Why Humility Is the Key to Well-Being

Want to stay current with Arthur’s writing? Sign up to get an email every time a new column comes out.

Last night at sundown, the annual Jewish holiday of Sukkot began. This seven-day celebration, known as both the Feast of Tabernacles and the Holiday of the Harvest, commemorates the exodus from Egypt and the end of the harvest season. Those observing the festival do so by erecting tent-like structures outdoors, in which they eat, pray, and even sleep, to recall the temporary dwellings made by the Israelites during their 40 years in the desert, as well as the shelters that farmers used in earlier times when they were bringing in the crops.

Sukkot is a joyful celebration—in the Talmud, it is written that any Jew who has not celebrated Sukkot “never saw rejoicing in his lifetime.” That’s a claim I’ve never heard about any other holiday. I don’t recall anyone saying, for example, that Christmas is guaranteed to make you happy, let alone that you can’t be truly happy if you don’t celebrate Christmas.

The spirit of Sukkot is in sharp contrast to the holiday that immediately precedes it: Yom Kippur, which calls upon Jews to make somber atonement for their sins. That change of mood will be especially poignant and difficult this year, coming so soon after the anniversary of the October 7 massacre in Israel. For some, Sukkot’s joyful celebration may understandably feel out of reach.

But Sukkot has an ingenious method for bringing joy even in the midst of suffering, if people choose to accept it—what’s known as “reverse emotional causation.” Sukkot instructs its observants as follows: to, as they recall being saved, be humble, even if they feel proud; to be grateful for the abundance they enjoy, in spite of their resentments; to celebrate as befits the holiday, even if their hearts are hard. By this means, Sukkot engineers the joy it seeks to instill.

You don’t need to be Jewish to benefit from Sukkot’s technique of reverse emotional causation. Learning this method can help you find more to rejoice in.

[Yair Rosenberg: When you’re not in control of your life]

We live in an age in which emotional authenticity is considered paramount. Many people talk about their feelings constantly and feel warranted in acting according to them. A common justification for saying something unkind might easily be “Because I felt angry.” As I have written a number of times, this rationale cedes a lot of behavioral autonomy to the brain’s limbic system, which largely functions below the level of conscious control. Negative basic emotions, for example—fear, anger, disgust, sadness—are at root a physiological response to perceived threats. To act because you feel these emotions is to allow yourself to be managed by what amounts to an entity of low intelligence.

For greater happiness, a better way to live employs what behavioral scientists call metacognition. This simply refers to an impartial awareness of your emotions, a capacity to see them as important information but not as a mandate for any particular behavior. Good ways to practice metacognition include Vipassana meditation, journaling, and prayers, which shift the experience of involuntary emotion into the realm of conscious attention.

Once you have this cognitive awareness of your feelings, you can consider what they mean, and how to act most appropriately in response.

Social scientists have also found that emotions can be reeducated through conscious decisions and actions. Put simply, if you want to feel differently, act as if you do. Many experiments demonstrate this so-called as-if effect.

Take humility, for example, which is a sentiment with both attitudinal and emotional components. Being humble is virtuous but devilishly elusive, especially for some people. As Benjamin Franklin—known by contemporaries for his lack of humility—joked in his autobiography, “Even if I could conceive that I had completely overcome [my pride], I should probably be proud of my humility.”

In 2014, a team of psychologists set out to test whether humility training could work. Participants were assigned a 7.5-hour set of exercises intended to help them recognize and acknowledge their limitations: Although they were not specifically seeking to become humbler, completion of the course did result in their becoming more open to ideas, acquiring a broader perspective with less focus on themselves and an enhanced ability to see value in other things. The researchers concluded that the intervention they’d designed increased humility by about 8 percent among participants (compared with no significant change among a control group that was not exposed to the exercises). The improved humility also came with a greater capacity for forgiveness and patience, and reduced negative feelings.

Gratitude works the same way. You might think that being grateful requires feeling grateful. Researchers have successfully run the process in reverse. A 2011 study in Applied Psychology documented an experiment by three Canadian psychologists, in which one group of participants was asked to adopt a practice of thinking about what they were grateful for in life and to try to maintain this gratitude; a control group simply recalled a memorable event from their lives, with no prompt about feeling thankful. After four weeks of this exercise, the scholars found that those in the gratitude group reported almost 8 percent more life satisfaction, while the simply memorable controls were slightly less happy than when they’d begun.

Finally, consider celebration itself. A holiday per se doesn’t necessarily stimulate positive emotion; that depends on how you decide to celebrate the occasion. In 2011, a team of Spanish and Chilean psychologists studying Christmas and New Year celebrations found that when the holidays were purposely ritualized through traditional practices, families on average experienced greater satisfaction with their life after the holiday than beforehand. In other words, people don’t celebrate because they feel joy; they feel joy because they have made a specific commitment to celebrate.

[Arthur C. Brooks: Eight ways to banish misery]

Sukkot devised an ancient formula for joy: No matter how you feel, for seven days, practice humility, count your blessings, and gather with family and friends to share in food and drink—and joy will find you.

It might find others as well. The holiday in fact has a third name—the Festival of Lights, because the people of old Jerusalem would light great lamps that would illuminate the entire city. “And it shall be one day that shall be known to the Lord, neither day nor night,” wrote the prophet Zechariah, “and it shall come to pass that at eventide it shall be light.” From miles around, Jerusalem would be a brilliant, gleaming beacon, and all across the countryside, people would rejoice at the sight.

Even if you are (like me) not Jewish, you can adopt your own personal Sukkot whenever your well-being isn’t where you want it to be. As an act of humility, set aside a week during which you will resolve to focus less on yourself and your professional or personal life; instead, try taking on a project that has no immediate benefit for you but gives a lot to others. Strive not to talk about yourself the entire week but concentrate on the things outside yourself for which you are grateful. One effective way of doing this is to make a gratitude list that you keep studying and updating over the week. And then make sure to celebrate with others whom you love: A ritual you could adopt would be to have dinner with a different friend or family member each night, and to use it as an occasion to bring joy to them as much as you can.

By doing these things, you yourself will light up, creating the joy you seek. And like a little Jerusalem, you will shine on others and bring them the inspiration they need.

Gut yom tov. Happy Sukkot.

This essay is based on a Sukkot reflection delivered on October 16, 2024, at Temple Beth Elohim in Wellesley, Massachusetts.