Four Questions for When You Don’t Know What to Do Next

Now, just to recap, one of the things that I shared last day was information that first came to me, uh, from Dav- uh, sorry, this was from Dr., um, [lips smack] Arthur Brooks, and he talks about, uh, happiness having three components: enjoyment, satisfaction, and this idea of meaning or purpose, and our ability to actually hold those things had other factors, three other factors, which he introduced were 50% of a person's ability to experience enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning.

So 50% of our ability to be able to be happy actually is genetic.

It's like in our DNA.

It's in that blueprint.

25% is based on our circumstances, and the other 25% is based on our habits.

Now, if I heard that my DNA was essentially a 50/50 shot about whether or not I could hold a lot of happiness or experience happiness, I would feel pretty discouraged because that tells me it's outside of my control.

But what's so remarkable is when we think about psychology, what we know from psychology about how we essentially activate some of our genetic predisposition, I find that information is actually super encouraging.

Now, I still remember coming across this theory.

I would've been in second year, as a second-year student, when I first learned about what's called the diathesis stress model.

And how it was presented to me was this understanding that we have these markers in our genetics, and essentially they have to be activated for certain things to be released or for things to get turned on or for things to be kind of present day.

And so there's a whole bunch of stuff that's happening, like behind the scenes, and I'm not gonna go into a huge DNA lesson here.

That's not the point.

But the idea being was this: They had identical twins who shared the exact same DNA, and they would have one of the twins who developed schizophrenia and the other one didn't.

Now, if you have a gene for schizophrenia and these two identical twins both had the gene and one of them had it activated and they started to develop schizophrenia and the other one didn't, what the scientists started to figure, uh, started to question and got curious about is, well, how is that possible? So if you have the gene of alcoholism, that means you're, like destined to be an alcoholic, but there are some people who have that gene, and it's never expressed.

That gene doesn't essentially turn on or get activated.

So this is what introduced the notion of the diathesis stress model, to the best of my knowledge, which is under certain conditions, some of those genetic predispositions may or may not get activated.

So in some of these classic identical twin studies, what happened is that in many cases, those kids were separated at birth.

I don't know the backstory.

I wish I knew the good backstory, but I also know that ethics have changed dramatically in psychology studies since.

But the gene that was activated in an environment that was more stressful, the s- the child who had that expression of schizophrenia in adulthood had a much more stressful childhood and or adolescent period.

And so the whole kind of philosophy or understanding around this is that when we experience acute stress at particular moments in our development, it's gonna make it so it's more likely that these things get turned on or these things get expressed.

So what does this have to do with happiness? [chuckles] You can ask that.

We're four minutes in.

Fair question.

Well, if we know that 50% of our ability, uh, that is, of to hold happiness and to experience it is related to our genetics, it means that our environments, also maybe our habits, can actually offer us a bit of a buffer or maybe a hedge of protection.