What is the key to happiness? It’s a question to which Harvard professor and bestselling author Arthur C. Brooks has dedicated his career. His course “Leadership and Happiness” is one of the most popular at Harvard Business School, and his latest book The Happiness Files: Insights on Work and Life (Harvard Business Review Press) compiles some of his best advice from this course and his weekly “How to Build a Life” column in The Atlantic.
Brooks sat down with Outreach to discuss why church leaders often struggle with happiness and enjoyment, how pastors can navigate discouragement, and how they can reframe success and better align themselves with Christ.
A lot of pastors seem to struggle with happiness, uncertain how joy and happiness relate. So why do you think the message about happiness is important in general and maybe a help to pastors and church leaders today?
Well, to begin with, everybody wants it. I mean, that’s a truism. Everybody wants to be happier. But the more important point is that happiness is in decline, particularly among leaders. And we have no bulletproof defense just by being Christians. My Christian faith is absolutely central to my life, but when I look at the data I see that Christians are suffering like other people are suffering. That gives me an opportunity as a scientist, by the way, to also talk about the fact that understanding my Christian faith in a different way is what I need to do to become a happier person.
So I work with a lot of clergy. I work with a lot of pastors. I work with a lot of priests. And I work with them to talk about how they can actually start using the happiness science in the pulpit. In so doing, they become happiness teachers. That helps their flock and it helps them as people.
How do you help people to think about joy in the context of happiness? How are they related?
So it’s very important to understand the difference between joy and happiness as a scientific matter versus as a theological matter. Christians talk about joy—you know how C.S. Lewis talked about it in his autobiography, Surprised by Joy—that’s these moments of the beatific vision. Joy is ultimately what we’re gonna get in perpetuity when we die and go to heaven. That’s the whole idea. And those moments that take your breath away in life, those are moments of joy, as C.S. Lewis talks about it.
Psychologists talk about it in a different way. They talk about it as a basic positive emotion, which is produced by activity in the limbic system of the brain. That’s a basic positive emotion that’s telling us—our limbic system is telling us—that we have sensed an opportunity and we should approach it. That biological sensation is not the same thing as the beatific vision, as the vision of God, obviously. And so confusing those things is actually quite dangerous.
Joy in the psychological sense, in the biological sense is very different than happiness. Why? Because joy is basically the smell of the turkey, not the turkey. The turkey itself is happiness. That’s a combination of enjoyment of life, of satisfaction with accomplishments and experiences, and the sense of life’s meaning. And those three things together, really what they tell us is if you want to be a happy person, unmitigated joy on earth is not going to be your lot. It just isn’t. For you to get satisfaction, you actually need to defer your gratifications. Every good Christian knows that. That’s central to the way that we try to comport ourselves, a disciplined good Christian life.
And meaning, the meaning of life, that requires a lot of hard experiences. That actually requires a lot of suffering. And every Christian is comfortable with suffering. We should be. Christianity is worshiping a man who suffered and died for us. So this idea that somehow if I’m not happy all the time, I’m not right with God … I’m sorry, we’re walking the earth. Our earthly experience also entails some suffering. Why? So that we can purify ourselves, so that we can understand what real happiness is and we can get ourselves ready for the unmitigated, unending joy that we hope will be our lot in heaven.
What do you see related to happiness when it comes to practicing one’s faith?
So faith is absolutely central to it. There are four pillars in the happiest life. They are faith, family, friendship and work that serves other people. And all of those things are the Christian gospel, which is that happiness is love because God is love.
When you don’t know what to do and you are suffering, which you will on earth, then the thing to do is for you to love. That’s the thing to do. Love of the divine, love of our Lord, love of your family, love of your friends and love toward everybody through the way that you sanctify your ordinary work. One of the ways that I bait the hook for talking about the fact that this is the secret of happiness is to say, “Are you loving now?” And inevitably that leads people to ask, What is the basis of love, cosmically? Metaphysically, what’s transcendentally just vacuuming me into this love? And that’s the Lord. And that’s what people inevitably find.
“A lot of Christians feel guilty about enjoying their life because they think that enjoyment and pleasure are the same thing, and they’re not.”
I’m just a missionary. My grandfather was a missionary to the Navajos. On my mother’s side, they were missionaries to the Zulus. And one of the things that missionaries have always told me is that your job is not to get everybody all the way to baptism. Your job is to keep the door open one inch, because then the Holy Spirit can kick it in. So my job is to get people just to question their disbelief, just to interrogate their disbelief a little bit and say, Maybe through that little crack, maybe, maybe, maybe there is that happiness that I seek. And then with my life to try to live in an impeccable way so that there’s admiration for me. And they’ll say, That weird guy, that weird scientist, is going to church every day. What’s the deal with that? And then do what I can to open the door to all four pillars of happiness.
So how can pastors who may feel maybe stuck in discouragement reframe their ministry in some of those ways that bring them a greater sense of happiness?
Yeah, this is one of the things that I do with a lot of leaders, not just church leaders. I do this a lot with hedge fund managers and politicians and military leaders. I’m sort of the striver whisperer. And I’ll ask across these three silos: enjoyment, satisfaction and meaning. I say, “Where 10 is the highest score and one is the lowest score, give me your score compared to everybody you know on enjoyment of your life. And what I find with religious leaders is inevitably, their sense of meaning is pretty high. So, I’d say that most of them find about a nine in satisfaction and about a six or a seven in meaning, which isn’t too bad. But about a three in enjoyment.
And this is the thing: A lot of Christians feel guilty about enjoying their life. And the reason is because they’re making a mistake. A lot of Christians—a lot of people—think that enjoyment and pleasure are the same thing and they’re not.
Pleasure is called a limbic phenomenon. It’s processed in the limbic system of the brain, which you have in common with all of the mammals. So your dog feels pleasure like you feel pleasure. A squirrel feels pleasure like you feel pleasure. Enjoyment is a very human experience that moves pleasure into the prefrontal cortex, this big processing computer that only humans have in its present form. This is a real connection to the divine because no other animal can understand God, let alone talk to God.
So here’s the thing: Enjoyment starts with pleasure. Pleasure plus people plus memory equals enjoyment, and enjoyment is one of God’s gifts.
Now, what this means is that when we have a conscious prefrontal cortex management of our pleasures, then our pleasures don’t manage us. A lot of Christians feel really guilty when they’re feeling some sort of a pleasure, as if that pleasure is a temptation, as if that pleasure is a perdition. It is if you don’t turn it into enjoyment.
And here’s the ultimate social science test. If you’re doing something that gives you pleasure and it can be addictive and you’re doing it alone, you’re probably doing it wrong. A lot of clergy spend a lot of time alone, and that leads them to be tempted by pleasure, not by enjoyment. And the result of that is that they try to cut it out of their lives. They cut out enjoyment and they get unhappier.
You highlight faith as this pillar of happiness, but for pastors and church leaders faith is personal, but it’s also their job. So that’s where it sometimes gets tricky, and maybe it gets rote and it gets spiritually dry and they find themselves not enjoying, not walking in the fullness of their relationship with Christ. Share with me your thoughts on it.
Look, you know what it’s like to be a happiness professor? The truth is I have very, very high negative affect. I have very intense negative emotions. That’s the reason I study happiness. And this is the vulnerability that clergy need to bring to the job is to say, Why am I clergy? Not because I was born praising Jesus, but because it’s hard for me. That’s why I’m doing this. I’m walking the path of difficulty. I’m walking it with you. I need you to support me as I support you. And that sort of vulnerability is really important.
St. Ignatius of Loyola—the 16th century Catholic saint who founded the Society of Jesus, aka the Jesuit Order of Priests—he created something called the Spiritual Exercises. Protestants can really appreciate this a lot too. What he talks about is the process of deepening faith, not just by the consolation that comes from a feeling of deep faith, but from the desolation that inevitably comes to us, the desolation of feeling far from God. This is really, really important.
What I find with a lot of clergy, a lot of priests and pastors, is when they naturally feel desolation, that gives them a feeling of fraudulence. It gives them a feeling of sort of a counterfeit faith.
“Our earthly experience entails some suffering. Why? So that we can purify ourselves, so that we can understand what real happiness is and we can get ourselves ready for the unmitigated, unending joy that we hope will be our lot in heaven.”
I mean, I’m super sympathetic, they get up in a pulpit and they say, “Do you feel the presence of Jesus Christ in your life?” And inside they’re saying, I don’t feel it. And St. Ignatius of Loyola said, Good! Do it anyway. Do it anyway. I mean, feel the fear, feel the pain, feel the suffering, and praise Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior, notwithstanding your feelings. That’s how you get over the hump. That’s how you get over the desolation.
You’re not a fraud. You’re a man. You’re a woman. You’re a person. And recognizing that it’s not fraudulent; it’s human to feel desolation. And this is how you draw closer to Christ. Just like this is how you draw closer to your wife, Ed. If you only stayed married when you felt romantic love … I mean, I’ve been married 34 years. I would have been married 34 minutes if I were relying on love as a feeling. No, it’s a commitment. It’s an act. And doing that, and recognizing that, and being authentic about that, that is the ultimate solution that will sustain a person.
OK, so pastors experience spiritual depletion, right? where they’re poured into others and maybe not being poured into. You talk about self-management. What practices of self-management could help pastors sustain their inner lives and experience that happiness.
It’s a lot of the same advice that I give to people who are caregivers. If you’re taking care of an aging parent, then it’s all them, all them, all them. And you’re just kind of desiccated, you’re dry, you’re dying inside. You have a feeling of desolation about the relationship with your parent.
For people who are in the business of the consolation of others, it’s like they say on the airplane: You gotta put on your own oxygen mask first. I know a lot of clergy who are not putting on their own oxygen mask first. And that means having a serious set of spiritual and physical protocols in your life.
Over the past 10 years, my career has exploded in a way I never anticipated. I’m doing 150 speeches a year outside of my full-time teaching job, and I’m working in media, and it’s really wonderful and I’m grateful to God that he gave me this path. But I recognize that I will become depleted talking about this with other people all the time. So I have developed, using the science of protocols, what will actually make it possible for me to do this. And they start with exactly what I need to do to sharpen the saw every day—that’s the words of Stephen Covey [in] The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.
I get up very early every day before the sun. I work out for an hour every morning from 4:45 to 5:45. Then I get cleaned up and I go to church every day from 6:30 to 7. Now, this is the holy hour. It doesn’t matter if you’re Protestant or Catholic, we’re Christian people. I recommend the holy hour. That’s the hour of you with the Lord, where the Lord can sustain you, the Lord can console you, but that’s a discipline. That’s like your exercise. It’s more important than your exercise every day. Then it’s a question of how are you gonna spend your day in creative life and contemplation and prayer and working with other people.
Starting a day like that is a very, very healthy way. The biochemistry of it is not even necessary for me to talk about, but the science is all there. This is a way that you can actually maintain the neurochemical balance that’s required to be a public person.
A lot of [pastors] measure their success by attendance or budgets. How do you encourage clergy to rethink success in ways that cause them not to be constantly disappointed that maybe they’re not a megachurch pastor.
Look, all of us are absolutely prone to idolatry. It does not matter how deep your Christian faith is, idolatry is there. Aristotle said through Thomas Aquinas that there are four idols that bedevil us. What we really want is God. But we’re distracted from God. Why? Because the devil distracts us with worldly idols that have divine-seeming characteristics. And there’s only four. And this is unbelievably good behavioral science, by the way. As a scientist, I completely agree with this. The four idols that each one of us can fall prey to are money, power, pleasure and honor. And by honor I’m talking about fame or admiration of other people or prestige.
[For] a lot of public people their main idol is that prestige. And anytime we’re counting people that are sitting out there or church budgets, we’re falling prey to something that is not the message of Jesus Christ. The truth is that if we’re working for the Lord, then we have to put our ambition in God. We have to put our ambition in the work of Jesus Christ and his plan for us.
We always say, Lord, guide my path. We never mean it. Maybe God’s path for us is a small church of people who actually go out and are truly apostolic in their work. And the fact that they’re very close to their pastor—like physically close to their pastor—maybe that’s what those particular people need.
But to say, Lord, take my career. Do with me what you will. I am your servant. I’m in your hands. And then actually meaning that. That’s hard. But that’s the only path.
So how do I reframe accomplishment in ways that I can experience happiness if my church isn’t growing. Can I be happy still?
Yeah, for sure. It’s satisfaction, not accomplishment. Satisfaction is accomplishment with struggle. That’s what brings happiness. Accomplishments without struggle, that’s like winning a lottery or getting an inheritance. That brings no sweetness to life. When you don’t feel like you’ve earned your success, that’s not meaningful to you. So let’s talk about how the accomplishment and the struggle actually work, and the scale of it, and what to actually measure.
I’ve made this mistake a hundred times, Ed. I used to be the president of a big think tank in Washington, D.C., called the American Enterprise Institute, which is a free market think tank. I loved that job. But when I came into the job in the beginning of 2009, we were in the middle of the great recession and we were deeply in debt and it was a big problem. And I got this kind of depression mentality—as in economic depression mentality—where I thought that I had to just fundraise all the time.
I got into this bad habit. This is a very common bad habit, it’s a very human thing of thinking if we weren’t growing and my contributions weren’t going up and I didn’t have more donors, that I was failing. But that wasn’t the job. The job was to actually have an effect on public policy. The effect was to have an effect on individual politicians and policymakers so they would do things that were better for America.
“Anytime we’re counting people that are sitting out there or church budgets, we’re falling prey to something that is not the message of Jesus Christ.”
OK, so how did I learn about this? I was doing all this research on charitable giving, and I noticed that charitable giving really, really affects your happiness. Not when you drop dollar bills out of a helicopter. What really affects your happiness is when you change somebody’s life, a real person’s life, in a meaningful way. That’s when it really affects your happiness. And I was showing my wife Esther—who has a graduate degree in theology; she’s super-sophisticated—and I said, “Honey, this is funny, isn’t it? I think we should give more.”
She said OK.
And I said, “You want me to write more checks?”
And she said, “No, I think we should adopt a baby. Because if you’re talking about turning the whole dial, then let’s turn the whole dial.”
And I was dead to rights. So I’m like, “It’s only a book,” you know.
And we did. And it was the most life-changing thing that ever happened to us.
You may be called to change one soul. One soul. because the body of Christ is in each soul. So each soul is equally important, and you don’t know the scale of one or a million. It’s not for you to know. This is not human knowledge. This is supernatural knowledge.
So, when the numbers aren’t changing, sure, try to grow your church, get best practices, get better at what you do, go to more seminars, watch Ed’s podcast. I completely agree with that. But when you’re doing everything that you need to do and your numbers aren’t going up, it might just be that the Lord wants you to be touching the same number of people at a more intense level.
And that’s still accomplishment.
Oh my goodness, that might be the most important accomplishment.
So, leadership and calling is a key theme throughout, not just your writing, but The Happiness Files, for sure. You talk about treating life like a startup. How can pastors in established churches or parachurch organizations treat life as a startup without going to plant a church? Not that there’s anything wrong with planting a church.
Yeah, I talk about life as a startup because life is the ultimate entrepreneurial endeavor. We love entrepreneurs in America. I mean, we’re a very immigrant-based culture and we’re just a bunch of cowboys in America is really what it comes down to. The way to think about life in the American context typically is with this kind of startup vernacular. I’m willing and able to take serious risk. I’m gonna put my capital at risk in search of explosive rewards. And explosive rewards mean outsized, outlandish rewards that other people can’t see.
Now, that means you have to be good at and prudent about risk. And prudent doesn’t mean that you’re being risk averse. On the contrary, the cardinal virtue of prudence means doing what should be done. Sometimes that’s running into a house on fire and giving your life to try to carry somebody out. Sometimes that means not saying that thing that’s gonna get you beaten up. Those are both prudence. So you gotta figure out what that is. What’s the right amount of risk, and what is the outlandish reward that we want?
That’s a life technique, but that’s also a technique for all kinds of leaders. Church leaders are not trying to get rich, I hope. That’s not a very dignified goal for a church leader. I got nothing against getting rich, but that’s not exactly what we’re doing. We’re trying to save souls. And maybe that means a lot of souls, or maybe that means some souls thoroughly, or whatever it happens to be.
So thinking about what it means. I want to get to heaven and take as many people with me as I can, or I want to make sure that this group of people that’s really, really hard up and at risk is going to get to heaven—understanding those outlandish rewards require a certain amount of risks, and that’s what entrepreneurship is all about.
So one of the things that is a pretty significant problem, you talk about relationships and community. [For] pastors, clergy, church leaders, this is an area of struggle. Help us think through that so we can have those kinds of relationships that are deeply connected to thriving and happiness.
The beginning of the way to understand this, of course, is in the words of St. Paul, where he said, in my weakness, I find my strength. Now that’s a really, really important thing. And the reason for that is that Paul was, I mean, we don’t quite know what he was referring to. I mean, maybe it was terrible temptation. Maybe it was frontal lobe epilepsy, which some people think that it was some other affliction. But the truth of the matter [is] he recognized that he was going to get converts and connect with people not through his unbelievable mental acuity, but rather through his physical feebleness. That it was his weakness that connected [to] other people.
So, I got onto the weakness and strength business, but the truth of the matter is that you need real friends, not just deal friends. And leaders tend to have lots of deal friends and not that many real friends. It’s very important. It’s actually critical for leaders more than anybody else. The reason that leaders don’t have a lot of real friends is because deal friends are more efficacious. You’re super busy. They help you, you help them. People treat you differently than they treat other people because you have a lot of standing in your community. Your ego gets stroked a little bit by people who actually need things from you, and the result is you become quite isolated. You like being special more than you like being happy, which is what happens to a lot of people. It’s human frailty. I mean the devil is good at his job. And one of the ways that the devil works on leaders is by isolating them. That’s how he does it, by making them actually lonely.
That’s why this is so important. That’s what Benjamin Franklin had. He called it his Junto (Club), which was a group of men of standing in Philadelphia who were all pretty high up, and they could talk about real things, intimate things, and real problems with each other. That’s what the YPO (Young Presidents Organization) forum thing is for business owners. There’s complete secrecy.
That’s what church leaders need as well. If you’re isolated, and you don’t have any real friends [with] whom you can talk about real things, it’s not going to go well for you.
The isolation seems to lead to a sense of entitlement, which leads to bad decisions. And there’s a whole process here that I’ve seen blow up far, far too many times.
And a lot of sin. One of the things that I recommend is that leaders across professions, but especially religious leaders, that they have somebody who’s holding them accountable, All. The. Time. In the Catholic world, there was a famous group called Opus Dei, a very deeply Catholic organization in Spain. And the leader of Opus Dei was always being accompanied by two regular priests—one who is correcting his theology and the other who is correcting his morals.
But I do find that for me, as a pastor and a church leader, you know, I’m on staff of a church now as a pastor, but my deepest relationships are not necessarily with congregants or people, partly because I need to be able to share some of the struggles with peers and be able to say things that I might not say: (e.g.,) “Man, our church is really wearing me out.”
That’s absolutely the case. I mean, there are all kinds of things that you and your wife talk about that you don’t talk about in front of your kids. It’s not the appropriate audience. You know, it’s like, “My kids are just bumming me out.” You say that to your wife; you don’t say that to your kid, because it’s not the appropriate audience for that truth. This is the funny thing about truth. You should always be honest, but you don’t have to say all the true things to everybody all the time.
That’s good. You wrote about the importance of managing your emotions. If you’re a pastor or church leader and you’re speaking, you’re emoting in ways that are remarkably unusual for any other [speaking] role. We are intentionally emoting and drawing people to think on these things or be transformed by these things. So how do we in general, in life, practically manage those emotions well so that ultimately we thrive and we can walk through the day to day?
Well, we have to, those of us who are in the business of managing other people’s emotions—pastors, professors, people who are doing that all the time, public speakers. You have to start by managing yourself. I mean, that’s your most important employee in the enterprise of your own life. And that starts by actually understanding the science of emotions. Emotions are not there to give you a nice day. Emotions are not there to do biologically much more than to give you signals about what you’ve perceived around you.
What are we perceiving around us? Threats and opportunities. The result of perceiving a threat is negative emotions. There’s only four: fear, anger, disgust and sadness. Everybody has those four basic negative emotions. We have organs, miniature sub-organs, inside our limbic systems that govern each one of those negative emotions. That’s how God created us. That’s the onboard hardware. And he did it for a reason, I have to imagine.
Our positive emotions work the same way. They say that we have perceived an opportunity. We get positive emotions so that we’ll approach it. But emotions are liars because all they are are talking to us about are things that we’re seeing out around us. We’re given a prefrontal cortex, which is an executive decision-making console inside our heads, precisely so that we’re not being managed by our own emotions.
“You need real friends, not just deal friends. And leaders tend to have lots of deal friends and not that many real friends.”
So one of the things I have to talk to leaders a lot [about] is getting a repertoire of ways to manage your emotions so they don’t manage you. A whole bunch of techniques. You know, prayer or petition is a classic technique that moves the experience of emotions into your prefrontal cortex, as is walking with a spiritual director, as is journaling, as is any sort of spiritual practice where you’re examining yourself along these lines. These are things that clergy have to be especially good at and especially disciplined at. There’s spiritual warfare going on. And if you’re the Dark One, if I were, I know who I’d go after. I’d go after guys in the pulpit.
If a pastor were on the edge of burnout and asked you for one place to start, where would you encourage that pastor to start?
One of the great things about the evangelical church is that most of the pastors are married. And I believe that marriage is a sacrament and it’s a holy thing. I believe that very few people are meant to be alone. Now I understand that my church has a different teaching on that. And I believe that some people have a charism to celibate life. They really do. Many Protestants have a charism to celibate life as well.
But many clergy, who have the benefit and the gift of being married, that’s your antenna to God. When you need consolation, that’s when you must not be alone. Now, if you’re celibate it means you need your closest friends. And when you’re married, you need your spouse. That’s where you turn. And that’s why clergy must be ultra, ultra serious about maintaining a good marriage.
So good. If you were addressing room full of young pastors, what single theme, message, idea from The Happiness Files would you want them to carry into what we hope would be six decades of successful ministry?
Don’t be afraid of your suffering. Don’t believe the propaganda from the modern culture that your suffering means that there’s something wrong with you, there’s something wrong with your career, there’s something wrong with your faith. On the contrary, that means you’re fully alive as a human being.
And that leaders suffer more than non-leaders. They just do. I have the data. That’s just a natural part of what it means to lead other people. You know perfectly that if you’re a good pastor, then you’re gonna suffer more than your sheep. That’s what it means to be a good pastor. There’s nothing wrong with that. There’s nothing unnatural about that. That is a gift to you, and you have to see it as such.