Hi and welcome to episode 174 of Live Happy Now.

This is Paula Phelps, and today we're talking with Jonathan Roush, author of The Happiness Curve,

Why Life Gets Better After 50.

Yep, you heard that right.

Things start looking up at midlife, and Jonathan talks with our own Chris Libby to explain

why getting older actually makes us happier.

Can you briefly explain for those who don't know what the happiness or the U-shaped curve is and why you decided to write a book about it?

Well, I'll flip the order if that's all right and do why me before what it is because they actually, it's a pretty good setup.

So I've had an incredibly fortunate life.

And by around the age of 40, I had so much to be grateful for good health, the career

of my dreams, stable relationship, plenty of income, you know, everything was just golden. And yet I felt this encroaching feeling

of disappointment, discontent, as if I was trapped and it failed. And I didn't understand it.

So I sat down, I started taking an inventory of things to be grateful for. That only made it worse.

By about 45, I started to feel like

I'd never be grateful and satisfied again. I just became really pessimistic. I didn't know what was

going on because it was irrational. And it really got very unpleasant. It wasn't depression, though.

It wasn't a mood disorder. It was a contentment disorder. It also wasn't midlife crisis,

though it was midlife, because it wasn't that bad. It was more like a kind of constant

background whining of discontent, but it made me like myself less. So that dragged on for a

well. And then in my late 40s basically coincidentally i discovered this emerging literature on

the happiness curve it was called coincidentally about the same time about the time i turned 50 i noticed i

was feeling less of this discontent myself it was starting to turn around so i looked into the science

...