisfaction, and the song says, I try and I try and I try and I can't get no satisfaction.

The real point of that song is not that Mick Jagger can't get no satisfaction.

He can get satisfaction.

It's that he can't keep no satisfaction.

That's the irony of this thing.

Running almost as if it were on a treadmill trying to get it.

Now, it's interesting, isn't it?

We have a concept in my social science field called the hedonic treadmill.

Hedonic means feeling.

Treadmill is just a metaphor, obviously.

But you want to get the feeling of joy.

You want to get the satisfaction.

So you run and you run, or as Jagger says, you try and you try and you try, but you stay more or less in the same place.

But you never quite figure it out.

Furthermore, as you get more and more addicted to the worldly things, to the material possessions, to the money, the power, the pleasure, the fame, the treadmill starts to turn up in speed.

And so you're running faster.

Pretty soon you're running at blinding speed.

And you're not just running out of ambition.

You start to run out of fear, right?

If you're a success addict, maybe a little bit of a workaholic, you know how this fear feels.

You're running for more and more satisfaction that comes from the object of your work, from the returns that you get, from the congratulations, from the raises, the promotions, the deals done.

And pretty soon you start thinking to yourself, I'm actually not getting that much satisfaction, but what if I stop?

What happens if you stop on the treadmill?

Your face plant is what happens if you stop on a treadmill, and nobody wants that.

Well, it might seem to you that I'm kind of a downer here, that I'm telling you about the human condition.

It's not that great.

It's not that fun.

And maybe it even seems like there's nothing you can do.

Well there is something that you can do.

There's a lot that you can do, but you have to be willing to do the work and go contrary to your nature.

The old idea that if it feels good, do it, is wrong.

When it comes to happiness, Mother Nature doesn't really care how happy you are.

She wants you to pass on your genes, your happiness.

That's up to you.

And you need to contravene your tendencies, and this is a perfect case.

I'm going to tell you how you can actually achieve lasting and stable satisfaction, but you can't go with your instincts.

It starts with a formula.

Most people think that satisfaction comes if I have what I want.

If I manage my halves, I expand my halves, if I maximize my halves, I have things, I have relationships, I have money, I have power, I have all of these worldly things.

But the truth is that stable and lasting satisfaction comes not from what you have, but what you have divided by what you want.

That's a better model for it, because when you think about it, it sort of makes sense.

When you have a lot, well, your wants increase by even more.

I have a friend who, he told himself he was very successful in business early on in his 20s.

He said, you know how I'm going to know I'm a real success?

Kind of his own yardstick.

I'm going to go down to the Mercedes dealership and be able to buy a car in cash, he said.

And the day he was able to, he was 32, such a gifted guy, he went down and put down his money in cash.

I mean, who buys a Mercedes in cash?

Different question.

He puts down the money, and he says, I want my car, and they gave it to him, and his satisfaction lasted all of 45 seconds.

As he was driving off the lot, he thought to himself, I should have saved six months longer and gotten the Ferrari.

What happened?

He was managing his haves, but his wants were sprawling.

Remember your high school fractions?

If you've got a fraction, it's got a numerator, it's got a denominator.

If you maximize the numerator, the number goes up, it's true.

But another way for it to go up, another way for your satisfaction to go up, is to decrease the denominator to manage your wants.

Ask yourself this.

Do you have a haves management strategy?

Of course you do, everybody does.

Do you have a wants management strategy?

I bet you don't.

Most people don't.

The secret to lasting satisfaction is not to manage your worldly haves to have more, but rather it's to want less.

I have a beautiful friendship, one that I treasure, with His Holiness the Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gatso, the 14th Dalai Lama, who dispenses wisdom to people all around the world.

He's the world's most respected religious figure.

He was guest lecturing for my happiness class last year, and I asked him this question.

He was in his home in Dharamsala in the Himalayan foothills.

I was in Boston where I teach, and we were separated because of the coronavirus epidemic, but we were still close in all the things that we were talking about.

I asked him for my students and a live audience of 14 million people.

It was a beautiful public event.

I said, Your Holiness, what's the secret to satisfaction?

He didn't tell me the fraction I just gave you, but he said it in words.

He said, we need to learn how to want what we have, not to have what we want, in order to get steady and stable satisfaction.

Another way to think of this is not to have a bucket list, but to have a reverse bucket list.

In other words, don't think of all of the sticky cravings that you have, but rather make a list of all those cravings and make a plan to renounce your craving to those things.

If you get them, great, but if you don't, that's great too.

Make a conscious decision to divorce yourself from the cravings to the things on the list.

That's a reverse bucket list.

That's what strong people do.

Can you do it?

I do that every year on my birthday now, and I've just watched my happiness through my satisfaction increase.

Now, you might ask yourself, is there anything, anything that will give me stable and steady satisfaction?

The answer is yes, but it's not money, not power, not pleasure, not fame.

That's the bad four.

Here's the good four, faith, family, friends, and work.

Now, by faith, I don't mean my faith.

I don't mean necessarily a formal faith.

I mean a sense of the grandeur, a sense of the transcendent, a perspective that's bigger than your everyday life, which is so small and so tedious.

Maybe it comes from a walk in the forest every day for an hour.

Maybe it comes from studying the ancient Stoic masters.

Maybe it comes from going back to the faith of your youth.

Maybe it comes from a meditation practice you choose, but you must do something every day that zooms you out.

Your family life, the ties that bind, that don't break, the ties you don't choose, and God knows in many cases you wouldn't.

Maybe you had a tough Thanksgiving where Aunt Marge wouldn't stop talking about politics, but you know perfectly that the 2 a.m. call that you make would go to one of those people.

Don't ruin those relationships over trivialities like politics and ideology.

Friendship.

You need friends, but you don't just need people around you, people who can help you, people at work.