If there’s one thing Arthur C Brooks knows a lot about, it’s happiness. He is the author of From Strength to Strength, the popular column “How to Build a Life” for The Atlantic, and a professor at Harvard Business School and Harvard Kennedy School who, after leaving his CEO role in 2019, returned to academia to study the science of happiness. He has spent the past seven years researching ways to increase happiness and “eating his own cooking” by putting his learnings into practice, all while measuring his own happiness with meticulous self-evaluation instruments.
Initially, he says, he got into the science of happiness because he lacked it. “Happiness is naturally hard for me; I had very gloomy parents with lots of problems and so as a scientist, I dedicated myself to this.”
The bad news, he explains, is that about 75 per cent of how happy we are is out of our control: 50 per cent comes down to genetics and 25 per cent comes down to circumstance. But the good news is that the last 25 per cent is down to habits which, he says, “are really the only things that matter: you can give yourself incredibly good luck and good circumstances by having the right habits”. Though he doesn’t claim you can avoid unhappiness (“the only way to definitely do that is to be dead – I don’t recommend that”), he asserts his own happiness has risen by 60 per cent since 2019 through his new approach, which he measures through his self-designed Happiness Scale. The scale is a 10-minute assessment which examines how closely you align with his four key pillars of happiness: faith; family; friends; and work (specifically, “work where you feel you’re earning your success on the basis of merit and you serve other people”). The test gives you a score based on a “large” and “rigorously tested” survey of adults aged 18-75.
Brooks identified these cornerstones of fulfilment in his 2023 book Build the Life You Want: The Art and Science of Getting Happier, which he co-authored with Oprah Winfrey.
As for his habits (which he calls protocols), they are demanding and precise. “It’s a rigorous exercise to actually live in this way,” he acknowledges, noting that he sometimes fails to meet his own standards. His protocols facilitate these four key pillars.
His message is simple: If you focus too hard on perfecting your biological health at the expense of your family bonds, or on work as a source of profit rather than serving other people, you won’t find happiness. This would only be sabotaging your connection to your purpose in life,and your search for meaning. This is the focus of his latest book, The Meaning of Your Life, which he wrote as a response to what he sees as the modern meaningless crisis.
He believes that the number one predictor for depression and anxiety, which have tripled and doubled, respectively, since 2008, is the feeling that life is meaningless. “And that’s why I wrote this book, because it didn’t need to be written 20 years ago, and now it does. We need a manual on meaning.”
He starts by waking at 4.30am every morning (after going to bed at 9pm the night before) so that he can meet the dawn. “Neuroscience strongly suggests that if you get up before dawn and experience the dawn, you’ll have greater happiness, greater focus, greater creativity and greater productivity over the course of the day,” he says. “If it’s already light when you get up, you’ve already lost the first battle.”
Then he exercises. “With a very clean brain, in a state of fasting, I exercise very hard for 60 minutes from 4.45 to 5.45 in the morning. The reason is that it’s extremely clear that that’s good for your happiness, good for your productivity, good for your clarity. About half the time, I do it without headphones.” He lifts weights three times a week, alternating with high-intensity cardio.
After that is daily mass – “I’m a Catholic and I go to mass every day at 6.30am”. This is his daily contemplative period which for others could look like meditation, journal writing, or reading. “This is really important to do. In the quiet of the morning, you experience the dark of the dawn, you work your body very hard and then you actually work on your soul.”
After mass, he has his coffee (he has one “bolus” of between 350 and 400mg of caffeine once a day and always waits a few hours between waking and drinking coffee) and eats a “super high protein breakfast”, which usually includes Greek yoghurt. “I get 60g of protein first thing in the morning. I keep a 200g-a-day protein diet, which is really important for muscle protein synthesis after 60. I’m 61, so it’s really helpful for me.”
The result of all this, he says, is that he gets four hours of maximum creativity, clarity and focus during which he cranks out his major projects (of which there are many) and is finished by midday. “If you don’t do any of this stuff you leave it up to chance – you’re lucky if you get an hour or two of great creativity during the day,” says Brooks. “But I want four hours, and that’s the way I do it: by engineering all the stuff for productivity, creativity, happiness and focus.”
This is just one of Arthur’s many protocols that he implements, and at first glance seems more aligned with a rise and grind approach than one of someone seeking happiness. But he maintains that these habits give him the greatest opportunity to experience more happiness by focusing on his own wellbeing: “I write my talks, write my lectures, write a weekly column and write a book every two years by doing exactly this. And as a result, I’m easier to live with, I’m more upbeat, and I have a better relationship with my faith and my family.”
On top of that, he sees it as a gift to the ones he loves to stay disciplined. “Nobody wants to be married to an unhappy man, nobody wants to work for an unhappy guy, nobody wants to have an unhappy father,” he says. “So the greatest gift that you and I can give to other people is to work on our happiness. That’s truly a gift to other people.”
He adds that this is only a baseline framework, and he is careful not to be obsessive about it.
Since maintaining his habits, Brooks is closer with his family“I have very rigorous discipline but I try to have it not be unduly impactful on the lives of the people I love. At least one day a week, I don’t do this protocol. How do I decide? My wife will say, “let’s not do this today”, and I love my wife more than I love my protocols.”
Prioritising faith and family is counter-cultural in 2026 and a common reactionary talking point. But Arthur does not position this as a return to traditional values. When he talks of faith, for example, he means transcending the self, experiencing awe, and pondering the unanswerable questions. “You can study philosophers and get what I’m talking about,” he says. “You can walk an hour before dawn. You can study the fugues of Johann Sebastian Bach. You can start a meditation practice. You can serve in a soup kitchen. But you have to transcend yourself, otherwise life is just so boring. “Me me me’, it’s like a psychodrama, so tedious right?”
And when he talks about family (he lives with his children and grandchildren in a big intergenerational household), he is not lamenting the loss of “traditional family values”, but taking issue with the rise of family estrangement. “We have this whole ‘no contact movement’ in the United States now where Gen Z is being encouraged by malevolent actors, more or less my age, to cut off contact with their parents. Are you kidding me?” he says. “And 80 per cent of those cases are dreadfully depressed because they did that.”
In 2024, his children suggested that they all live together, including the grandkids. This is something that he believes has been a positive impact on his family’s wellbeing, because it is a choice rather than a necessity. “When two generations live with babies and small children, raising a family becomes a joint project — everyone pitches in,” he wrote in his column for The Free Press recently. “When the cohabitation is voluntary — especially if it involves grandparents living with their children and grandchildren — it tends to be highly beneficial for everyone.” Plus, “arguably, the grandparents benefit the most: Older people living in a multigenerational setting have a 40 per cent lower mortality risk than those who don’t. They also report higher life satisfaction and lower depressive symptoms.”
This living set-up, as well as bringing out the childlike goofball in him, is a regular reminder of the importance of collaboration and humility. “I know exactly zero conflict-free families (including my own), nor those without unhappy members at a given time, differences of opinion, or difficult truths,” he wrote in another column. “What these features mean is that the family has figured out how to get beyond schismatic disparities and love each other in spite of them.”
Brooks knows he isn’t perfect; but since introducing focused habits and routine, he has become far more content. “If you asked [my wife] about me about 10 years ago, she’d just shake her head,” he says.
“I was a CEO in those days, and I was very unhappy. I’m not perfect, I’m still a workaholic. I confess to my weaknesses.”
“I still have a long way to go.”
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