Welcome to the Happiness podcast. I'm Dr. Robert Puff. When I was in high school, one of the sports

that I did was track and I was a sprinter, the 100-yard dash. Several young men along with me would get on that line,

get ready, wait for that gun to go off and we had one goal in mind to get to the finish line first.

But because it was such a short race, it didn't take long to get to that finish line,

and then it was over, and we'd go back to living our lives at a normal pace.

Now, some of my friends on my team would run a mile or even longer.

It was considered long distance running,

and they in no way could run the same way I did. So sprinting, though exhilarating and fun,

is not a sustainable pace. But working now as a clinical psychologist with thousands of people

over the past 30 years, I see a lot of people sprinting.

We're constantly trying to force faster outcomes. We want our promotion now. We want the

healing now. We want the perfect relationship now. Obviously, I'm not a sprinter anymore,

but as I've aged, I've gotten more into tea.

This past summer, I actually went to China and went to a beautiful tea plantation, and I went

through all the steps of picking the tea, preparing the tea, and drinking the tea.

It was a beautiful experience.

But did you know there's actually two ways of making tea. You can pour

scolding hot water over the tea leaves and the tea will be ready in minutes. It's fast,

but it shocks the leaves and draws out the bitter tannins. What I do when I'm making my tea is called

cold brewing. It requires patience because you have to put the tea leaves

in water and then wait hours for the tea leaves to be steeped in that water and ready to drink.

But with patience what we get is a gentle extracts of natural sweetness and the amino acids

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