Welcome to the Happiness podcast. I'm Dr. Robert Puff. I want to talk about something that we almost all do that makes being happy so much harder.

In and of itself, being happy, finding peace in our lives, living a good life is not an easy

task to do. There are a lot of moving parts that have to be in place in order for our lives to go well.

But before I begin delving into what we do that's getting us in trouble, I want to talk about

a physics phenomena. Hang on, it will

be important and it will relate. But there's something called the three-body problem. You may or may not

have heard of it. In physics, what it means is, imagine you have two objects in space, like the

Earth and the Moon. They pull on each other with gravity, and scientists can predict

their movement pretty accurately. This is called the two-body problem, and it's solvable with the equations.

Now, at a third object like the Sun, suddenly things get incredibly complicated.

All three objects are pulling on each other and those poles are constantly

changing as the objects move. The three-body problem is the challenge of trying to figure out

how these objects will move over time. And why is this so hard? Unlike the predictable two-body

situation, the three-body system tends to be chaotic. This means that

even tiny changes in their starting position or speed can lead to widely different outcomes.

And if you add a fourth, fifth, or six objects, etc., it gets incredibly complicated. Now the big

question is, how does this relate to us and our happiness?

What I'm going to share next, you're not going to find in any theory book. This is something I came up with

because I love physics and I saw how the three-body problem really relates to human behavior

and our happiness. In our universe, the universe of happiness or well-being,

there are two main objects that we have to deal with. One is ourselves, our thoughts,

and the way we interact with the world. And then there's the external world, everything that we

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