Matthieu Ricard, the world's happiest man
Who is the happiest man in the world?
If you Google it, the name "Matthieu
Ricard" pops up.
Matthieu Ricard, 69, is a Tibetan Buddhist
monk who has been called "the world's happiest man."
That's because he participated in a 12-year
brain study on meditation and compassion led by a neuroscientist from the
University of Wisconsin, Richard Davidson. Davidson hooked up Ricard's head to
256 sensors and found that when Ricard was meditating on compassion, his mind
was unusually light.
"The scans showed that when meditating
on compassion, Ricard's brain produces a level of gamma waves - those linked to
consciousness, attention, learning and memory - 'never reported before in the
neuroscience literature', Davidson said.The scans also showed excessive
activity in his brain's left prefrontal cortex compared to its right
counterpart, allowing him an abnormally large capacity for happiness and a
reduced propensity towards negativity."
Ricard - who says he sometimes meditates for
entire days without getting bored - admits he's a generally happy person
(although he feels his "happiest man" title is a media-driven
overstatement). He spoke with Business Insider at the World Economic Forum in
Davos, Switzerland. Here's his advice for how to be happy.
Stop thinking "me, me, me"
To Ricard, the answer comes down to altruism.
The reason is because thinking about yourself, and how to make things better
for yourself all the time, is exhausting, stressful, and ultimately leads to
unhappiness.
"It's not the moral ground," Ricard
explained. "It's simply that me, me, me all day long is very stuffy. And
it's quite miserable, because you instrumentalize the whole world as a threat,
or as a potential sort of interest [to yourself]."
If you want to be happy, Ricard says you
should strive to be "benevolent" which will not only make you feel
better, but it will also make others like you better.
(That's not to say you should let other
people take advantage of you, Ricard warns, but you should generally strive to
be kind within reason.)
"If your mind is filled with
benevolence, you know -the passion and solidarity ... this is a very healthy
state of mind that is conducive to flourishing," Ricard says. "So
you, yourself, are in a much better mental state. Your body will be healthier,
so [it] has been shown. And also, people will perceive it as something
nice."
That all sounds great in theory, but how does
a person actually become altruistic and benevolent and not let selfish thoughts
creep in?
Start training your mind like you'd train to
run a marathon
Ricard believes everyone has the ability to
have a lighter mind because there's a potential for goodness in every human
being (unless you're, say, a serial killer, and there's something actually
chemically abnormal going on with your brain).
But like a marathon runner who needs to train
before he or she can run 26 miles, people who want to be happier need to train
their minds. Ricard's preferred way of training his is meditation.
"With mental training, we can always
bring [our level of happiness] to a different level," Ricard explains.
"It's like running. If I train, I might run a marathon. I might not become
an Olympic champion, but there is a huge difference between training and not
training. So why should that not apply to the mind?... There is [a] view that
benevolence, attention, emotional balance and resilience are skills that can be
trained. So if you put them all together, you could say that happiness is a
skill that can be trained."
Ok, so how does one train their mind to be
happier?
Just spend 15 continuous minutes per day
thinking happy thoughts
Start by thinking happy thoughts for 10 to 15
minutes per day, Ricard says. Typically when we experience feelings of
happiness and love, it's fleeting and then something else happens, and we move
on to the next thought. But Ricard says instead, concentrate on not letting
your mind get distracted and keep focused on the positive emotions for the next
stretch of time. And if you do that training every day, even just 2 weeks later
you can feel positive mental results. And if you practice that for fifty years
like Ricard has, you can become a happiness pro too.
That's backed up by neuroscientists by the way. Davidson found from his
study that even 20 minutes of daily meditation can make people much happier overall.
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