Good Life Project - The Gratitude Diaries: A Yearlong Experiment in Thanks

Episode Date: December 14, 2015

Janice Kaplan is filled with gratitude. But, it wasn't always that way.Her career in the media has taken her from the TV sportscasting desk to producing dozens of shows, writing more than a dozen books and eventually serving as editor-in-chief of Parade Magazine, which at its height, boasted a circulation of about 30 million readers.Her life was good, still is. But, she noticed that, as good as it was, there was always this feeling of yearning, of it not being enough.Then, a few years back, a research project she'd been working on that focused on gratitude triggered her to reexamine her life and explore nearly every facet of her existence anew.This launched a yearlong exploration of gratitude, with a series of experiments that revealed how profound an impact simple shifts and daily practices could have on her life. Unfolding in "seasons," Janice examines both the growing wellspring of research, as well as the direct effect of so many "gratitude interventions" we've heard about over the years in her book, The Gratitude Diaries.In today's conversation, we dive into Janice's extraordinary career in media, her creative through-lines and fascination with human behavior and why we do what we do, and her values around family, women's voices, relationships, life and the life-changing impact of her year of gratitude. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot if we need him! Y'all need a pilot? Flight Risk. I had to come to terms with the idea that gratitude and ambition can coexist.

And that you can appreciate what you have now and still want more or other or have ambition to go ahead. There's this really weird quirk of humanity. We tend to focus a whole lot more on what's not right than we focus on what's right. It's called the negativity bias, and it makes us in a persistently more bummed out state than we need to be. So today's guest, Janice Kaplan, who's also the author of a book called The Gratitude Diaries, decided to try something a little bit different. We've all heard about gratitude recently, and there's an interesting amount of research around it, but she decided to devote an entire year to a whole bunch of different, let's call them gratitude interventions, to see if she could actually literally rewire her brain and her life to just operate on a much happier, more fulfilled level on a day-to-day basis. What unfolded was pretty

incredible. And we don't just explore that in today's conversation. We also explore her extraordinary journey in the media as a newscaster, as a writer, as a producer, as an editor-in-chief. And what she's been able to accomplish is pretty extraordinary. Really excited to dive into the conversation with Janice Kaplan. I'm Jonathan Fields. This is Good Life Project. Right now, as we sit here, you have had a pretty stunning career. Not that it's over. But the list of accomplishments is kind of mind-blowing.

And your recent exploration of gratitude on a very personal level is something that I want to get into in a fair amount of detail. But I want to take a step back in time first. So you went to school at Yale. I did. What did you actually study there? I was an American Studies major, which at the time was a great major. Tom Wolfe, I think, had just gotten the first Ph.D. in American Studies at Yale. And now, as I understand it, it's the jock major.

So, you know, people think I'm a football player. I am not. But there's an interesting tie in there, because when you came out of Yale, you made a really interesting career choice. Right. I actually started as a sports reporter. So you got, all right, take me there. How does that happen?

Well, it actually started while I was at Yale. And I was working one summer at the CBS radio station in Boston as a morning news reporter and a news writer. And the sports reporter at the time, the head sports guy, used to not only do the sports casts, he would also do an editorial. And he, you know, hey, let's admit it, I was a cute 19-year-old girl, okay? And he was this know, hey, let's admit it, I was a cute 19-year-old girl, okay? And he was this hot sportscaster. And he came swaggering out of the studio one morning, and he stood in front of me, and he said, well, that was a pretty great editorial, wasn't it? I bet you couldn't do anything like that.

And as with the arrogance that only a 19-year-old can have, I said, I thought it was horrible and sexist and really offensive, and you should be ashamed of talking about women that way. I don't remember exactly what it was about. And he said, Oh, yeah, you could do better. And I said, Sure. He said, Okay, the editorial is yours tomorrow morning. And that was the start of it. And yeah, and I started doing, he was actually a great guy. And I shouldn't be shouldn't be teasing that way. He actually then put me on the air covering tennis for CBS radio, and I went back to Yale. And that was the year that the Giants were actually playing at Yale Bowl as Giant Stadium was being rebuilt. And so I covered,

I covered the Giants for CBS Radio. And it was a really fun way to start in college. I mean, were you somebody with a deep interest in sports and athletics? Or was this just totally more of the editorial side that was pulling you? Absolutely no knowledge or interest in it at all. I was actually interested in women's issues. And I started using sports as a way to talk about women's issues. And I wrote a sports column for years for Seventeen magazine. Hard to imagine now that Seventeen would have a sports column, but it did. And my first book was called Women in Sports. So it was my way of talking about women's issues through the prism of, at the time, what people figured women couldn't do and were just starting to do.

So you were writing two women? Very much so. Yeah. Not when I was doing the regular sportscast. The sportscasts were guy stuff. But when you were doing the regular sportscast stuff, which is largely a male audience, in the back of your mind, are you still thinking, how do I tell this story in a way that sort of like plants a different seed or allows for a different lens to most of the men who are listening to and watching this? That's interesting. I don't think I actually could do that when I was doing straight sportscasting. If you're talking about a tennis match or you're talking about a football game, probably not. But it did become interesting to me to see how women could fit into that world. And, you know, I was just reading this morning something about women in the military. And I was reading these arguments that I thought 20 years

ago had been settled. You know, it's just, it's kind of stunning to me to keep reading these same things and these same stereotypes and our same ability to forget that maybe what the average woman and the average man can do is indeed different. But none of us are average. And whether you're in sports or the military, we're looking for people who aren't average and who can do different kinds of things. And our inability to understand that and accept that sort of still surprises me. Yeah, it really is. I mean, what do you think is behind that, though? Because if we've been essentially repeating the same conversation over and over for decades now,

I'd love to believe in some way we've evolved over the last generation or so in terms of the public conversation, the assumptions around that. What do you think is keeping the conversation at this same level, even though maybe not even the conversation, but what do you think is keeping the underlying assumptions and actions? I wish I had the answer to that. I guess it's fear of some sort. Protectiveness. Isn't that what we all do? Just protecting our own territory that the Marine, the guys who are in the Marines want to say, hey, we're the only Marines. Nobody can be as good as us. And if there's a woman in the Marines, that means we're not as masculine?

I don't know. But I guess there's just this fear and ignorance. I can't find any good reasons that it would still exist. Yeah, I mean, it's amazing. Well, hopefully the conversation continues and the actions continue. I'm assuming part of what you were talking about here also was we're recording this at a time where I think it was about a week ago, there's a big announcement that women are now going to be considered or the Marines are standing firm that they really don't like that idea. But hopefully, as you said, changes do start to exist. And certainly when I look at women in sports now and the way they're accepted now versus the way they were when I first started writing about women in sports,

it is a very dramatic change and change takes a while to happen. So incremental, you know, what seems like incremental change when you're living it, actually, I guess, to be fair, when you look back over a longer range is pretty dramatic. And moving people's opinions does take time. So we're in the right track. Yeah, absolutely. So when you start to make the shift to more of the editorial side, and then writing, and then you came up with your first book, where the audience for you starts to shift more to women. What were you trying to accomplish? What was driving you? What was the awakening or the actions that you were trying to breathe life into? I guess we all need to have the images of who we can be. And I was probably of a generation where I was lucky enough that there were women ahead of me who had broken the ground and who had had the careers and who had mixed the careers and the families. So I didn't

have to break that ground. But I think even as I look at young women in college right now, they're still struggling with those same issues and still trying to figure out what can we do and who can we be. And I was young enough as I was first writing that I was struggling with them and wanted to talk about it and lay the groundwork and say, look at what our possibilities are. Look what we can do. You know, when I was back in the days when I was writing about sports, women's sports, it was, and this was not that long ago. So we're talking about maybe, well, probably this now was maybe back to the 70s. But when the first women were allowed to run in the Boston Marathon, that sounds like ancient history now. But as I said, I think that was the 1970s.

Just using the word, you know, allowed. It's so bizarre. Right. Just even, you know, consider that. They were physically being thrown out of the marathon. A woman named Catherine Switzer, again, I'm pulling these names out of long ago history, I believe was the first woman to run the Boston Marathon. And she registered as Kay Switzer and was wearing a hat and nobody knew who she was. And then the guy who was running, who was the head of the Boston Marathon at the time realized who she was halfway through the marathon, and physically came in and threw her off the course. Oh, my God. And again, that goes back to your question of what are we afraid of?

You know, what would be so terrible? And obviously that changed very quickly, and within the next few years, the marathons were open to women. But here's what's startling. In that very short time, the speed at which a woman, the top woman, could run a marathon improved by something like an hour within about five years, right? Ridiculous. You're normally talking about incremental changes of a minute. Five minutes is huge. But when you don't know what you can do, and when you don't have a sense

of what your possibilities are, you hold yourself back. And so, you know, maybe that's the answer to your question of what was I trying to do? I was trying to say to people, you have these potentials. You have these possibilities. Yes, you can run a marathon an hour faster than you actually think you can. Yeah, it's incredible. I remember years ago, I was friendly with a guy. He was a camera guy for, I think it was ABC, early in his career. And he covered a lot of sports.

And he was sent to shoot, I think it was the first ever Ironman triathlon in Hawaii. And his instruction was, we just want to cover the lead guys. So he's basically, he's on the back of a motorcycle covering the lead guy the whole race. The lead guy comes in. You know, he radios to his boss, hey, like, what do I do now? Like, I don't know, just go find the lead woman and just like, you know, like shoot some footage, maybe B-roll or something like that. That becomes this stunning story. I remember to this day because I met him years later, but I saw the footage on TV when they ran it.

The woman's name was Julie Moss. And oh, my God, the most stunning story of Will as she was hallucinating and losing control of her body and literally on her hands and knees clawing her way across the finish line. And this was this astonishing story that would never have actually been captured or told. But for the fact that somebody said, well, the dudes are already in, let's go grab some footage. And, you know, it's nice to see that I think in that window of time, you know, between then and now, that there is so much more emphasis on like, no, actually, let's cover it all. Let's tell the stories that are but I still think part of what I do with this is that I want to give equal if not more time to women that I sit down with and have conversations with. So over a window of time,

you'll always find, you know, pretty close to a 50-50 blend of men and women. And part of the reason I do that is because when my daughter was younger and I was reading her bedtime stories, they were all fables about the prince coming in and saving. And I was like, no, this can't happen. And I became aware of that dynamic. And it still, I think, exists in media. There's a massive overbalance of coverage of men doing nearly identical challenge, physical tasks and jobs. It's women, but men are the ones who are getting the airtime. I think it's a wrong that needs to be rewritten to a certain extent.

Well, I'm so glad that you're aware of it and that you're trying to write it. But I also love that story of the Iron Woman. Because aren't we just all so inspired by those stories? I was in tears watching that. I'm literally shaking and in tears watching that. of the Iron Woman. Because aren't we just all so inspired by those stories? Oh my God, I was in tears watching that. I'm literally shaking and in tears watching that. When you see somebody pushing themselves to the limits, either of their physical or emotional capabilities,

pushing themselves to the heights of what we can be, it's just such an inspiration because we don't do that. In our own lives, we don't push ourselves. And to see others who can just reminds us of the potential that we do have. Yeah. And I think it reminds you, yeah, that there's a spark of humanity that you see in those other people that you kind of see in yourself too. And you're like, huh, if they can, maybe we can. Right. I don't think I can do an iron man. Yeah, I don't think I can. And a more metaphoric level, how's that? So you go from TV sportscasting to more on the editorial side,

but you actually kind of like keep a foot pretty strongly in the TV world as your career evolves. Right. My career was always a balance between magazines and television and writing. And for a while I used to think, oh gosh, if only I had stayed with one of them, it would have been better. But very shortly, all of media started to converge. And I realized that I had a great advantage by having done that. And also, I think I have a pretty short attention span. I think that one reason that a lot of us are in journalism is because we're curious. And journalism gives you a great way to investigate

something and to find out about it and then to move on. The downside of that, I think, is that sometimes you don't actually participate. You watch it from the outside and you think you've taken it in, but you always maintain that little bit of a distance. It's probably what I started to try to do differently when I was writing or when I was writing my most recent book. Yeah, I mean, that's so interesting that you say that, because I think we're turning into a world of citizen journalists in terms of how we participate in so much of life. And that, you know, it's not about the experience. It's about, like, the selfie of the experience.

If you go to a concert, it's not about the music. It's about, like, who can take the best footage of the concert, you know, and then share it the fastest, you know, on YouTube. And I wonder what that's doing to our ability to actually just be present in the experience. Yeah, no, that's really interesting. I haven't thought of it in terms of how it's changed the whole society, but I think that's absolutely correct because, as I said, certainly as a journalist what you do is you maintain a bit of a wary distance on something, and you need that perhaps to keep a bit of a critical eye,

but it also does keep you from getting fully involved in the event. And you may be right that if you're doing something only so you can report it on Facebook compelling and so visceral and so emotional that you really had to fight this? You're like, I need to do something about this, but my job is to be objective. My job is not to do something about it to a certain extent. Yeah, I haven't been in those circumstances necessarily where I was seeing tragedies or dangers. So probably not that way. But certainly, you know, on the very different extreme, I've interviewed a lot of people, and I interviewed a lot of celebrities, both when I was an editor at TV Guide and when I was editor-in-chief of Parade. And seeing people's lives and getting involved in people's lives is really interesting.

And then what happens is sometimes you get close to somebody for two days, and you really feel like they're your best friend, and then you never see them again, or you see them on the next junket or the next story that you're doing. And so it's very interesting what our connections are with other people and how we come to know them or respond to them. Yeah. I mean, it's so interesting, too, and tell me if this has been your experience at all, but it almost seems like your job is to dispassionately engage in order to tell a story that inspires the most compassion with those who experience the story.

So there's this kind of weird dynamic going on. You know, when I was editor of Parade, Parade at the time was a huge, huge platform. We printed something like 35 million copies a week, and 70 million people read it. For those who don't know it, it's the Sunday magazine insert that was at the time in about 500 newspapers around the country. And it's much smaller now, of course, because newspapers have disappeared.

But at the time it was huge, and you could pretty much get anybody to do anything. And probably one of my happiest experiences there was right after Obama won the presidency for the first time. And I called his communications people, and I asked if he would like to give to write something for parade on the Sunday before his inauguration, which of course is on a Tuesday. And they said, Yeah, great idea. But hate to tell you this, he's actually going to say everything important at his inauguration. And he doesn't want to say it on the Sunday before I want to scoop it. Right. So I said, Okay. And they said, Well, do you want to come up with something that he could do that might be different? So I said, Yeah, I'll get right back to you. And I had like five minutes to come up with something that he could do that might be different. So I said, Yeah, I'll get

right back to you. And I had like five minutes to come up with something. And I called them back. And I said, How about if he writes a letter to his daughters about what he hopes for them for the next four years? And they said, Wow, that's a great idea. We'll check. And of course, he liked it. And it was it was interesting, because we were close to deadline on closing the issue. Parade at the time closed three weeks before the magazine came out. And I kept calling the communications office and saying, I really need that piece. And at one point, I said, I'm really anxious to see it. And the guy said, yeah, we're anxious to see it, too. He's actually writing this one. It's like the office is not writing a forum. He's actually doing the work.

And it came in, and it was just an absolutely beautiful piece. And, you know, I'm an editor, even for the president, I edit everything. But I didn't, I think I changed two words on it. And it was just quite moving and quite wonderful. And a couple of years later, he actually turned it into a children's book, where he wrote it as a letter to his daughters. And so I was pleased with that, because it was a way of humanizing something. And having the president, a new president, who was at the time seemed so exciting, come in and say something that everybody and their children could relate to. Yeah. So when you made the move, you know, eventually through TV Guide, and you did a, you know, you had a pretty extensive career in TV production, then Parade magazine. I mean, it's interesting, because like you said, you've experienced monumental shifts in your career in the media.

Even just in that last stopping place at Parade, from the time you landed there to the time you left. I'm assuming it's a pretty substantial shift. What's your overall just sense of where media is headed these days? I know it's like a big amorphous, you know, like Oracle-like question, but I'm curious because you've had some pretty extraordinary experience in such a depth and a variety of the way that stories are told, And I'm a little bit obsessed with storytelling. So I'm curious where, like what your sense is almost of like where we've been. And if you have a sense of where we're headed. You hit it when you said stories, because I think stories still are what matter. We still want to be emotionally involved in something. We still want to be moved by something. I think we don't trust people in the same way. We don't believe in the

voice of something. It was funny when I first got got to Parade, the CEO told me, I had a particular story, and I was doing it from two sides, you know, one, two different viewpoints. And the CEO, who was an older guy, and had been at Parade for many years, and was really quite wonderful, and had done fabulous things for Parade. But he came to me, and he said, no, we don't do that at Parade. We have one voice and we have one point of view. And I realized that was sort of an older school position than I wanted to take. So I don't think we have that anymore. I don't think we listen to the evening news broadcaster as the knowing all voice. But we do want to hear stories

and we still care about people and we still want to be moved on an emotional level and be involved. So, yeah, I don't know if I had the answer. I was hoping you'd say podcasting. Podcasting may be it, may be it. I hope so. Yeah. I mean, I so agree. I think we're, you know, if you look back just in the way that we've communicated the most powerful things, you know, it's stories been the common thread. And I think it's told, it's interesting in my short time in this world, I think I see the way that it's being told sort of emerging, especially it's like, I almost have this feeling like

the pendulum is swinging back to like the family around the radio on a Sunday night, or there's a level of intimacy of listening that we're reverting back to that is supplanting the visual storytelling, at least on a day-to-day basis. And that may just be my biased lens entirely too, because that's what I like. But a lot of your work has been around storytelling and also telling the stories of women and powerful women and empowering women. So it was interesting when I was doing a little bit of research on you, I pulled up the 1982 wedding announcement in the New York Times. Oh my gosh, you did way too much research. Interesting that it appeared in the style section. Immediately interesting. The headline was something like,

I'm trying to remember, Miss Kaplan weds a physician. And then in the middle of it, it was pretty short. It says, you know, like Janice Kaplan will be keeping her last name. And I was like, the phrasing, the fact that it's in the style section

and that headline where it's like, doesn't wed, you know, the name of your husband, but quote, a physician. What was that communicating? Well, first of all, I am so impressed. You know, like everybody else in the world, I have Googled myself many times, many times, and I have never come up with that New York Times marriage announcement. So I guess I'll have to dig deeper. I don't actually remember that. I did indeed wed a physician. That is correct. I don't know why the Times would have put it that way. The funny thing was that when

we got married, I told my husband that I was marrying him even though he was a doctor. That's great. And he said, oh, no, my mother always assumed the only reason anybody would marry me was because I was a doctor. I said, no. Why are you even going to med school? I want to be an artist. Right. That's so funny.

So that's interesting. The Times made that decision. I know. I certainly had not written anything like that. Yeah. Again, it's sort of like a really interesting just commentary on the evolution of media. On one of the first dates that I had with my husband, we had gone out, I don't remember where, and then we had gone for a drink afterwards at the Palace Hotel, which has a big grand at the time.

I don't know if it still does. It has a big grand staircase coming down. And we were sitting sort of at the bottom of the staircase having a drink. And I looked up and I said, oh, there's Barbara Walters. She was walking down the stairs. And the man who was to become my husband said, Who's Barbara Walters? Perfect. I thought, this could be a really interesting life. That's awesome. So kind of coming full circle a little bit, we're hanging out here today, and it's shortly after a new book of yours has come out. And the book is an exploration of a year in your life, but it's really also a conversation about a much bigger topic, something that has been in the sort of public sphere of interest and started been increasingly

heavily researched and things like that for a while now, and that's gratitude. And I want to dive into some of your personal experience and what you actually did for a year because it's kind of fun and fascinating. But one of the bigger questions for me is because it's a topic that has gotten a lot of ink over the last couple of years, and you're somebody who's sort of like deeply aware of the media and the market around it. What in your mind sort of led you to think there's something

that hasn't been discussed that I think would be really compelling? I think happiness was very much in the zeitgeist for a number of years. There were all sorts of big happiness books and some very successful happiness books, and it became a whole happiness movement. And we were all supposed to be happy. And it started to strike me that happiness was a bit ephemeral, that much of happiness and some of these books, by the way, were quite excellent and really dug deep, and I do admire them. But in some ways, happiness was a little bit about waiting for the events that would make us happy. And I think if you wait for events to make you

happy, you can be waiting for a really long time. And you know, you've been kind enough to mention my career, and I certainly have had a great career. And I don't think I ever felt that. I think I was always thinking about what I hadn't accomplished and what else I could do and always looking forward and always thinking about the next step and the next thing that I was going to do. And, you know, we also were talking about my husband. I have a great husband. I don't think I appreciated him either. There are lots of other people out there. Your eyes are always wandering.

I don't mean literally, but you're always living with the other person that you might have been. And I started to realize that I was just doing that too much. And from the outside, people were always telling me what a great career I had and what a great life I had and how lucky I was. And I was wondering why I didn't feel that way. And I think it wasn lucky I was. And I was wondering why I didn't feel that way. And I think it wasn't just me. I think so many of us feel like we're not quite doing what we should and that there are other people who are doing something more and that life can be more and what are we missing? And we're always looking for something that perhaps we're looking in the wrong place for. And it really took that pausing and thinking about, okay, what is happiness? What does make

you happy? And if it's not those events, if it's not that list on the about, okay, what is happiness? What does make you happy? And if it's not those events, if it's not that list on the resume, and my resume is as good as anybody's, and if it's not that family, and my family's as good as anybody's, what is it? And it really made me stop and think about how do you refocus and how do you rethink what's going to be really meaningful to you? Yeah. So that led you not just to explore the topic of gratitude, but also to make an unusual commitment and experiment. But I guess it kicked off partly also with some research that you were sort of involved in.

Right. I got involved with the John Templeton Foundation shortly after I left Parade, and they gave me a grant to do a survey on gratitude, a big national survey on gratitude. And it was interesting, but it wasn't a deeply emotional topic for me at the time, I was doing it as an interesting project. And the results came in. And there were interesting findings like that 90% or so of people thought

that being grateful made you more happy, and made you happier. And that a similar number thought that when asked if they were grateful for their family and friends said, absolutely, you know, grateful for family and friends. But then when we asked people about expressing gratitude, the numbers plunged, and we were at, you know, under half said that they expressed gratitude. So great. This was a great finding for me. You know, I called it the gratitude gap, and I wrote about it, and I went on TV talking about it. But it really took a while for it to sink in on a personal level. It was still like data for other people. Absolutely. All those other people.

It's a great story. Exactly what we were talking about before. All those other people who aren't grateful. And at some point, it did sink in. And it did strike me that, oh, maybe that's what I should be focusing on. Maybe all this data could actually turn into something that would have an effect on me and have an effect on how I feel. And so that was the genesis of it. Yeah. And what did that lead you to do? Well, I decided to, after I had done, I had spent a fair amount of time after doing that survey of doing more research on gratitude. And then I decided on a New Year's Eve that I would try to spend the next year living gratefully. And, you know, it was a New Year's Eve, I was at a nice New York party, and I was

wearing my nice little black dress and holding my glass of champagne and midnight was coming. And it had been a perfectly nice year, you know, there was nothing that had gone wrong. But I tried to imagine what I wanted in the year ahead. And I couldn't actually think of anything. And that kind of scared me. You know, it was like, I didn't have anything that I really desperately thought was going to make me happy in the coming year. And so that was a moment where I realized, well, it's not the events that are going to happen. You know, I'm not going to win the lottery, I'm not going to move to Hawaii. And even where I realized, well, it's not the events that are going to happen. I'm not going to win the lottery. I'm not going to move to Hawaii. And even if I do those things, I'll find reasons to undermine them.

And why, if they've happened, they're not as good as they should be. And so maybe I need to take what I've just learned about gratitude and actually turn it into a year where I think about gratitude and I research it and I try to figure out what it means. And I try to actually live more gratefully. And because I'm a journalist, I couldn't just kind of go ahead and do this as a memoir kind of thing. So I set it up with different categories for each month. And I actually did it by seasons that I would start with family and friends, and then I did work, and then I did health and fitness, and then sort of the fourth quarter, I did the bigger world. And it started, and it became something so much more dramatic than I

had really anticipated. It really just so quickly started to change my whole attitude and my whole perspective that I was just really excited to get to do it. Yeah. And I kind of want to walk through those seasons with you a little bit, because I think there's some interesting stories to share and some interesting data. Let's just kind of explore. Let's move through the seasons together. You mentioned family as one of the places where you really explored gratitude and its application. And so you're married, you're a parent, I'm assuming you have friends too, and colleagues. What were the big awakenings for you in sort of that season?

Well, the biggest one was with my husband. And you mentioned my marriage announcement, so you know I've been married for a long time. And I have a great husband, but I sort of stopped noticing him. And I think we do that in marriages. You know, our spouses become kind of the background rather than what we focus on. And, you know, psychologists have a fancy name for it. They call it habituation, that no matter what you want or think you want, once you have it, it becomes, you get used to it, you get habituated to it. And so I decided that I was going to, for that first month, for January, bring my husband, not from the background, very much into the foreground.

And I was just going to start noticing the things that he did. It started one Friday night. We were driving up. We were lucky enough to have a country house up in Connecticut. And we were driving up there, as we usually do on Friday night. And we pulled into the driveway. And I said, honey, thanks for driving. And he said, I always drive.

And I said, yeah, I know you always drive. But, you know, it's dark. It's snowing. I really hate to drive. And I'm lucky that you drive. So thank you. And he didn't say much more. And that was fine.

And then a couple of other times in the course of the weekend, I thanked him for little things that he normally did or I appreciated something that he said. And there started to be a different vibe just over that one little weekend. And I didn't tell him at that point what I was doing. And by Sunday night, we had dinner and he said to me, oh, thanks for cooking. And I said, I always cook. But it was, at that point, we started talking about what was going on. And it became a little bit of a joke, you know, in that first month. It's a little bit awkward, you know, to be thanking your husband or your spouse or your wife or whoever. And, you know, we would laugh about it. And he would get up in the morning and he would get dressed and I would tell him how great he looked. And he would say,

do I really or is this for the book? You know, so at first, it was a little bit of a joke, but then it became part of our lives. And appreciating each other became part of our lives. And it's almost hard to explain how dramatically that affected us. And again, because I was doing research, I started calling marriage counselors around the country and asking them if I was crazy. And I spoke to one in particular in Illinois who had done a lot of research into this. And he started explaining to me and sent me some research on actually the neural pathways in the brain, and how they start to change when we're grateful or express loving feelings. And, you know, it makes sense. It's like anything else, if you lift weights, right, your biceps are going to get stronger. If you start using the neural pathways for love and

gratitude, they're going to get stronger and become more potent in your life. And he told me that one of the things he has done with couples for years and years is tell them to send an email to each other every day. And it's just a simple fill in the blank. And the first part of it is, one thing you did today that I appreciated was, and just fill it in. And he told me that he always does this every day. Now, he's also married to a marriage counselor. And so I said to him, hello, why can't you just tell her? And his answer was, I always mean to, but the day gets busy. And I'm about to say something, and a kid screams, or the dog barks, or the phone rings.

And then it goes away, and we're eating dinner, and something else is happening. And if you just take that time to pause and know that once a day you're going to appreciate the person who you're married to and you're supposed to care about more than anybody else, it's really going to make a difference. And it did. Yeah. And it's amazing to think it's not a grand gesture that we're talking about. We're talking about like just the smallest little momentary acknowledgements. One of the things that comes up for me around this, and it's not just gratitude practices, it's a lot of other things around the sort of positive psychology work. You brought up this term habituation. So we kind of habituate to great people just being there,

to the person driving or the other person cooking, just because that's the roles that you, and we kind of assume that, well, they know that I appreciate that. I don't have to keep saying it. So my question is, I'm curious whether you experience this or whether in your research, you came upon research on this, do we also habituate to a state of gratitude? So if you start saying all these things to your husband or sending that email every day,

do we habituate to that and it no longer has the same effect at some point? That's an interesting question. I don't actually know the answer to it, but I think it may not have the same dramatic effect, but if you can make your baseline a little different, think how good we all are at criticizing. And we all know that our spouses could be so much better if only they would listen to us a little bit more. And so we know, we all know that our spouses could be so much better if only they

would listen to us a little bit more. And so we always have great suggestions for them and for our kids too. And so sometimes that becomes the baseline in the house for our kids that they come home and they think, if I say this, mom or dad isn't necessarily going to say why it's great, but it's going to say how I could do it better and what the next step is. Right. It's like, oh, you got a B. Well, like, how can we get an A? Right. Or, you know, we all do that. If 10 great things happen in a day and one bad thing happens, we tend to focus on the bad. We ask our kids, if our kids are telling us things and a teacher made one negative comment, we'll just focus on that negative comment and try to find out more about

it rather than shrugging it off and looking at the positive. So I think it just becomes very much what you end up focusing on. And if you habituate to the positive things, I think that's probably a better state to be in and puts you in a better position to be able to function. Yeah, and maybe even just as you're speaking where my mind was going, maybe even if you do habituate to a certain extent, just the practice of constantly noticing yourself, you know, within heading towards that negativity bias, which our brains are

through some quirk of survival, you know, oriented towards, and just like repeatedly pulling yourself back to it. No, but this is great. Like this happened the way that I wanted it to happen or this kind of constantly the practice of bringing you back to the place of gratitude. Even just that sort of like creating a perpetual shift to acknowledging what's right rather than, you know,

miring yourself and what's not right has got to have a lot of benefit. I think so. And I think that's exactly what has been most important for me. You know, my actual year of living gratefully ended almost a year ago now. And what I've been able to hold on to more than anything else is that ability to reframe things and to find myself annoyed or frustrated about something and to stop. And again, it doesn't have to be soft and sappy. And oh, the world is a beautiful place. And, you know, I did one radio interview and the

interviewer said, tell me four things you're grateful for right this minute. And I thought, that's not really what gratitude is. It's not that I'm sitting here, oh, and I'm grateful for this, and I'm grateful for that, because that's just not who I am. And I think it's not who most of us are. But if we can find ourselves in a situation, whether at work or at home, and stop ourselves and say, okay, maybe it's terrible. Maybe this is just a really rotten day. But I want to just stop and find a moment of something that I can appreciate and stop and really just have a slightly different perspective on it. Because I think we tend to think that we're smarter and better and more intellectual if we're negative. And that we sound so much smarter if we're complaining about something. And if we remind ourselves that actually, I think many of us do our best work when we're positive, not when we're negative. Yeah, I so agree. And we could probably go down the whole rabbit hole of negativity, bias, and media, but I think maybe we'll just set that aside. So the first season was really sort of based around how acknowledging gratitude,

bringing gratitude more into day-to-day relationships, change things. Beyond your husband, did you notice sort of a broader impact? Or were there specific things that you did or moments or stories that emerged that really stayed with you? Well, I noticed it with a lot of friends, because I found that when I would tell people that I was writing about gratitude, their instant reaction would be, oh, that's great. I should do more of that. It's like we all have an instinct. Right. It's like, let me put it on my list. Right. Exactly. We should do better on that. But there are some people who didn't get it. And I have one friend who is a very negative person. She's lovely and delightful and upbeat in most

ways. But if there's a negative to talk about in any situation, she will find it. And after a while, I was finding it almost unbearable to be with her. And I kept pointing it out to her. I kept saying, you know, trying to turn around what, what she was complaining about, if it was, you know, that she had to, she had her office had just moved, and she was way downtown, and she had to take the subway, and she hated taking the subway. Yes, but you have a great job. Let's focus on this great job that you've had for so long. And I think some people just are resistant to that and don't want to hear that and want you to realize how difficult their lives are. And she did come around and I think she's appreciated that and we can joke about that a lot.

I had one very close friend who was really worried that I was going to lose my edge completely. And that this was going to turn me just so soft and sappy and that I was not going to be ambitious anymore. And she's a very, very successful real estate entrepreneur in the city and has built some great buildings and done some big projects. And it took her a while to come around also. And it was difficult in some ways. But I liked it because she was always challenging me. And I knew that for me, gratitude couldn't be a pat on the back. And it couldn't be something

that was just placating. If at the end of the year, I ended up saying, oh, yes, everything is lovely, that was not going to be successful. So I had to come to terms with, and perhaps she helped me do it, with the idea that gratitude and ambition can coexist. And that you can appreciate what you have now and still want more or other or have ambition to go ahead. But what gratitude does is it lets you stop and appreciate what you have when you have it, rather than looking back at it 10 years later and saying, gee, I wish I had appreciated that. Yeah, that notion of gratitude and ambition coexisting, I think is so powerful, because I think we're taught from a young age, the exact opposite. It's sort of like, you know, kid comes home from school, well, you get what you get,

and you don't get upset. You know. Just be grateful for what you have. So it's almost like the silent part of that teaching is, and if you want more, then that's not good. That means that you're not being grateful for what you have. Whereas I love that, and I completely agree with the whole idea of you can be immensely grateful for where you are and what you have, and at the same time want more. And if you think about it on a societal scale too, it's like, sure, we got this legislation passed. I'm so grateful we got it, or we have the peace thing going on,

or we made really great inroads, but there's a lot more. And I'm grateful for that. I'm happy that we're in a better place than we were. And I don't want to say but, I want to say and, there's more work to be done. And that's okay. You can better place than we were. And I don't want to say but, I want to say and, there's more work to be done. And that's okay. You can still have that coexisting. And I think, I feel like the seed is planted that those two can't really coexist in so many of us at a young age. Yeah, I think that's great and absolutely correct. And I hadn't thought of that in terms of kids.

But you're right. When kids come home and they ask for something or want something, an answer may be, oh, just be grateful for what you have. And that's not the answer. Because figuring out how you can get something else or why you want something else is okay. And I think in that survey that I mentioned before, we found that one of the places people are least likely to be grateful is at work. And that comes both from up and down. Bosses do not say thank you. They don't want to express gratitude. What's behind that?

Well, I think it's that fear that, first of all, they think they're showing that they're powerful by not saying thank you. And they have this idea that they're showing that they have higher expectations, that you are just doing what you're supposed to do. And they think that that's motivating people. I'll tell you one story about that. I was out having dinner with a friend of mine who's a partner at a big corporate law firm. And he made a call during dinner, it was maybe eight o'clock at night. And he was obviously talking to one of his young associates. And he said, I want that on my desk at eight o'clock tomorrow morning. And he hung up. And I said, so is that guy pulling an all-nighter for you? And he said, yeah, I need that tomorrow. And I said, you're going to say, this was at the end of my year of gratitude, let me make clear. And I said,

you're going to say thank you to him when you come in tomorrow? He said, no, it's his job. I said, I know it's his job, but he's staying up all night for you. Are you going to say thank you? And he said, probably not. And I said, okay, here's an idea. Why don't you stop at Starbucks on the way in and buy him a cup of coffee and come in and put it down on his desk and say, great job. Thanks for staying up all night. And my lawyer friend got it and he laughed and he said, yeah, I guess if I give him coffee, he'll stay up for the rest of the day. That's a great idea. But the point is that we forget that, yeah, this young associate, it was his job to do this, and it was his job to pull an all-nighter that night. But we also want to be appreciated. We want our work to be meaningful, and we find fulfillment by people appreciating what we do.

And I think executives are making such a mistake in not understanding that people will work harder for you if you say thank you to them. People are happy for that. And that's a motivator. It's not a demotivator. And so many executives, I talk about this in the book, when I spoke to them about this, they would say, well, we say thank you with a paycheck. And, you know, that's sort of a line from Mad Men. I think Don Draper says something very similar in Mad Men. And the answer should be, no, we don't say thank you with a paycheck. We say we're paying you with a paycheck. We say thank you with thank you. They're different things. Yeah, that resonates so powerfully with me, because people don't work for a paycheck. I mean,

of course, we work because we have, you know, we want money, and we want what it buys, and we want, you know, that whatever illusion of security and certainty it gives us. But fundamentally, you don't get the best of people for a paycheck. And people don't devote themselves to a worthwhile cause. I mean, if you think about the enterprises where people put the most on the line, it's when they're actually not getting paid. It's the causes. It's the movements. It's the revolutions. You know, it's when they're actually not getting paid. It's the causes. It's the movements. It's the revolutions.

You know, it has nothing. And they will work harder and sometimes, like, sacrifice themselves in physical and emotional ways. They would never begin to sacrifice for a paycheck, you know, because there's something bigger on the line. And I so agree with you. I think, you know, it's we want to be acknowledged and thanked, you know, we do it because there's something intrinsic going on. But there's also

that pat on the back feels good. Right? Yeah, no, we need to, I agree that, you know, we put so many of us put time, huge amounts of time into things that aren't being paid. And of course, we need a base level of fair pay. And I'm not arguing against that in any way. Nor am I. We both live in New York City. But one has to complement the other. And somebody told me a story about that she was doing a project for somebody and was being paid on a monthly basis for it. And she was really dedicated to it, and she really cared about proving that she was doing this right and doing the best for this person.

And then as the project started nearing its end, he decided he wanted her to work harder, and he thought he would motivate her by putting it to an hourly basis. So he changed it from paying her per month to paying her per hour. And she said he completely misunderstood. It completely changed it from paying her per month to paying her per hour. And she said he completely misunderstood. It completely demotivated her, because she was driven by trying to have the project right. And by having his appreciation and having the person she was working with, you know, pleased with what she was doing. When it was turned into an hourly wage, it just became a job.

And, and that really changes it. Yeah, it's like all that research that Dan Pink shared in Drive about how doing something intrinsically and then you introduce an extrinsic motivator, and it destroys the motivation, even when you pull it back away again, it doesn't come back. You also explored gratitude in the context of health and vitality. And also gratitude does, talk to me a little bit about some of your exploration around what it actually does to you from a mindset and a physiological standpoint. Well, there's been a lot of research. It's become a topic of research only in the last few years.

And some of the research has found that gratitude lowers your blood pressure, decreases stress, which is pretty obvious, helps you sleep better, just has all sorts of powerful physical effects. And we shouldn't be surprised. We know that there are mind-body effects in just about everything that we do. There's been a lot of interesting research showing how gratitude and positive emotions can actually affect the immune system. And I was really, really struck by that. And, you know, it makes sense. And it's fairly complicated in a way that I won't get into right now. But it makes sense that our immune system can sense our emotions, right? Because historically, if we were feeling fear, it probably meant that something physical was going to happen to us that that a spear was going to be in our belly before too long. And so the immune system had to know to gear up to emotions like fear and anxiety.

Now, when we feel fear, it's more likely because we're talking to our boss or we're being unfriended on Facebook. And our immune system doesn't really need to gear up for that. And it turns out that again, positive emotions like gratitude, pretty much send a message to the immune system to calm down. And it lowers the inflammation in the body. And so, again, we don't necessarily know how all of this works, the specifics of it, but the early findings on it are pretty strong and powerful. Yeah. And there's no downside. Except for, I mean, but it's interesting that your friend brought up the potential downside of, you know, like, quote, losing your edge. Right, right. Because I think that's actually probably in a lot more people's minds than we acknowledge. I think so.

I think people think that if they're grateful, they're just going to sound silly. Like Pollyanna-ish. Exactly. And that they're not going to be able to be powerful. And I think that that's probably the key message that I would want to bring, that no, gratitude makes you more powerful. It makes people rally around you. Bosses are more successful when people like them and, and want to support them and want to help them. We're better in our marriage and our personal lives when we're positive and we're looking for the positive. I mean, who do you want to be around?

You want to be around the people who say nice things to you or the people who are always negative? Yeah, depends if you're an artist or not. But I've actually had that conversation specifically with artist friends where they think that, you know, there has to be a certain amount of, of, you know, like persistent cloud and also negativity and suffering for them to be at their best.

And yeah, at least from the research that I've seen, that's not true. I think you need to engage with life to have experiences, to be able to actually mine for the way you express your art. But it doesn't necessarily have to involve fierce negativity and suffering. It can be based around some pretty extraordinary things. Right, absolutely.

So let's come full circle a little bit. The name of this is Good Life Project. So if I offer that term out to you, to live a good life, what comes up? Wow. I think living a good life is really what you decide you want your life to be. And a good life can really, in terms of the actual things that happen, can be just about anything. But to me, and maybe it's because I've been so focused on gratitude the last few years the good life is finding the bright sides in life I interviewed so many people for this book who had had really horrible things happen to them in terms of tragedies illness the loss of children

death horrible horrible events and who were able to tell me how grateful they were that a spouse had been there for them that their friends had been around that they were able to tell me how grateful they were that a spouse had been there for them, that their friends had been around, that they were able to do positive things afterwards. Is it a good life when you've had a terrible tragedy in it? Well, again, we don't control that. And I think the good life is what you can do with what you've been handed, that there's so much, we think we can control a lot more of our lives than we can. But I think so much of it is random. And our ability to take the positive from whatever we can find and try to put positivity into the world and make the world a better place that way is, to me, the way that we can all have a better life. Thank you. Hey, thanks so much for listening to today's episode. If you found something valuable, entertaining, engaging, or just plain fun, I'd be so appreciative

if you take a couple extra seconds and share it. Maybe you want to email it to a friend. Maybe you want to share it around social media. Or even be awesome if you'd head over to iTunes and just give us a rating. Every little bit helps get the word out and it helps more people get in touch with the message. I'm Jonathan Fields, signing off for Good Life Project. If you're looking for flexible workouts, Peloton's got you covered.

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