Welcome to the Happiness Podcast. I'm Dr. Robert Puff. I think most of us would agree that we have more freedom and opportunities than any generation before us.

We don't have to travel that far back in time when people, wherever they

were born, stayed in that area for the rest of their lives. If they went somewhere, it wasn't

far. And yet in today's age, many of us, if not all of us, through a little work and saving money

and a little good research on finding discount flights could probably

fly almost anywhere in the world for under $1,000. And it wasn't that long ago if your father was a

plumber or your mom was a homemaker that that was the job you were going to do for the rest of your

life too. This one may shock you, but when I went to graduate school at Princeton, it had only been

13 years that at the undergraduate university they allowed women to attend.

Prior to that, every undergraduate at Princeton was a man.

We have so many choices of what we can eat, what we can do,

where we can live, who we can be with. It seems endless. And yet with all this freedom,

the rates of anxiety and dissatisfactions are incredibly high in our world. We pursue happiness relentlessly, but it feels like a moving target.

Sadly, many people struggle with a false dichotomy. They think that happiness is either one of two

things. There's a deep sense of frantic achievement, a hustle culture, a promise that happiness is just on the other side of the next goal, promotion, or purchase.

There's freedom without relaxation.

The second thing people struggle with is passive comfort, the comfort zone trap.

Well, they'll avoid risk and challenge to maintain a sense of safety, which often leads to stagnation, relaxation without freedom. Today I want to

propose a different truth, where sustainable happiness doesn't line either of these two extremes, that of freedom or that

of relaxation, but instead of relax freedom. When I think of often the best description of what

happiness is, I think the term relaxed freedom is a really good descriptor of what happiness looks like,

feels like, and is experienced. So let's next take a little time to explore these two pillars of

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