This conversation in the Institute for Real Growth’s Humanizing Growth series was recorded a year into the pandemic. Chopra reads what the world has been through as the stages of grief. Victimization comes first, then anger, then hostility, then frustration and helplessness.
The stage he argues for is acceptance of the facts as they are now, rather than a verdict on what was done right or wrong. His claim is that a sequence follows from it. Acceptance produces peace, peace produces meaning, and meaning produces purpose.
Key findings
- His view of established business is blunt. Most large companies he has watched through the crisis are outdated, carrying a traditional Wall Street mentality that operates from fear and greed. He locates the innovation elsewhere, with entrepreneurs rather than large companies.
- He co-founded a non-profit, Just Capital, that identifies companies authentically changing the value system on Wall Street. It has identified around a thousand such companies. He also warns that many companies are moving now for public relations reasons rather than conviction.
- The survey work behind that project puts employee well-being at the head of a chain. The most successful companies were those most aware of the well-being of their employees. Happy employees produce happy customers, and happy customers produce happy investors.
- For teams who cannot meet, he offers four practices: attention, meaning deep listening; affection, meaning reassurance that you are there; appreciation, meaning noticing each person’s strength; and acceptance of the situation as it is.
The happiness formula
Chopra sets out a formula drawn from social science. Happiness equals a set point in the brain, plus conditions of living, plus voluntary choices.
The set point accounts for about half of daily happiness, and it is formed in childhood. Unhappy people see only problems, and happy people see only opportunities. His claim is that the set point can be moved by repeatedly asking one question of any situation: what is the opportunity here.
Conditions of living, mainly financial, account for about 15%. A lottery win fades back to the set point within a year. Very rich and very poor people are both unhappy, because both think about money constantly, and many confuse net worth with self-worth.
The third term splits in two. Choices made for personal pleasure produce happiness that does not last. The choices that hold are the ones he calls fulfillment: meaning, purpose, managing relationships, and making other people happy.
Where chronic disease actually comes from
The health argument rests on a distinction between the genetic and the behavioral. Only about five percent of disease-related gene mutations are fully penetrant, which is the category gene editing will eventually address.
The other 95% of chronic disease he attributes to a short list. Lack of sleep, lack of stress management, and lack of exercise and breathing. Then unhealthy relationships and emotional turbulence, disconnection from biological rhythms, nutrition and the microbiome, and spiritual well-being. He calls these the seven pillars of well-being, and has codified them into algorithms for a digital coaching product.
He extends the same logic to the pandemic itself. On his account it is the inflamed environment that produces new mutations, so chasing each variant with a new vaccine repeats the pattern of antibiotics and resistant organisms.
How he says he works
Asked how he keeps reinventing, Chopra describes starting each day with four intentions and one formula: love in action. Love without action is irrelevant, and action without love is meaningless.
He ends on a reading of one word. Responsibility means the ability to respond, and the more creative that ability, the happier a person will be.
Scope and limitations
The speaker is describing organizations he says he sits outside of, and several claims here are his own assessment rather than research findings. The company identification work is from a non-profit he co-founded, and the well-being framework underpins a product he is building.
Source
This page summarises HGS #25: Deepak Chopra (Professor, University of California) about wellbeing in challenging times, by Marc de Swaan Arons.