These are the most common habits that prevent you from achieving happiness, Arthur Brooks says

By Maura Hohman

Arthur C. Brooks is an creator, speaker and professor on the Harvard Kennedy School of Business. His studies makes a speciality of happiness, management and social entrepreneurship, and as a featured professional at TODAY’s Making Space Wellness Weekend with Hoda Kotb, subsidized via Miraval Resorts & Spas, he shared insights on locating extra happiness in life.

Many people think of happiness as a sense, but ask Arthur C. Brooks, a columnist on the subject for The Atlantic, and he’s going to let you know it is incorrect. Happiness, he often says, is not a kingdom of mind, but as an alternative a path.

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“Every single day, you are now not going to be happier than every other day before. But simply in fashionable, you know whilst you’re transferring within the right path, due to the fact you have extra leisure of your life, you have got extra delight for your accomplishments,” he tells TODAY.Com, including that it is often less difficult to measure progress month to month, in place of each day.

Asking the difficult questions

Brooks believes that to kickstart your journey down the path to happiness, you should ask yourself a few simple however difficult to reply questions: What is the importance of my existence? Why do I consider I’m alive? For what could I deliver my life?

But the intention is not necessarily for you to solution these question in concrete phrases — it is to benefit information.

“The maximum thrilling questions in existence do not have answers, but they do have information,” Brooks explains. “The solutions are meaningless, but the knowledge is limitless, and that’s what you need with all of the thrilling, essential questions of meaning for your existence.”

Another commonplace misconception approximately happiness, in keeping with Brooks, is that pursuing pleasing studies could make you experience happier because you “sense correct.” But he says, in fact, some thing that distracts us from considering these vital questions certainly blocks us from transferring in the direction of happiness.

Brooks’ biggest perpetrator of unnecessary distraction in modern day society isn’t sudden.

Embrace boredom

“The excellent manner to not make development in meaning is to study your smartphone,” he says. “It’s just a completely fundamental fact. … Looking at your cellphone is fun on occasion, I’m now not towards that. But if you’re in no way bored, you are by no means going to be gaining access to the parts of the brain which you want to cope with these questions.”

Screens and social media are simply one instance, he says; other commonplace behavior that distract us from trying to find meaning in our lives encompass tablets, alcohol and workaholism.

“Anything that distracts you due to the fact you’re so uncomfortable on this space, it truly is a hassle,” Brooks says. “Stop being distracted. Start being bored. Become uncomfortable.”

Being uncomfortable mentally isn’t a bad factor, Brooks keeps.

“(We) have been led to agree with, and it’s a lie, that if it feels terrible, it must be bad. … We all apprehend within the gymnasium that matters don’t feel appropriate and that they hurt, and that is truly accurate, but we suppose that emotional, intellectual or spiritual discomfort is evidence of (mental infection).”

So next time you find your self with some loose time, why no longer permit yourself to feel bored and uncomfortable?

“Take the time, sit down in … Silence, and then begin asking the questions, and the relaxation will cope with itself,” Brooks says.

Read more tales from TODAY’s Making Space Wellness Weekend with Hoda Kotb: