There are basically four ingredients to cultivating contentment in life.

If you read the works of people like Leobramorski,

hate, Seligman, Fredericksen,

even clinical meta-Dow, analysis such as the World Happiness Report, there's a common four themes that you'll find.

The first is, I'll summarize them as love, play, work, and ease.

That's just a easy way to remember it.

Love, we need to feel that we are connected to empathetic people that are emotionally tolerant

with whom we can disclose our

Emotional experience and feel feel reasonable expectation that what we

express will be well tolerated and mirrored back so that we won't feel

rejected or people won't shun us or go, who that's a

strange thing you're talking about. I don't get you at all. So you want to have in essence safe secure connections with people who hold your secrets, are open to what you expressed to not try to tell you what to do, but listen in a emotionally mirroring way that they hear what you say and they mirror the emotions back and they make

you feel safe. So the second play is finding activities in life that are engaging, engaging activities create what's called a neural state of flow where you're constantly

very much occupied with what's going on around you.

Classic examples of flow are anything from drawing, gardening, playing an instrument, working with your hands, writing,

acting, swimming, anything that has you fully engaged with the world around you.

When you're in a state of flow, are not in what's called default mode network.

The default mode network is a setting of your brain where your mind wanders around looking for thoughts. You're not involved in the world around you.

So they switch instead of going outwards, the switch of the cingulate goes up.

And it's like, oh, what do I have to think about it?

Guess what?

The research of Killingsworth and Gilbert at Harvard in their pioneering large studies of 2,250 people found again and

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