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.
Source : Businessinsider