How to Be Happy and Successful
Guidance for and from the mildly incompetent on how to be happy and successful.
How to Be Happy and Successful
Ep. 8: Be Here Now (Happiness)
Learn the downsides of letting your mind spend nearly all of its time thinking about the past or future and the upsides of paying attention to what you're doing right now. Then learn how to pay attention to your thoughts and bring them back to the present.
Hi, my name is David Murphy, and welcome to How to Be Happy and Successful, the podcast for and from the Mildly Incompetent. Okay, welcome everyone. Welcome to Be Here Now, the next episode on the happiness side of the podcast as opposed to the success side of the podcast. The two different but certainly not contrasting sides of what we do here. Anyways, welcome. We all live in the present moment. For people who practice meditation or at least are used to the sort of mindfulness world, they spend time listening to people talk about mindfulness. That statement that we all live in the present moment all of our lives, it's a fundamental truth. It has profound implications for how we should approach our days and live our lives. It is a useful reminder not to get caught up in the excesses and the complicated pathways of thought. For people who are not in the mindfulness world, who don't meditate, saying that we all live in the present moment is a ridiculously obvious expression. It's like saying, Oh, fish are wet, and the sun is hot. You know, there's nothing useful about it. And it's even annoying that some people think it's profound. To the cynical or the uninitiated, it seems profound only to idiots or to frauds. We all live in the present moment. We live in the now. There's nothing profound about that to people, and it's frustrating when others do seem to think it's so profound. To the truly cynical, uh, claiming that we all live in the now is a profound statement that should change your life, indicates that you're either a fraud who's trying to sell podcasts, books, seminars, yoga mats, whatever, or you're an idiot who believes those frauds. Well, I used to be the second person, and now I'm the first person. I used to find it ridiculous that people think this is something kind of an important statement, and now I'm making a statement in a podcast. I'm making a podcast episode about trying to be here now and in this moment. So I know the journey that you have to take if you're starting on that cynical side of things. The title of this episode is taken from a book called Be Here Now, written by a guy who ended up calling himself Ram Das. And he is very famous in the American meditation community world, you might say. And he started off on the cynical side of life in that he started off as a very uptight, highly educated American person who ended up taking uh psychedelics and then going to India and having his whole life changed. And he wrote this book, Be Here Now, which I can't exactly recommend because it gets a little too weird, mostly weird in sort of how it's formatted, you might say. Not really weird in the ideas. And I heard about Ram Das through the 10% happier podcast. Now that was started by Dan Harris, who was Mr. Cynical. That's how he always portrays himself. And in the book, 10% Happier, when he talks about how he got into meditation and things, you know, he was he emphasizes how little he believed in any of this stuff. And it's funny, I started listening to 10% happier podcast because, you know, as I said in the first episode, I wanted to learn. I felt like I was actually a pretty happy person, certainly in comparison to many people who stress so much about life. I tend to have a little more of a this is not a big problem perspective. But I still wanted to learn: are there rules, are there practices that we can do to make ourselves more reliably happy? And so I started listening to this podcast, but I didn't start meditating, even though he, Dan Harris, at that time had a 10% happier app. And so I'm just listening to podcast episodes, and people would come on and talk about the important changes they'd made in their lives, almost always as a result of starting meditation. And then Sam Harris, no relation to Dan Harris, so just friends with the same last name, he comes on as a guest of the podcast. I hear that, and then I start listening to Sam Harris's Making Sense podcast, which is largely about politics, current events, problems with our society. Though he does also talk to meditators and other people of interest in the world, people who talk about having a happy life and sometimes just uh scientists talking about interesting ideas in the world. Still, it was not where Sam Harris focused on things like happiness and meditation. That was in his Waking Up app, which I still did not start using. And so I want to learn about happiness. I listen to a guy who's got a happiness app, but I don't do any of that stuff, and I don't start meditating. Then I switch over to a guy who also has a happ a meditation app called Waking Up. I don't go joining that, I don't start meditating, I listen to his Making Sense podcast for, I don't know, at least a year before I finally say, oh, all right, I'll try this meditation stuff for myself. So you can see that even with a guy like me who teaches and preaches that you should practice uh gratitude in your life, that you should practice self-compassion and is here telling you that you should learn to be present in this moment and ideally practice some mindfulness meditation. This guy who's here talking to you took a long time. He's got to change things. And you know what? I'm not trying to get you now. I've not been converted to somebody who wears flowers in his hair and burns incense. I don't do any of that stuff. I don't even wear sandals. I am closed toe shoes only. But I'll tell you this. I said at the beginning of the self-compassion episode that if just a phrase self-compassion makes your skin crawl, you couldn't have to get used to that. I'm not gonna try to change the phrasing to make you able to avoid facing the idea of having compassion for yourself. And here, I'm not gonna pretend we're not talking about mindfulness, about trying to be more present in the moment without judging the moment or yourself, which is the kind of phrasing that people who do meditation use. In my opinion, a person not being able to see the usefulness of mindfulness is like a person not being able to see the usefulness of giving up cigarettes. And a person who thinks that examining their thoughts is for weirdos, it's like a person who thinks that not beating their kids is for softies. You know, you have to just give up some of the old ideas that have been shown to be useless, to be harmful to us. My goal in this episode is to make you see that you spend a lot of your time, the large majority of your time, thinking about things that aren't happening right now. And two, that doing that makes you less happy. And three, that you can learn to be better at paying attention to what's going on right now. You can become better at it even without becoming a defic a dedicated mindfulness meditator. Though it helps if you do actually start practicing mindfulness meditation. Okay, let's talk about you for a minute. You spend most of your time, a reasonable estimate would be about uh 80% of your time, thinking about what happened in the past, maybe five minutes ago, maybe two weeks ago, maybe 20 years ago, or what's coming in the future. Maybe what's coming for dinner, maybe what's going to happen in a week, maybe what your retirement might be like, all that. 80% of your time in the future or in the past. And you might think, oh no, I don't. I really bet you do. And no, I'm not in your mind. But I am, I'm basing that number from my own experience and from what other people who spent a lot of time observing their thoughts and talking to people who observe your thoughts, the kind of sense that they get from that study. I'll give a couple of quotes. The first is from Eckhart Tall, whose name I did not know how to pronounce until I looked it up for this episode, and you are welcome for the extra effort there. His line from his very successful book, The Power of Now, says, We live almost entirely through memory and anticipation. So we live almost entirely through memory and anticipation. I of course think he's completely right about that, and I don't think it'll take even too much effort on your part at looking at your thoughts for a while for you to see the truth of it also. I'll say something about Eckhart Tall. You know, he's very successful promoting the ideas that I'm trying to promote in this episode, you know, and so I totally support you going to read The Power of Now or watch videos about him, because the ideas are there. You know, I have never been a big reader of his back in the day. I, of course, was too cynical to consider reading that kind of stuff. Uh now I feel I get the ideas elsewhere. If I have any problem with him, and look, he has been a teacher who's been, according to many, many fans and admirers, very helpful to them in helping to make them happier by living in the present moment. That is terrific. Again, if I have any issue with him at all, it's that he promotes this very important idea of the importance of being in the moment and how easy it is for us to be carried out of this moment by our sort of spinning thoughts. But he doesn't give any credit at all to the clear origin of those ideas, which is Buddhism. And not the praying to the Buddha side of Buddhism, but the you know analysis of our mental behaviors and the practices we can do to make ourselves happier. If you listen to Eckhart Tall talk and you have any experience of listening to you know Buddhists talk about the mind, you go, yeah, exactly. But he sort of promotes it like it's his own brand new uh revelation. So I don't love that. But if the way he teaches and what he teaches works for you, it's terrific because it's the exact right idea. You know, most of it. I I haven't read all of his stuff at all. According to Dan Harris, you know, who wrote 10% happier, you know, it's some of it drifts off into, you know, some of that non-scientific uh mumbo jumbo. And it's also a teacher who likes to use a lot of confusing jargon. It sounds very smart. Maybe it's just too smart for me. But let's just take that idea, which I think from what I think is this great quote, that we live almost entirely through memory and anticipation. This is totally true. And it there are reasons for it. There are evolutionary reasons why it's useful for us to remember the past, either just for information we can gather for making decisions, or even frankly, if you have some shameful incident in the past and you can remember, it might guide you to being more socially acceptable now. And since we live in a social species, it's important that we carry those burdens that make us better at fitting in our group. And for anticipation, it's obviously useful that we make predictions and we act on those predictions. And even again, even social anxieties about the future can make us a little better at fitting in with our group, which is very useful for us living long enough to procreate and to make sure that our offspring carry on. So again, an evolutionary purpose there. But realize that evolutionary purpose has nothing to do with you being happy. Evolution, that process, does not care about you feeling good in the moment or with your life. Well, I do care about you being happy now in this moment and today and with your life overall. And so we sometimes have to do things that will step away from these evolutionary influences. And so we want to step away from this constant thinking about the past and thinking about the future. It is useful, but really it's we should switch the numbers. It should really be about 20% of our time should be thinking about the past and the future. We can get all the remembering of facts and the planning of future actions. We can get all of that done quite effectively in about 20% of our time instead of 80% of our time. Now, the next quote is from a guy named Mark Epstein, who is an author. He is a therapist and a meditator who has written books about therapy and about meditation. The quote I'm about to give is not exactly about past and future, but it's about the idea of thoughts coming and taking us away from whatever's going on at this moment, sort of taking over our inner monologue. He says, we are constantly murmuring, muttering, scheming, or wondering to ourselves under our breath. In other words, we're not thinking about how we're washing the dishes, how we're driving our car, how we're doing whatever task we're doing at work, or even sometimes about what we're saying to the person right in front of us. Instead, we have these voices going on and on about whatever it is, which is often about the past or the future, but whatever is aggravating us or motivating us in some negative way right now. And as I said in the self-compassion episode, we often don't even notice these voices. They can be, they can be up sort of in our conscious mind, or they could be just running around under the surface, affecting our moods and affecting our perspective without us being aware of them. Now, the challenge here is this lack of awareness. If you have no idea what I'm talking about, if you think I don't think I do that much, you know, yeah, sure, I think about the past and future some, but not all the time. Okay, well, look, test what I'm saying. You could take it on faith. You could listen to me, listen to those quotes, and be like, ah, but that's true about me. And that's great. But more useful. And in fact, the only way to actually move forward from here is for you to start paying attention yourself to your own head. Start looking at your thoughts. And again, that is it's unusual. It's not a natural skill to be able to step back from our thoughts and try to look at them as they happen. And I am not trying to get you to sit down and do meditation right now. I I strongly encourage that habit. I'll talk about I'll talk later at the end of the episode. I'll try to give more of a selling pitch for you actually sitting down and meditating, even though I don't offer a meditation app. You know, unlike those Harris fellows, I have no conflict of interest. I can be a straight shooter. But in it really, the main difference between what I'm talking about mostly in this episode, and me urging you to do meditation is that I'm talking about you being in the moment as you go through your life and do things, as you drive your kids to school, as you spend time with them, as you talk to your friends, as you do your job, as you do your dishes. Not as you sit on a pillow, you know, legs crossed, and do nothing but put your attention on your breath and look at the thoughts that arise. But I do think it's important that you learn how to look at your thoughts. Okay, how do you do that? Well, look, just make an effort to, I don't know, twice a day, five times a day, ten times a day, once an hour. If you want, set an alarm on your phone. Once every two hours, have this alarm go off. And just it goes off, you think, okay, what am I thinking about? What's going on in my brain? If this is new to you, you're not going to be good at it at first. You're going to be, oh, the alarm went off. And that will be the thought you discover. But as you try, you will start to think, what was I thinking about? And you might realize, I was thinking about dinner. I was thinking about that thing that guy said to me this morning, or that thing that someone said to me 15 years ago that I never got over. You're very likely not thinking about whatever is happening at this moment. That's okay. You're not a bad person because your mind wanders. To say in the meditation teacher voice that uh used to drive Dan Harris crazy when he started his journey, and maybe drive some of you crazy as well. Yeah, because that's okay. You are you, whole and complete. You know, that kind of thing. That's how they talk. But the point is, it is okay. You know, when you find out I wasn't thinking about what I'm doing, okay, good for you for noticing. You're not a bad person, you're just a person for being that way. This is part of a big part of the deal of being mindful, is not looking at things so you can criticize yourself, but just looking and noticing. So you start to do that. It's a skill I talked about in self-compassion. I'd say I'd talk about it more here because you need it for self compassion, and really this is where you really have to get good at noticing your thoughts so that they can stop running your life. They can stop running your feelings about your life. There's a woman named Sharon Salzberg who, in the world of uh American meditation teachers, She's about half a generation after uh the Ron Das guy I talk about, and from whom I stole the title of this episode. I heard her say once in a video on YouTube, I don't know her. I heard her say that, you know, mindfulness is a skill. You know, you can learn to do it. And when you do it, it's applicable to different things. You know, it it is applicable to you learning to bring your attention to the moment and make yourself happier by doing that. It's useful, like I talked about in the self-compassion episode. It's useful to know for noticing when your voices are just like so out of whack. They say the meanest things that are so exaggerated. You can notice that if you're mindful. If you're doing any kind of therapy, you essentially need some mindfulness to be able to see what's going on in your head and kind of follow it. You know, say, well, where did that come from? What's going on with that? Why do I think that so often? What's it all about? You need to have some mindfulness to do that. And on a more positive note, mindfulness can help you when you're hanging out with friends or you're hanging out with your kids or anybody you care about. It can get you to look at them more and listen to them more and just appreciate being around them more, and so you can enjoy your life more because of that. Which I'll talk about in a few minutes. So you can start to follow my suggestion of you know using your alarm to sort of remind yourself to, hey, what am I thinking about? You can also start to do, you know, a little more formal meditation practice. You don't have to go to a temple somewhere to do that, but you can find on YouTube, you know, guided meditation for five minutes, you know, guided meditation video, or anything. There are lots of apps out there. You could just five minutes a day or ten minutes a day, sit down and start looking at your thoughts. And what you will find is a mess. I'm not trying to insult you when I say that. I have talked to friends of mine about how they should do meditation. They think, I can't meditate. When I've tried, my mind just runs everywhere. Exactly. Your mind is running everywhere right now. You're just not noticing how much is running everywhere because you're distracting yourself. You're doing things in your life, like listening to a podcast about being happier. You're not paying enough attention to those things you're doing because your mind's sort of distracted, but you're distracted from the fact that your mind is distracted by the fact that you're doing things. When you sit down and you think, well, I'm just going to focus on my breath, your mind starts spinning off and not thinking about the breath. And now, while you're meditating, you see it happening and you think you're failing. But you're not failing. You're just noticing what your mind is doing all the time. So, ideally, you would start to spend a little bit of time, you say, meditating, but you've got to carry that forward into your regular life. Right now, spend some time each day and each evening and before you go to bed, just noticing what's going on with my brain. And if you see that, oh, I was thinking about this, I was thinking about this, you know, you can you don't even have to keep a score of like, oh, David was right, oh, David was wrong. I'm thinking about this moment right now. I mean, you can keep score if you want to, I will definitely win that one. So, you know, good for me. The point is just get good at that skill of seeing whatever's happening with your thoughts. And you won't be good at it at first. We're not good at challenging skills when we first try them. But even to notice some of what's happening in your brain, it's terrific. Now I want you to understand that I'm not saying your life will only be worth living, or at least we'll only be happy if you put all of your attention into whatever you are doing at this moment. 100%, never thinking about anything else. For example, when listening to this podcast, I don't expect you to sit very still with your eyes closed while you listen to me go on and on. I mean, did you listen to that work your behaviors episode? That's so long. Ridiculous. I love podcasts and I listen to them while I do dishes and while I cook and while I do this and that. I don't listen to while I work out. I try to work out I use music when I work out to push me a little harder. But so I love podcasts, and I love, you know, talking on the phone to people while I'm doing tasks around my apartment or doing other things when I'm out and about. I often listen to music while driving in my car, and sometimes I really get into that music. You know, maybe some song that you used to love comes on and, you know, you get carried away, you love it, and it reminds you of the past. That's not bad. And those are examples of me not paying attention with all of my focus into what's what's happening right now. So I'm not trying to tell you that you must never use any form of distraction. You must never do something else with your brain while your body's doing one thing. But you must have some skill at paying attention to what's happening. There are times when it's very important to pay attention to what's happening. And first of all, with things like podcasts or talking to friends, sometimes we turn to that because we simply can't even bear the idea of carrying out simple tasks without having a distraction. We don't want that kind of dependence, that almost addiction to having noise go on while we do things, just distraction going on. And I am guilty of that myself. I every time I want to do a task, I grab my phone and think, oh, can I listen to you right now? Nothing wrong with that, but it means that you just really are trying to escape your brain, escape looking at your brain, escape considering what's going on in your brain. Or you think without necessarily thinking of it consciously, you might think that reality is just too boring to endure. Yeah, it's just it's just impossible to actually sit and not do something with my phone. Yeah, how often do you stand waiting for an elevator or getting on an elevator without grabbing your phone? I mean, that is, you know, what? Twenty seconds to sixty seconds waiting for the elevator and another twenty to sixty seconds riding it. But we're so trained right now to have distraction going on that it seems like an hour if we don't grab our phones. Because the phones are right there in our pockets, and they're telling you, hey, you're not doing anything. Come on, get distracted. I'm telling you it's better to not distract yourself, that's not the right word. It's better to spend your time looking at the environment, seeing what's going on around you, or looking at your thoughts. As I say in self-compassion, our thoughts are running all the time, and they're not representations of reality. They're not really things as they are, but they will make us think they are. If they are go unobserved, they can do magic, they can cast spells upon us that make us completely accept them as profound statements. So we'll tell ourselves out loud in our brains, enough so that we really notice it, or maybe under the radar, we'll tell ourselves things like, you always screw that up. And because we don't take note of our mind saying that, and therefore can't see it objectively at all, we just a little zombie brain, a little zombie voice in our heads responds, I always screw that up. I always screw that up. And we come to believe it. We think it's true instead of just some really obviously ridiculous exaggeration. We can only break the spell if we can see them and realize, oh, that's that thought that I'm the stupidest person in the whole world, that's not accurate. I know people stupider than me. Look at my cousin. That guy is dumb as the day is long. I know my IQ is higher than that guy's. So the joke's on you, inner voice. Go tell my cousin that he's the dumbest person in the world. We can only break the spell if we can look. And what'll happen if you even do develop that skill, just realize you're gonna get caught up in a spell again. But you you can break the spell again if you can look at your thoughts. So you see how useful that skill is? That Sharon Salzberg was right. Okay, let's say you accept, either because you really believe it or for the sake of argument, you accept what I'm saying, that you are constantly sort of your mind is wandering off what you're doing right now into the past or into the future, or it's just spinning off on ideas and topics that are not connected to what you're doing right now. Well, oh, what's so bad about that? Really? What are the cons? Maybe what you're doing right now isn't so great. Maybe you don't really like being at your job 40 hours a week, and so having your mind somewhere else is terrific. Maybe you don't like driving your car to your job. So spending that eight to ten hours a week thinking about something else is great. You know, and and on and on. Like what's so great about this moment and what's so bad about thinking about something else? Good question. Now, I have already touched upon the answers, well, part of the answer to that question, but I'm gonna go into it more now because it's really important to understand for developing this skill and for you working on your happiness altogether. Okay, the first con, and this is a big one, this is the most important one, is that while our mind is wandering, it is rarely leading us through happy thoughts. You know, our mind loves to do negative things, and maybe there's an evolutionary cause for that, but it's the purpose is not to make you happier, and the result is not making you happier. If you are thinking about the future, it's often anxiety related. You know, am I gonna get out of here on time? If I don't get out of here on time, then I won't make it to the other thing on time, and you know, I'll miss this thing I want to do, or guess who will be mad at me again? You know, even if you think about something happy, you've got a trip planned for next week, you're flying to Hawaii next week, you think, oh, I have so much to do before I have to go. Am I gonna be possibly get it all done? And what if I don't get it done? Well, what are my my possible plans for that? And even getting to the airport, how am I gonna get to the airport? Because every every option totally sucks about that. Now, it's important you think about a trip like that, but you'll run through that thought process about 62 times sometimes. I'd say at least 17 times. Maybe I'm going too far with that first estimate. At least 17 times. Three times is all you need. But our brain will just go on and on. And and if it's not about the past or if it's not about the future, we think about the past and we could think about things over and over again that might never be useful at all. It might, frankly, never be useful that you think about that time when you were 10 years old and you were very embarrassed in front of your whole class or in front of your friends, in front of four people, but you will think about that a lot of times. It might actually be useful to think about something as someone said to you two days ago, because that might interact might affect your interactions with them at work, but it's not useful for you to think about it, oh, 10-15 minutes at a time, you know, four or five times a day. That's not useful to you. And it's generally anxiety-inducing. Our minds will just do that. So we'll spin and we'll cycle on negative thoughts. And guess what? That's not making you happy. As I said in What is Happiness, the primary way that we are going to make ourselves happier is by reducing the amount of time that negative thoughts take hold of our inner narrative, reducing how much time we spend in the grip of negative thoughts. Well, here we are. You can see why, in some ways, being here now, being in this moment, that is the most useful skill for you to learn. I considered it putting it as a first piece of advice on the happiness site instead of gratitude. I went with gratitude and I stand by that decision. Nonetheless, this is really our opportunity not to get caught up just going on and on with negative things, which is generally what happens. And again, you might think, I don't do that. Okay, you might be a unique person. But at least 99% of humans running around on this earth do have their minds, their brains or thoughts spin off, and those spinnings generally go into negative territory. You know, demanding, anxiety-inducing, shame-producing, anger-inducing territory, even while we're going along and you know, driving our kids to school or talking to our partner, maybe arguing with our partner, partly because of these thoughts that are going through our heads. And you might not, in other words, be aware that you're thinking negative thoughts, but that's mostly what happens. And so that's a disadvantage of not being in this moment. If you are doing dishes and you are paying attention to each dish that you wash, and you are paying attention to how the water feels in your hands, you're paying attention to the things you're, you know, the little stains you're getting off of the dish, that might sound super boring to you, but you are not thinking about, you know, what an idiot you were for saying what you said last night. You're not thinking about the politics that makes you so angry. You're not thinking about, you know, this interview you have to do in three days that you've already thought about 50 times and you're going through it again because you were so scared of what's going to happen there. You're thinking about the dishes and the hot water on your hands and how you're making a dish nice and clean and put it in the right place. That kind of paying attention to this moment frees you of all the crap your mind is doing to you. To repeat myself, as I do and as I will, you're breaking the spell. That's the whole idea. We're breaking the spell, and we're gonna have to keep on breaking the spell because all we do all day long is cast spells on our brain to tell us, you know, how we should be worrying about things. There's this word and this idea in Buddhism called prapancha. And prapancha is this old word, and this concept in Buddhism has to do with the proliferation of ideas. So you have some simple idea, and your mind will just start building and building and building on it, and going off down this corridor and that corridor of possibility, and you know, worrying about the consequences if this happens or that happens. You know very well that you're already very good at propuncha. It's a natural ability, but we humans, we work on it so much as we go through our lives that we become masters at it. And yet propuncha does not make us happier. It is terrific. If you are, I don't know, if you're a software designer and you are building something, you do need to be able to brainstorm and think about all the possible uses that a user might put this uh this new program to and what might happen if this happens, if that happens. Okay, so brainstorming is a useful skill. I'm not knocking it, but our minds just proliferate, proliferate, proliferate in ways that are not helpful to us at all. One phrase you can hear a lot if you listen to people talking about mindfulness and the effect of mindfulness on your life is you hear people say we so often are sleepwalking through our lives because we're not fully present in what we're doing. We're not paying attention to what we're doing as we go through our lives. We're our minds are at least half on something else. And so there's this idea of sleepwalking. But at least with sleep you get rest. With sleepwalking through our lives and being distracted, we're not even resting our minds and making ourselves refreshed. We're just making ourselves more and more anxious. Look, I don't want to give you the impression that I think your mind is full of horrible things. You know, I know that you don't constantly think about murdering people, for example. That's not what I'm saying. So as an aside, I was a waiter 20 years ago. I worked in a restaurant that was very busy on Friday nights, Saturday nights, Sunday lunches. And uh waiter, your time is of the essence in these busy shifts. And yeah, if you get to a table and you ask people, okay, are you ready to order or should I give you a couple minutes? That's not just you being polite. That's like, are you ready now or should I move on? Anyways, you get to a table and you say, Are you ready now? Should I give you a couple minutes? And they say, Oh no, no, we're ready now. And so you get, you pull out your pad, get ready, and then they pick up their menus and they look and say, hmm, what do I want? Hey, what are you gonna get? Well, I don't know. I mean, what do you think you're gonna get? Okay, that's when the murderous thoughts begin. I'm just telling you, think about your waiters and the danger you're putting yourself in. There's an example of the negative thoughts your mind can spin into. Anyways, as I was saying, don't think that I think your mind is full of evil, and don't think that I think that when you, you know, do think about negative, anxiety-inducing things that you are some strange weirdo. I mean, that's the whole point of what I'm talking about. Is that this kind of stuff happens to me, it happens to everybody who might be listening, if anybody is listening to this podcast, you know, it used to happen to the Buddha before he got enlightened, if that really happened. I'm not religious, so I don't know. I'm not a Freudian who thinks that you are just driven by constant depraved sexual cravings. But I do think that our minds are not as healthy and mature as we would like them to be. They they tend to not help us with the things that they go on about. And so when you notice this, I can't promise you, if you start to observe your thoughts more, that you're gonna love what you see. You're gonna be very impressed, like, oh, I was thinking about amazing literature without even realizing it. There was Beethoven's fifth playing in my mind again. That's not what's gonna happen. What's gonna happen is that you're gonna give the voices in your head less power. They're gonna stop running the show all the time. That's super useful. You know, as I quoted to Buddha, I I think it was in the first episode where someone asked him, What have you gained through meditation? And he said, Nothing. But I've lost anxiety, anger, fear, etc., etc. Terrific. That's what we're trying to lose as well, because losing that stuff makes us happier. How do we lose it? The best way is to learn to be in this moment. Order, you know, to be here now. Okay, on to con number two of spending our mind in the future or the past, or just somehow not in the moment that we're living in. The second con is that you don't get as much pleasure from what you're doing as you can. Now, this is most clearly a loss to you when you're doing something that you're supposed to be enjoying. So you're out to lunch with your friends, you're playing with your kids, you're eating a meal that you enjoy, or just a cookie that you enjoy. It is so easy to be doing things that we like and not even paying attention to it. You know, we're we're out with our friends, and this is a special opportunity to, you know, talk, and we however, we maybe see them once a week, maybe we see them, you know, twice a year. And so often we're there and our phones are going, we're thinking about our phones, we're thinking about what we did before we came, or we have to do after we leave, and our minds are on the meal instead of what our friends are saying, you know, and we didn't like that we ordered this thing. Whatever. There's just so much that can run through our minds that just take us away from paying attention to the conversation we're having, even if we're actually somewhat engaged in the conversation, which is our mind will wander, wander, wander. That again, that is natural. I do not expect you to have an hour and a half with your friends for lunch and spend every single second just engrossed in what they're saying. That would actually be a little strange. You might creep them out. But it is so easy to spend more than half the time with your mind elsewhere. So that's lame. It is very easy to sit down to eat something you want to eat, and maybe you've been looking forward to eating, and then you hardly notice it. You just get it in your mouth and you get it down as quick as possible, you move on to the next bite, and maybe that's also because you're on your phone while you're eating. You know, if you are chatting with your friend, you know, that that you like very much while you're eating your great food, okay. It is hard to put your attention on both. It's hard to say, wait a minute, wait a minute, don't talk to me while I enjoy this bite. So that wouldn't be the worst thing in the world. You know, I get it, but so if it's a choice between two, there's real pleasures in your life, terrific. But you know so often it's not. So often you're eating something that you really should enjoy, but you don't enjoy it all that much, not nearly as much as you could, because you're, you know, looking at Instagram or reading some news that's pissing you off, you know, or whatever, thinking about something else, watching something, anything except paying attention to this delicious food that's going into your mouth. So we can spend time doing things that we enjoy and yet not get the pleasure from them we should because our mind is off, you know, gallivanting doing other things. Now please understand, if it's not clear already, I'm not trying to make you feel guilty here. So often, you know, you hear this lesson. Oh, we we just don't appreciate our lives enough. We don't pay enough attention to the special moments. And implied from whatever source this is coming from is that uh we suck, you know, that we are wasting these moments of watching our children do whatever they're doing, for example, and we should feel bad about ourselves. I'm not saying that. I'm saying that you could be happier and like your life more if you look at these enjoyable things you're doing, these things that you set out to do because you enjoy them. If you pay more attention to them, you'll get more pleasure from them. And if you should feel guilty about that, well, then everybody should feel guilty because we we all have this tendency. It also counts. This con number two also happens with ordinary tasks in life. Things that you don't think that you can appreciate or enjoy, you can enjoy them much more than you think if you pay attention to them, if you don't try to distract yourself. So, you know, walking home from work or home from the store or home from school or walking anywhere, even while you're doing an errand, if you pay attention to what you're doing, you'll be surprised at the things you notice that are worth noticing. Whether it be a sunset, whether it be, you know, a beautiful tree or beautiful flower, you might see an interaction between two people, a mom and her son, that is just you know terrific. Or you might see something funny going on somewhere that people don't intend to be funny, but it is, anyways. You can take that pleasure if you're noticing what's going on. Not if you are totally distracted and having your mind spinning around doing stuff. And that goes, you know, I mentioned washing dishes earlier, you know, it goes for chores where we can actually, you'd be surprised how you could be sweeping a floor, folding laundry, doing dishes, doing whatever. You know, I've mentioned before on previous episodes uh Dr. Lori Santos and the Happiness Lab podcast, which is a great podcast, and I encourage you to listen to it. And she says somewhere in there that studies have shown, you know, she's a scientist and a researcher, so she does goes a lot by evidence-based uh uh evidence-based recommendations. Studies have shown that people who focus on a task when they're doing it are more likely to enjoy doing it than people who let their mind go off and wander somewhere else. So if you have to sweep a floor and you're told, look, you gotta pay attention to sweeping the floor. You have to, you know, pay attention to what you're doing as you do it, and other people say, look, let your mind do whatever you want while you're sweeping the floor. The people who have to pay attention tend to enjoy themselves more, which seems very strange because who wants to think about sweeping the floor? But they report more happiness in the people who had to do the chore and could, you know, think about television while they're doing it. But just there's two things. Doing the task, actually not as bad as you think, and you can get pleasure from doing something well and from just seeing the effect that you're having, seeing dishes get cleaner, seeing a floor get clean, seeing laundry get folded, etc. etc. You can get a pleasure from achieving something in that relatively short period of time. But also, and again, you are saving yourself from wandering off on thoughts that will end up causing you frustration and anxiety. So, by letting your mind do its thing and run around in different ways, you are taking away pleasure from this moment that you're in right now. And look, as I said before, I am not saying that you must spend every moment living mindfully, focusing on the task that you're doing. You, I don't expect you to live your life like you're in a retreat where every single action must be done mindfully. If you want to sweep the floor and listen to a podcast while you do it, you know, if you want to have your headphones on, listen to music, or talk to someone over the phone so that you are not paying attention closely to sweeping the floor, hey, okay. I'm not criticizing that, terrific. But but realize when you do that, at least when you're distracting yourself from what your your current action from this moment, you're doing it by by intentionally stepping to something that is pleasurable. Talking to someone on the phone that you like, uh, you know, listening to a podcast that you enjoy. Those are at least good choices rather than letting your mind, again, just run amuck with itself. And also, as I said before, I do recommend that you not become totally dependent upon these distractions. Give yourself a chance to do activities without listening to stuff or letting your brain be distracted in some way. Give yourself a chance to sometimes step into these tasks and these errands, whatever, you know, by paying attention to them. And you will see, not only not as bad as you think, you can actually get pleasure from these moments. In truth, our experience in life is or certainly can be, much more remarkable than you would predict. And you will only get at that sort of larger experience, that larger understanding of the moment if you pay real attention to it, and if you practice paying attention to it. And finally, perhaps, con number three of letting your mind, you know, go off and do what it wants to do, is that you're just you're not as good at what you're doing right now if you're not paying enough attention to it. The more you can bring your mind to the task at hand, the better you will do that task at hand. And there are some things that you probably don't care a whole lot about. Now, as I just sort of suggested, it's actually worth doing a lot of things well, even simple things. But certainly there are tasks in your life, and you know this, maybe these all come up at work, though probably. They this includes things you do when you're outside of work. They're things that it's really important to do them well. And the better you do them, the happier you will be, the the better the consequences for you. And really producing high-quality work tends to require concentration and frankly, an ability to bring your mind back to the task. Again, I do not ask of you, I do not expect of you, what I cannot deliver myself, which is to keep my mind constantly on what I'm doing without my mind wandering somewhere. Again, that's not how the human mind works. That's what people don't understand who do try meditation and say I can't do it because I just my mind goes off somewhere. Yes, yes, that's your human mind doing that. You have to learn to bring your mind back in meditation, but also when you're doing a task, it requires concentration. So learn to be in the moment. Get practice that skill of returning your attention to this moment. You'll enjoy it more, as I said a minute ago, and you'll be better at it, and you'll enjoy that more. You'll enjoy feeling and seeing that you're good at something. You know, in his book 10% Happier, Dan Harris, a man I've mentioned repeatedly, you know, again, who came from a sort of a cynical point of view and came from a career that was very competitive. He was in television news, you know, striving to become more and more noticed, more and more important in the TV news world. And he emphasizes in his book that he doesn't believe at all that mindfulness holds you back from success. He tries to emphasize he thinks it helps you. His concern was that it might make you into a softie, which you can't afford when you're trying to become a TV news anchor. It's not as critical to me that I prove that this idea of being in the moment will make you a more successful person who achieves more. I am urging you to do it because I really think it has a big effect on you being happier in your life. And that's frankly more important to me, even though I have a whole bunch of ideas about success, which I talk about in the episodes on achieving success. But I certainly do not think that mindfulness makes you worse at things. I do think it could contribute to you being better at things. There's no doubt about it. The only way it might hurt you in whatever your career you're striving for or something you're trying to achieve, is if you are trying to do whatever it is for some kind of negative reason. There's some kind of negative emotion and negative motivation that's driving you to work hard at something, mindfulness can help you see that, and then you make the choice. Maybe I don't really want to be spending my life or at least a lot of my time and effort achieving this thing, which I'm only achieving just to show somebody how wrong they are about me or to win somehow at some contest I don't really care about. If that's what's motivating you, mindfulness might end up taking away that motivation. But that would be a good thing, right? Otherwise, mindfulness will not in the least bit get in the way of you achieving things that are actually worth achieving. And to touch upon an idea I talked about a few minutes ago about how being in the moment, being in the present moment, stops our mind getting carried away by anxieties, say, about the future. You might think, well, the reason I'm good at things is because my mind worries so much, that my anxieties help me push myself to achieve more. I worry more about details, and so I get the details done. Uh, that's, I think, a false view of you and your success. I'm not saying that you don't worry about things and that you're not successful. I'm saying the successful part that being good at things does not require constant anxiety. You can think about things and think about details and have motivation to get the details right, get the overall project right without having to worry again and again and again. The thing is, we tend to give our problems and our anxieties, again, much more volume than they require or deserve. You can face very serious problems, and it can be very hard to deal with them. But you don't need to run them through your mind 50 times a day to deal with them. Your abilities will not be improved by by doing so. The pleasure of your life will certainly be reduced by doing so. And that's what I'm really talking about here. Okay, so I've talked a lot about why I think it's uh important to be mindful, why I think it's worthwhile to be here now, to be in this moment. I think I'll talk a little bit about how you can do that, but not a lot. You know, it's funny. The previous episodes I spent a lot of time telling you you should do this and you should do that, and you should do this and you should do that. You should write these goal lists, and here's how you should do that. With with this topic, I'm actually not gonna give a whole lot of instruction for a couple of reasons. One, there are very good resources out there for learning how to be mindful, for working on that. You know, I again use the Waking Up app by Sam Harris, the 10% happier app. Actually, no longer has Dan Harris running it, but he helped found it. You know, that's there. There are lots of meditation apps and things. You could go on YouTube and watch videos where people talk about mindfulness and being in the moment, and they can run you through a guided meditation session from three minutes to 30 minutes. So you don't need me to do that. And again, though I urge you to take up meditation as a practice, I think it's definitely worthwhile. I am not asking you to do that in order to move forward with being in this moment. Because I know a lot of you don't want to do that. I for a lot of people, just like with self-compassion, you know, as I talked about in that episode, you take those two words, put them together, a lot of people start to become nauseous. They have no interest in applying that to themselves. As I said there, you just you have to get over that. You gotta face the fact that this is a worthwhile skill to develop. Okay, I think that is true with mindfulness and practicing that form of meditation. But if you are at a point where you have no interest in doing that at all, okay. I don't think it's totally required if we just start to learn what I'm talking about here of paying more attention to what's happening in this moment. But learn how to bring your thoughts, your attention, as they say, to what you're doing now. Even when your thoughts are spinning around, bring your attention to now so at least you can notice they're doing that, give them less power, and get yourself a little more focused on what's going forward right now so you can enjoy it more. One of the tricks of doing that is just what I said earlier. You just have to find times in your day where you think, what am I thinking about? What's going on with my thoughts right now? Where are they wandering? And it can be really hard to come up with that thought, that idea, when you're in the midst of living your life and doing the best you can. So it can be useful, as I've already said, to set an alarm. So you can remind yourself, oh, I'm supposed to be paying attention to my thoughts. Let me take a minute to do that right now and see what I come up with. You know, do that twice a day, ten times a day, something. Obviously, the more time you make for yourself to do that, the better you'll get at it. And the better you'll get at noticing your thoughts even when the alarm doesn't go off. Another thing to do, this is useful, especially at stressful moments, anxious moments. You know, that's the hardest time to step out of yourself and think what's going on with me, what's going on with my thoughts, to be semi-objective. Uh, but it is the most useful time to do that. So some try to let something more than just your your phone alarm, try to let something else be a trigger to for you to say to yourself, okay, stop and think for a minute. What's going on with me? If you do get that voice in your head that, yeah, this this positive voice that I'm talking about that says, okay, time to think about your thoughts. Well, how do you do that? That's tricky enough by itself. So you could just try to look what's going through my brain right now, what's going through my brain, and also think. Remember, a lot of these thoughts we have sort of run under the surface. They're not just really conscious voices going off in our heads. Think about how am I feeling? Where am I feeling all tense? Am I feeling kind of nauseous? Am I feeling like my temperature's high because I'm angry? You know, what's going on with that? What's driving that anger? If I've been angry for 10 minutes, it's because I'm thinking about something that's making me angry. What is it that thing that I'm thinking about? And if you can see the source there, that won't just take away all your anger instantly. But you can realize even if I'm totally right about that anger, it's not helping me to stay this way. And one thing you might notice in that situation is that you actually can't stay angry for 10 minutes without putting some effort into it. You actually have to maintain that emotion with some kind of intention, or else you're gonna get over the anger within a couple of minutes. And you might think, ah, that's not true. It is true. We have to sort of remind ourselves and dwell upon whatever injustice we just suffered that makes us angry. And I'm not saying you're wrong. Maybe you have a good reason to be angry, but if you're carrying it along for 10 minutes, it's because you are carrying it along. And you can notice that if you get used to anger sort of. Triggering this question of what's going on in my head right now. Another trick that you can use is some kind of physical stimulus. You know, in meditation, the most common stimulus is the breath. As in, you suppose to bring your attention to your breathing. Just sort of feel your breathing in your lungs or in your nose or whatever. The breath is not magical. You know, there are some traditions that teach there's a spiritual importance to the breath. And if you want to think that, that's fine. But I'm not advocating for the higher power of the breath. For me, it's really just a focus point. Do you know Dan Harris to go off him again? You know, he he says the breath is not special. It's it's you it just gets your head, you're you're thinking below your neck. You know, so you can also do something like, you know, press your finger against a table or tap your fingers to the tabletop, or just think about you know how your feet feel in your shoes or how they're pressed against the floor. But that does, that's not capturing your thoughts. By thinking about those things and trying to think about those things, you can it makes you realize or notice when your thoughts start pulling away from that. You know, you're just know you're supposed to be thinking about the feelings of your breathing or your feeling of your feet in the floor, and then you start thinking about your brother, you know, and either it's his birthday, you haven't gotten a gift yet, or else he makes you mad or something, or else you start thinking about, you know, uh you have to prepare dinner tonight and you wish you didn't have to do that. And you and you can say, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. I'm supposed to be thinking about tapping my finger on this desk. So a some kind of a physical object or physical stimulus can help you bring those thoughts to the moment and at least again notice how much your mind wants to go off and do other things. That's useful. Getting yourself into this moment. And after you've done that for 30 seconds, a minute, you know, like 15 seconds, you can go back to your task at hand and you will actually be more focused on task at hand at least for a while. The point here is not to create a magical quality in you where you never have thoughts that distract you. You're always gonna have thoughts that distract you. If you ever do become an excellent meditator, what'll happen is you'll just notice this conversation that's going on. You'll be able to observe that there's a conversation going on in your brain among all these different voices in your head. You won't silence the voices. But if you can bring your attention to some kind of stimulus or something else in a moment when you return back to the task you're doing, you'll be more focused on that task for a while. And what matters to me is that you'll be happier as you do that. You'll be less under the power of the idiots that are down in your subconscious. Okay, I think I've made my point. As much as I'm gonna make it in my usual redundant way, or at least if I haven't made it by now, I'm obviously I'm not gonna be able to make it. I've got as far as I can go. So let's go ahead and and wrap up by my saying again, just don't be afraid of this idea of being mindful, of being in the moment. Don't be afraid of those hippie statements. And also understand that like the other skills I encourage you to develop, like practicing gratitude and practicing self-compassion, it is not a quick process. You're not gonna be great at this three months from now, even if you practice it every day. But in three months you can make progress, and if you keep going, in three years you'll make great progress. And if you're going to live, as I hope you will, for decades more, why not put that effort in in these next few years, and therefore make the rest of your life happier. So get to work and uh become more focused and happier. Now, let's move on to the mantra, which I do every episode. You know how the mantra goes? He says, You matter, this work matters, and you can do this work because you do matter, you have value. I'm not trying to teach you these things because you are worthless, but because you already have value. So just get that into your head. This work matters. Doesn't matter because I say it matters, or even because Dan Harris or Sam Harris or the boot or anybody else says it matters, it matters because you matter, you becoming happier matters, and you know, living more an enjoyable life and enjoyable now matters. And uh you can do this work. I've said it's hard, but it's hard for everybody. All those people who say, who have told me directly or say to themselves, I can't meditate. I have tried, it's just a disaster. I can't do it. No, you can do it. You can learn to be in this moment and just you can learn, just accept the fact that your mind runs around doing things, and you can learn to get better and better at seeing it and being less controlled by it. Okay, that's it. Thanks for being here as usual. Uh, we'll see you next time. All right, this has been the how to be happy successful podcast. Thanks for listening. Hope you enjoyed it and found it useful. So, if you're interested in reading an article that goes with this uh podcast episode, you can go to the website. Website is www.happy-and-successful.com. So it's happy and successful.com. There's hypers in between the words. You can read articles there, you can also sign up for the mailing list there. So when I put out new content, you will get an email saying, hey, there's new content. Go listen or go read. I also offered coaching. So if you'd like some help being happy or being successful, or both, you think my ideas are good, reach out to me to the website. If you like the episode, please go write a nice review about it wherever you listen to it. And if you didn't like it, or you just keep that to yourself. And if you really like the episode and the podcast in general, feel free to go to the Patreon page and become a supporter. That'd be awesome. If you have any questions or comments or complaints, go to the website and uh send me an email. I will do my best to respond, though. Okay, I think that's it. Until next time.