The Science of Happiness: Your 7-Day Mood Glow-Up

Day 1 is our starting point: a reality check. This book hilariously explains why your brain is terrible at predicting what will make you happy. Before we can find happiness, we have to understand why we're looking in all the wrong places.

After learning yesterday that we're bad at 'stumbling on happiness', today we learn that happiness is a skill you can train. This book, a conversation with the Dalai Lama, is your first lesson in treating happiness as an inside job, not an outside goal.

Now that you're training happiness as a skill, you need to know your biggest enemy: the cheap dopamine of modern life. This book explains how our endless pursuit of pleasure actually makes us miserable. It's the key to overcoming the biggest obstacle to the real happiness we learned about yesterday.

After understanding the individual challenge of Dopamine Nation, we turn to the greatest source of lasting joy: other people. This classic book is a deep dive into social psychology, showing why connection, belonging, and community are essential for our well-being.

Building on the importance of connection from The Social Animal, this book gives you a super practical tool. It's the simple user manual for improving your most important relationships by understanding how people give and receive love differently.

Beyond relationships, another pillar of happiness is deep engagement. Now that your social life is leveling up, this book introduces 'flow'—the state of being completely absorbed in a challenging activity. It's a guide to finding joy in what you do.

For our finale, we synthesize it all. After a week of exploring science, relationships, and flow, this book is a beautiful conversation between two of the world's wisest men on how to find joy even in the face of suffering. It's the perfect, hopeful capstone.