Welcome to the happiness podcast. I'm Dr. Robert Puff. I want to share something with you that surprised me. I grew up in the Midwest and when I moved to California to finish up my PhD and to work as a clinical psychologist, one of the true joys that I found about living in Southern California,

are experiencing the incredible sunsets at the beach.

You watch the sun, set and lower getting smaller and smaller,

sometimes redder and redder.

And then finally at the last minute,

the last second, it disappears and it's so beautiful. It truly is a

magnificent experience, but what surprised me is that when I started working in private practice, I would give my clients

who are struggling with life the assignment to drive to the beach and go watch the sunset

because it's just so spectacular and it really feeds the soul.

But what surprised me over the years is that it is really difficult for often my clients to do this.

I give the assignment and then they don't do it. And it wasn't

that they didn't have the time they would on the weekend drive to Vegas or fly there and spend

an entire weekend in the entertainment capital of the world

with all the thrills and excitement that comes with Vegas.

And sometimes they would gamble a lot and get really drunk and they come back from a lot of experiences but these

experiences definitely weren't feeding their soul and yet to go watch a sunset

which would feed their soul they couldn't make time for.

And I in no way mean to be critical of people that have a difficulty making time to go watch a sunset.

But I do understand it better now, why it is difficult for us to do things that

feed our soul and so easy to do things that are just feeding our entertainment hunger.

So to start with, what do I mean by entertainment?

Something that is entertaining is something that's pleasurable,

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