One of the big things that affects happiness is social connection ... Every available study of happy people suggests that happy people are more social; they spend more time, like just physically spend more time, around other people, and then they tend to prioritize time with their friends and family members.

Anxiety and excitement present exactly the same neurophysiologically. In studies, people who labeled it excitement had positive experiences; those who labeled it as anxiety had negative experiences.

The hardest thing about raising a middle schooler is the unhealed sweaty seventh-grader inside of us who's got the tray in their hand and doesn't smell quite right and doesn't know where they're going to sit. And we so desperately don't want that for our own children ... We almost can't take it if we have to watch it unfold again.

I think one thing you can do to make your kids ultimately happier and definitely to make them psychologically healthier is to let them be unhappy. It is to let them fail; it is to let them screw up; it is to let them cry; it's to let them see you do the same things because that is the way by which they do stuff.

We hold on to the job or the relationship or the hope, the expectation, the dream because we don't understand the fear that's right under letting go of it.

So, overwhelmed is a very intense amount of stress where actually you can no longer function in it. What's interesting is the only real empirically based solution to overwhelm is nothingness.

I urge young people who are thinking about having kids to think about why you're having kids. Because, in my view, we're not supposed to have kids to fulfill something in us that we're missing ... We are here as parents to raise individuals, and we have to be thinking along those lines. If you have a baby because you need a friend, well, you're going to be sorely disappointed.

There's so many surprising benefits of fun—it reduces your inflammation, it improves your heart condition, it can improve your relationships. It actually stimulates brain growth. This is why very young kids play a lot and baby animals play all the time, because play and doing fun things can actually increase brain growth. But it also has a surprising effect on your productivity.

When we see someone in struggle, reframe 'I'm here to fix' to 'I'm here to walk with.'

Right now, nationally, over 40% of college students report being too depressed to function most days, over 60% say that they feel overwhelmingly anxious, and more than 1 in 10 has seriously considered suicide in the last year.

A love affair with the thing, you're most afraid of, there's nothing more powerful than that.

A very core mechanism of our emotions is that they are contagious. If you're a super anxious, super unhappy mom, your kid's going to pick that up.

I tell young people that all the time. Your job as a 15-year-old, a 16-year-old, 18-year-old is not to fix the economy or to fix racism; your job is to graduate.

My father lived that way; and as a result, he was one of the happiest people that I knew, because he valued what he had. He didn't look at what the other guy had and worry. He didn't measure himself against somebody else's values. I think that's a gift, and it's a gift that I try to mirror.

There is lots of evidence that doing for other people can make us happy, but that's only if we have the bandwidth to do for other people. And the problem is that we sometimes don't.

Kids aren't supposed to be your friends, because the job is too big to worry about whether they like you or not. And no matter what you do, they will find a reason not to like you. That's their job—to push against us.

We cannot control the world, nor should we. So, all we can do is control our own selves, protect our own light. But if no one is showing us the value of our light, it's hard to do it.

You may decide that this relationship was a beautiful love story, but it will not remain a life story. You don't have to squash the love in order to move on. You may just say 'This love is precious; I will hold it dearly; but it is not going to be my life.'

I interviewed James Clear, who wrote 'Atomic Habits' ... One of his quotes is literally on a sticky note everywhere I walk that says 'We will never rise to the level of our goals; we will fall to the level of our systems.'

A good teacher can have as great, if not a greater, impact on the world than the president of the United States.