Office Hours with Arthur Brooks - 5 Steps Toward a More Grateful Life

Starting point is 00:00:00 Did you ever beat yourself up because you should be more grateful than you are? Were you ever criticized by loved ones? I get that. And I get that a lot, by the way. You know, I found myself two weeks ago saying, you know, first class of United Airlines has really gone downhill. Like, really? Negativity bias is our tendency to focus on the negative versus the positive. Why?

Starting point is 00:00:19 Because that's how our ancestors passed on their genes. That's why anger and fear exists so that you can flee threats. If you don't pay attention to them, you're just looking. It's like, it's a great day. you'll get eaten by a tiger and not pass on your genes. And so the result is that the ungrateful among us were the ones who survived. Ingratitude is your animal tendency. Gratitude is a manual override of that to get you into the space of your moral aspirations.

Starting point is 00:00:45 If you understand this, you can actually systematically override the ingratitude and become a more systematically and habitually grateful person. When you're authentically expressing gratitude, you get happier and so does everybody else. Hey friends, welcome to office hours. I'm Arthur Rooks. I'm your host. I'm a behavioral scientist dedicated to lifting people up and bringing them together in bonds of happiness and love using science and ideas. I want to bring the best ideas from all different areas of knowledge and science and even philosophy and theology to you so you can use them to live a happier life and to teach other people how to be happier as well. I want you to be a happiness teacher because we need

Starting point is 00:01:31 more people that are teaching this in the world. We want a better world. I know you do too, why you're watching the show. And thank you for doing so. Thank you for staying with this show. A lot of you have watched it from the very beginning. It's great to see the audience that we're starting to build. This is a community of people dedicated to love and happiness. And there's nothing more gratifying than being able to be part of that for me. So thank you. And the reason I start off with those thanks is because this is our Thanksgiving special. This is a show about today, about gratitude and how we can actually be more grateful people for our own benefit and for the benefit of the whole world. I'm going to give you the information today that you can use to become

Starting point is 00:02:08 a more grateful person and thus a happier person and to build a happier world through your gratitude and being the example of the kind of person that you want to be. If I do my job today, you're going to be ready because if you're watching this in the day that it comes out is before Thanksgiving. And you're going to go into the Thanksgiving holiday warmed up and ready for that holiday in a way that I hope is really good for you and really good for the people that you love. So before we get started, as always, please, give me your comments, give me your criticisms, give me your feedback, your suggestions. You can write to me at office hours at arthurbrooks.com, or you can put it in the comment sections of wherever you're watching or listening to this podcast. We read those

Starting point is 00:02:45 too, and we feed back on that on YouTube and Spotify and on Apple. So please, let us know what you think. Also, if you like this podcast and you like the written form, something that goes along with it, something you might want to read to start your week each week, three to 500 words, my newsletter's free. And you can get that by going to www.Atherbrooks.com slash newsletter. There, you'll join hundreds of thousands of people that are reading that every week. And I'm delighted that they are. And you can share that with other people. You can forward it to other people. There's something that you find interesting. What am I going to talk about today? Well, in the theme of gratitude, I'm going to tell you why it's hard. If you feel like an ungrateful wretch, I'm going to show you

Starting point is 00:03:25 the evolutionary biology that led you to be an ungrateful wretch and why you're actually quite normal being one. Second, I'm going to talk about some experimental studies that show how to become more grateful to override your evolutionary proclivity toward ingratitude. And last but not least, I'm going to talk about how you can make it, make gratitude a greater habit, how you can make it a habit in your own life. So it's going to be really super practical for Thanksgiving week, and indeed, I hope, for the rest of the year as well. Did you ever beat yourself up because you should be more grateful than you are. Were you ever criticized by loved ones? I get that. And I get that a lot, by the way, because, you know, I have this, I have a life that I've always wanted. I'm very,

Starting point is 00:04:07 very grateful for the life that I'm leaving. But I complain a lot. And part of that is this affect profile. I've talked about that on the show. I'm the mad scientist of unusually high positive affect, but also unusually high negative affect, which means that the limbic system of my brain that processes negative emotions, fear, anger, disgust, and sadness. They tend to be quite active. and I get an intense level of that. The result is that a lot of the time I'm complaining. And look, I'm 61 years old for Pete's sake. I should have learned how to be a better person.

Starting point is 00:04:38 And yet, Esther, my long-suffering beloved wife of 34 years and counting, you know, puts up with a lot of nonsense from me about when I have this beautiful life, but I'm complaining about the things that I don't like all the time. Why is it? You know, and it's, we do it all the time, you know, just constantly. You know, I found myself two weeks ago. saying, you know, first class in United Airlines has really gone downhill. Like, really?

Starting point is 00:05:03 Really? Or you're in, you know, in Starbucks and, you know, somebody in front of you is ordered a caramel macchiato, prop, babe, oatmeal, or chata with macadamia milk. It's paying in nickels. And you're like, eh, you're not grateful for the fact that you're, you know, about to get a delicious coffee. You're mad about the fact that it's going to take you, you know, you know, you know, three or four minutes longer. Why is that? And the answer is evolution. Let me tell you about a very

Starting point is 00:05:33 important concept, which is called negativity bias. Negativity bias is our tendency to focus on the negative versus the positive. Why? Because that's how our ancestors pass on their genes. Negative emotions keep you alive. Positive emotions are nice to have. That's the rule. Fear, anger, disgust, and sadness. Those are the four negative emotions and all of them were evolved to help you survive and pass on your genes. really important, all of them. And you think, like, how is sadness evolved? And the answer is because you need to have an aversion against losing the people or things that you love. You need to know that sadness is so painful that I'm not going to say that thing that's inside my head

Starting point is 00:06:12 that's going to give me 48 hours of silence with my spouse. That's why, because you don't want to actually suffer the loss. And that's what the organ inside your limbic system called the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, which governs, you know, social rejection in how, painful it is, that's the reason that you've got that is so that you'll behave in a way and you'll have a tendency to avoid certain things that could be really, really dangerous and bad for you. That's why anger and fear exists so that you can flee threats or stand up to threats, as the case may be discussed, is so you don't get poisoned. It's really important to understand

Starting point is 00:06:47 that you've got to pay attention to those things because threats can be real emergencies. And if you don't pay attention to them, you're just looking, it's like, it's a great day. you'll get eaten by a tiger and not pass on your jeans. And so the result is that the ungrateful among us were the ones who survived. And that's what's reached you today. Your ungrateful 500 generation ago ancestor is the reason that you're a grouch. So blame them. Blame mother nature. That's called negativity bias. And you can actually see it today. I mean, if you're at a party and somebody's smiling sweetly at you from across the room, that's nice to have. If somebody's frowning angrily at you, take notice. Because that's more likely to become a problem.

Starting point is 00:07:24 for you out on the street when you get out of that party. And so you do. And it affects our lives all over the place. You go out to dinner with a bunch of friends and you're having a great time. It's a great night. You're having fun. And at the end of the night at the restaurant, two of the people there get into this kind of nasty argument about politics. Like your spouse and somebody else's spouse and it's kind of insulting and kind of nasty. And it's a little thing. It's like five minutes. and the dinner itself was three hours. But what are you going to remember next year about that night? Oh, that's that night that, oh, yeah, that bad argument.

Starting point is 00:08:01 Why? Negativity bias. Because that got your attention, because that's important for survival, generally speaking. That explains why you're an ungrateful wretch. Your ancestors were ungrateful. They were suspicious. They were hostile. And they were unbelievably anxious.

Starting point is 00:08:18 They were. And they actually escaped becoming some animal's dinner. until at least they could pass on their genes. And thank God for that. So that's kind of how ingratitude wins out over gratitude. And so if you just go in if you live in a state of nature, if you're living the, you know, people say you should live in authentically. You know, you should live in habitat.

Starting point is 00:08:42 Not emotionally you shouldn't. Absolutely. Because if you're living your most natural self, you're going to be truly grumpy and feel terrible. And you're going to be making people miserable pretty much all the time. You need to override that. Now, here's an important point that I want to make. The incredible prefrontal cortex of homo sapiens, that bumper of tissue behind your forehead,

Starting point is 00:09:02 that's like 30% of your brain by weight, this is what sets us apart from all the other animals. We've got two choices in big parts of life. There's animal tendencies and there's moral aspirations. There's the person that you tend to be without trying to be. And there's a person you want to be through your efforts. and the prefrontal cortex gives us agency, gives us the ability to choose to be moral who we want to be as opposed to kind of what we're, what we have an urge to be. And I got nothing against animal tendencies, but I really like moral aspirations.

Starting point is 00:09:37 Here's how you understand it. In gratitude is your animal tendency. Gratitude is a manual override of that to get you into the space of your moral aspirations. Now, sometimes it comes a little bit naturally, but it's brief and fleeting and usually not that intense. And then you go back to your ungrateful self. However, if you understand this metacognitively, and you know that if you've been watching this show for a while, it basically means managing your feelings so they don't manage you. You can actually systematically override the ingratitude and become a more systematically and habitually grateful person.

Starting point is 00:10:14 And if you do, you're going to love what happens to your life. I've been writing about this stuff for years. I've been doing a lot of work on gratitude. It goes back about five years at this point, as a matter of fact, no longer. Eight years, I think, is the first time I wrote a serious paper on gratitude. If you want that, I'll put a couple of my columns that are kind of survey columns in the show notes about gratitude. Generally around Thanksgiving, I like to write a gratitude column. People like it.

Starting point is 00:10:38 And what they basically find is that when you are a grateful person, when you're authentically expressing gratitude, you get happier and so does everybody else. This is a true win-win. If you can learn how to do these techniques, and there's a lot of research on it. So if you go to these research articles that I'm going to put in the show notes, just go through them and hit the links

Starting point is 00:10:58 and you're going to find all the papers that you want to see as much data on gratitude as you need. But you knew it already that when you're grateful you feel better and when you're grateful everybody else likes you better. So why? Why is that? Well, it turns out that we know why, based on the research, there's kind of three big reasons

Starting point is 00:11:18 that gratitude will actually raise well-being and life satisfaction. I mean, it might seem obvious, but, you know, when you think about it, you need the reasons why, too, because then we're going to need this information when we put together our strategies. Number one is it, it tends to interrupt the cycles of rumination, of negative rumination. Now, interrupting bad moods is a really important thing to do. I give you an example of how interruption can be an important tool. in your emotional arsenal. If you've got a little kid in your house,

Starting point is 00:11:46 I live with my grandsons, with two of my grandsons. And one of them is a toddler. I mean, he's two in change. And he's got an active amygdala. And the amygdala is the part of the limbic system that governs fear and anger. And so he gets super mad, as all toddlers do. He's awesome, he's awesome, awesome, love him.

Starting point is 00:12:06 But sometimes he gets really, really mad at little things that frustrate him. Like he cut the crusts off his little sandwich in the wrong way or something, and he freaks out of it. but and he gets really, really mad. So what do you want to do? You want to interrupt the functioning of his amygdala.

Starting point is 00:12:18 The best way to do that is by grabbing his attention. Why? Because the amygdala governs your attention as well. So if you basically say, hey, hey, hey, hey, look over here. I found this thing. I wanted to show you this thing. Enthusistically, he'll be like, oh, what? And you won't be freaking out.

Starting point is 00:12:34 That's an emotional interruption. And that works across the range of, of emotions. And gratitude is a perfect example of, of interrupting a cycle of negative rumination, negative emotional rumination, where you're kind of ruminating. Rumination comes from the Latin word ruminare, which means to chew the cud like a cow. That's what that verb actually means. And when you're doing that, you can be, I mean, it can be bad. You can spend a day or a week in this negative ruminative cycle, especially of sadness, bitterness, anxiety, worry. You know how it feels. And you'll be, and you will. And you will,

Starting point is 00:13:12 want to interrupt it. Gratitude does that. This interruption, it makes it impossible of you to continue ruminating. Why? Because you've changed the attention in your brain. You've changed, you know, the emphasis on what you're looking at. You've literally moved the energy on what you're paying attention to from one part of the limbic system to another part of the limbic system that's going from governing a recursive and iterative negative emotion to one that's punctuating that with positivity, most notably gratitude. And furthermore, that you're doing it on. Purpose, which is great. That's one of the reasons that gratitude, that systematic gratitude, lowers depressive symptoms, reduces stress and reduces anxiety. Got the data on this, really good

Starting point is 00:13:54 stuff on this. One of the apex journals in psychology, the journal of clinical psychology, feeling thanks and saying thanks to randomized control trial, examining if and how socially oriented gratitude journals work. Okay. More on gratitude journals in a second. But the whole point is, this stuff is real and this stuff will, will affect your brain. The psychology of gratitude is biology. Of course, because it's always biology. The second reason is that it, and it's related to the first, obviously, is pulling attention away from what you lack toward what you have.

Starting point is 00:14:27 Okay. Now, one of the reasons that will ruminate on, you know, sadness and anxiety and worry and all that is because we're worried about not having something or something happening we don't like or not something not happening that we do want is, in other words, it's a scarcity mental and it's a scarcity fear is what a lot of these recursive negative emotions are all about. And instead of focusing on the thing that we lack, gratitude always focuses you toward the things that you have. Maybe it's something that you have that you really like. Maybe it's something not happening that you're glad is not happening. This is another way to think about it.

Starting point is 00:15:04 It's sort of in the inverse. But one way or the other, this redirects your attention. Remember, what you're trying to do is interrupt negative cycles of emotionality. interrupting them to do what. From what to what, it's what you lack to what you have. That's what a gratitude, a gratitude intervention actually does. And so therefore, what it's actually doing a lot of the time, especially in the cases of being ungrateful because something you want that you don't have is that gratitude will, and it's clear in the research that it diminishes envy and materialism. Envy and materialism are your enemy when it comes to your happiness. Now, I know why they exist. Materialism and envy exist because we live in a hierarchical kin-based society and we want

Starting point is 00:15:42 to climb and the way that you know where you stand in a hierarchical society is by looking at what people above you have and saying, I want that. And that gives you an impulse. It gives you an incentive to kind of go for it. That's how envy materials and work. But that doesn't make you happy because Mother Nature doesn't care if you're happy. She just wants you to pass on your genes. And a lot of the times, especially in modern life with technology, with the internet, where we can compare ourselves against everybody in the world and just walk around feeling horribly ungrateful constantly. You need that manual override to interrupt the cycle of. of negative emotionality to lower your anxiety, depressive symptoms, and turn you from envy and

Starting point is 00:16:18 materialism toward gratitude for what you have. And you have a lot. So what do I? We all do. Of interest, by the way, is some of this research that shows that there's these other big benefits that I really like to talk about with gratitude. When people feel grateful and express gratitude, it has a huge impact on the romantic relationships. One of the best things that you can do for your partnership, for your romantic partnership, is to focus on all the reasons you're grateful for that person. And conversely, one of the most corrosive things that actually happens in a marriage or any romance for that matter is to ruminate on your ingratitude. No, to ruminate on your, on your bitterness, on your resentment. That's a really super easy thing

Starting point is 00:17:02 to do. And especially when you're in a highly hot emotional hedonic state, negative emotional state, which for me is the mourning. And so one of the things that I like to do, is a very important. do as part of my morning protocol, what I'm thinking, for example, when I'm, when I'm, when I'm in my period of worship and meditation is meditating on all the reasons I'm really, really grateful for my wife, because I'm telling you, I mean, I'd be a mess if it weren't for her. And little irritations fade into nothing. That's when I'm actually being realistic. Gratitude is realism, by the way. It's being a realistic person. If you want to be authentic about the facts, don't be authentic for how you feel. Be authentic to the truth and the facts about your life.

Starting point is 00:17:40 that's why gratitude really matters. So it will really help your romance. Second, is it's unbelievably good for reducing burnout at work in particularly difficult times of work for you and really heavy workflow or where you don't like your boss or you don't feel like you're being adequately appreciated or noted for what you're doing. Gratitude for the having a job and doing something that you actually care about, assuming that you do, that's an almost immediate antidote to burnout. Now, it's not a permanent solution. I'm going to do a show on burnout coming up because there's a bunch of neuroscience and behavioral science and burnout that you can use. They help you build a career that's more satisfying and better and healthier for you.

Starting point is 00:18:17 But in the meantime, when you need a break glass plan, when you need the like anti-burnout pill, it's gratitude. It will really, really help you a lot. So where do you get it? You can't buy it. It's only homemade. That's the important thing to keep in mind. You can make gratitude, but you can't buy gratitude.

Starting point is 00:18:35 I mean, if you could take your gratitude pill, that would be great. No doubt there are some, you know, ways that you can alter your brain pharmaceutically that would make you feel more gratitude. I mean, I can imagine anything that will flood serotonin in your brain will probably make you feel more gratitude. And in point of fact, I've heard actually people say that when they experiment with hallucinogenic drugs, which I don't do or recommend because I think we need a lot more research on that. And when we do, I promise you will do an episode on it on the science of that.

Starting point is 00:19:05 But people who have experimented a lot with that, they'll say that they're just flooded with gratitude. That's obviously a, that's a psychiatric effect of the drugs that are doing that. There are ways to do it without drugs. And that's what I want to talk about now. One of the best ways for you to inflect your happiness upward is by developing more openness to new experiences. And one of the best ways to do that is by seeing new things that are away from home. That's why travel has been associated in so much research with higher levels of happiness. Travel leads to greater happiness. I know that for a fact, I've been traveling my whole life and I love to travel. That's why I'm so pleased that I get to talk about Expedia. Expedia is an all-in-one

Starting point is 00:19:45 travel site. I love it. I use it constantly. We book flights, hotels, rental cars. You can do cruises, vacation packages, kind of anything that you need to do that's away from home, you can do through Expedia to plan your next trip, make it easy to find the best deals and, you know, just have the best possible, seamless, easy journey. So you can focus on what you really care about, which is getting out of the house and doing something cool. That's why I'm so pleased. that Expedia is a sponsor of this podcast to make it easy and to find the best deals on every part of your wonderful journey toward greater happiness. I promise you, you're going to like what actually happens to your life. I certainly like what Expedia is doing for me. I'm a user myself,

Starting point is 00:20:24 and I recommend it to you. Start saving now at Expedia.com. What does the research say? Now, there's a really, really famous paper. It's going to go in the show notes. This is a classic. It's an old paper from 2003. I can't believe that 2003 is old. Anyway, and this is by Emmons and McCullough. These are the seminal work by these great social psychologists. They're sort of the kings of gratitude research on listing things and focusing on the list. So in other words, it's bringing to the fore, bringing into the prefrontal cortex, what might

Starting point is 00:20:58 have been lurking in the background, thinking consciously and using your executive centers to write down the things you're actually grateful for so that you're conscious of them. the famous gratitude list exercise that no doubt that you've heard about. In their research, they have college students. It's always college students because undergraduates do anything for 20 bucks. And they'll bring them into the lab. And there's three groups. One actually has to write a gratitude list. And they write a gratitude list and they look at their list and they update their list once a week. The other has a list of current events and the third group has a list of things that are annoying them, of hassles. They call it the hassles list. The gratitude listers,

Starting point is 00:21:38 at the end of 10 weeks are 6% happier. They have 6% higher well-being, self-evaluated well-being, than the current events lists, and 12% higher than the people who are just listing their hassles. Now, Mother Nature wants you to list your hassles. She really does. And by the way, your therapist might want you to list your hassles too. That might be what you're doing when you go to therapy every week

Starting point is 00:21:58 is just talking about the things you're mad about. And my mom, you know, or my school. You might be accidentally doing an ingratitude list every week in your therapy. And that could be pretty problematic when you think about it because this research is really clear that that could be depressing your happiness just by listing things for which you're ungrateful. Maybe unburdening yourself is not the right way to go. On the contrary, Emmons-McCullough stuff really suggests that you should be focusing on the things for which you're grateful as opposed to that for which you're ungrateful. Now, a 12% increase in happiness, I mean, drugs don't work that well. So that's something you should be doing.

Starting point is 00:22:37 Of course. I'll talk about more about how to do that in a second. The second big research strain comes from Martin Seligman at the University of Pennsylvania. This is actually one of my great intellectual heroes and somebody who's been a mentor to me for a long time, Marty Seligman, who's one of the kings of social psychology. He invented the whole field of positive psychology, which says that if you can actually learn how to become more positive person, no matter where you are in your psychiatric journey, you're behind the line of scrimmage because you're suffering from a mood disorder. or you're kind of the average in the population. Or you're even a happier person than normal. Positive psychology will give you the techniques and advantages so that you can even get down the field further where you can become a happier person. Why should we treat all fitness as if it were physical therapy for people with injuries?

Starting point is 00:23:24 You don't do that. You want people who are perfectly healthy to have even better lives. And as Peter Atia calls it, medicine 3.0, where medicine is, where you're doing things in your life that prevent problems going forward. So positive psychology is kind of a medicine three point O concept. He's the king of this stuff. And he knows perfectly that gratitude is one of the best tools in the field of positive psychology.

Starting point is 00:23:50 One of the things he recommends is gratitude letters. And what that means is that you're writing down like the gratitude list, things you're grateful for to a particular person and sending them a letter. And, you know, maybe it's an email or a text, by the way. but it's actually telling somebody that you're grateful. And he's got all of these really interesting studies. And I'll put it in a show notes, by the way, some of the stuff on gratitude letters, on how incredibly powerful it is.

Starting point is 00:24:18 And here's the bonus of it. When you write somebody to a gratitude letter, it actually affects your happiness for really long period of time. So gratitude listing is really good, but it's pretty short-lived. Gratitude letters, he has evidence that shows that people get happier

Starting point is 00:24:33 for like six months. like wow that's that's unbelievable and probably that has to do the fact with the enhanced relationship with the receiver of the letter because these are people who are presumably in your life you send your mother a gratitude letter you and your mother you're going to have a better relationship and and that's going to make you happier for a long time until it's time for the next gratitude letter or maybe one from her to you so that's an important thing to keep in mind on how that actually works and i'm going to talk about actually how to make that happen but i want to say one thing about that for a second about Marty Seligman's gratitude letters. Even if you know what the person is doing is writing a gratitude

Starting point is 00:25:06 letter as a gratitude intervention, even if you know that, you still get the benefit from the person because it just lifts people up. And I know that because Marty last year wrote me a gratitude letter. He wrote me a gratitude email, actually. It came on like the very, I think it was on January 1st. So I was like, it's great. And he just said, I really appreciate the work that you're doing. I think it's really good. And I'm like, the great Marty Seligman thanked me for the work that I'm doing. like, month made. And I know, I mean, he's doing a gratitude letter because he's, you know, it's like, doctor, treat thyself. I got it, you know, and it's still, I mean, it was sincere. I mean, he would have written it to me and be hypocritical about it. He's, he's the real deal.

Starting point is 00:25:46 And it just made me really, really happy that he did that. Marty, if you're listening, you're the best. Third is, is what's known as public action in which you find a public venue in which to, to thank somebody for something that they've done. That might. It might be somebody you know, it might be somebody you don't know, is doing a kind of a public gratitude proclamation. In the old days, that would be hard. Now is the easiest possible thing you can do in the advent of social media. You post something about somebody you admire.

Starting point is 00:26:13 I just really grateful to that person. That's worked from my friend Sonia Lubomerski with three of her colleagues in a really important paper and affective science called, what is the optimal way to give thanks? Comparing a bunch of interventions. One of them was this public action where people would put on social media how grateful they were to somebody else, a friend. colleague, stranger, even a celebrity, I don't know, somebody that you're really, really grateful for. And it has a nice impact on the grateful person, also on the person who's getting the thanks,

Starting point is 00:26:44 for sure. But it really has a big, you know, it's like, I'm publicly going to say that. It just, it makes you feel better. It raises your well-being, lowers your anxiety, decreases depressive symptoms, et cetera, et cetera, careful about this. Because you don't want to suck up. and public expressions of gratitude can be a big suckup. People will see right through that. Let me tell you. There's a, my colleague Mike Norton at Harvard Business School has done a bunch of work on humble bragging. And humble bragging is when you're bragging, but you're pretending to be humble.

Starting point is 00:27:14 Like, ah, forgot to take my suit to the cleaners. And today's, today I have to go see the president of the United States. What a moron I am. That's like a humble brag. It's not humble at all. And people see right through it. We've got, our brains are unbelievably good at intuition. We've got a million spider senses to suss out when somebody's, you know, being a humble bragger,

Starting point is 00:27:34 which is to say that they're being an egomaniac and trying not to look like an egomaniac. So not only they're an egomaniac, but they're an insincere egomaniac. And it's like, there's nothing good that comes from that. People really dislike you if you do humble bragging. But people also see, and it's the reason I say that is an example of we also see suck up. Suck uppery, is that a word? That's the word now. People see it.

Starting point is 00:27:55 They see absolutely right through it. It's like, oh, I'm so grateful for, you know, all the wonderful work that the Kardashians have done over the last decade for American society and culture or something like that. And maybe you mean it, but it's not going to look good. It's not a good look for you because what you're trying to do is to get the attention of somebody who's important or you're trying to get on the good side of somebody. Don't suck up. People are not going to appreciate it and they're going to know it's actually sucking up. So it has to be actually true, what you're saying, authentic. And the fourth intervention in the research is called grateful contemplation, where you're actually

Starting point is 00:28:31 grateful, but you keep it yourself. You focus on the gratitude you're feeling for another person. You're thinking briefly about things that you're grateful for and people that you're grateful for. And what this shows is that this gives you an immediate mood boost, a very transient but immediate mood boost. This is an emergency intervention, you might call it. I mean, this is something that you can actually do at any particular moment. So you're feeling like you're in a cycle of negativity and you're going downward, downward, downward, down, where you can break that cycle with this grateful contemplation intervention that doesn't take anything more than, you know, let's take 45 seconds here

Starting point is 00:29:08 and take a time out. Let's start counter blessings. That's blessings counting is really what it comes down to. And that's really, really effective. Nice paper in the journal of psychosomatic research from 2009 called gratitude influences sleep through the mechanism of pre-sleep cognitions. It's got a lot of stuff. that paper, but this is one of the things for a grateful contemplation. They actually find that

Starting point is 00:29:28 being gratefully contemplative before you go to sleep is a good way to do that. I like it. Now, let me talk for just a quick second about the dark side of gratitude before I give you some really practical suggestions on how to make this into a gratitude protocol for, not just for Thanksgiving week, but for the rest of your life. There's a dark side of gratitude where you're kind of feeling like you're forced to express gratitude where you're not grateful. And then you remember when you were a little kid and you got your Christmas presents or your holiday presents

Starting point is 00:29:57 and your parents made you write these thank you notes? It's interesting. And a friend of mine said that his worst memory from adolescence. I said, what's your wife? What's it going to be? It's like, you know, you got hit by a car or he went to jail.

Starting point is 00:30:09 He says, no, it was writing, I was writing 300 thank you notes after my bar mitzvah. He's like, why do people hate that so much? And the reason is because it makes you intensely unhappy to be expressing gratitude you don't feel. That creates a cognitive dissonance and that's incredibly uncomfortable. And so it really is important that you're thinking about what

Starting point is 00:30:33 you can be grateful for and not expressing gratitude for things that you're actually not grateful for. And it's not just your parents who are imposing this on you. You impose this on yourself a lot. It's like make a gratitude list and really be grateful for even the hard times. You're like, yeah, I'm so grateful for this painful case of shingles. And no, no, no, you're not. And you shouldn't be. That's okay. But there is something that you can be grateful for about it, like what I'm learning from this negative experience. I'm grateful for this negative experience. And if you've been watching the show for a while, you know that, you know, I recommend the failure journal or the disappointment journal where when something bad happens, you write it down and how it's making you feel. Then a week

Starting point is 00:31:12 later, you come back and write down what you learned from it. And then three weeks or three months, depending on how you want to do it, later you come back and write underneath that entry. What you actually what benefit you got from it. Even though you still don't want it to have happened, what growth you actually got from the experience. That's how you actually do gratitude about something for which you're actually not grateful. Because there's a secondary or tertiary phenomenon associated with it with learning and growth. And that's the thing to actually be thinking about. Not the shingles themselves, but actually how you dealt with it and the people actually helped you and et cetera, et cetera. It might be considerably after the fact. Okay, protocols.

Starting point is 00:31:50 Gratitude protocols. It's a four-part gratitude protocol I want to be talking about here. Okay, number one. Actually, number one and two are the weekly treatment. Okay, you need a weekly treatment. It has two parts to it. The first one is your gratitude list. I recommend on Sunday night, before you go to bed, take 10 to 15 minutes and write the five things you're most grateful for. I don't care how stupid they are. Like, the Red Sox won today. I don't care how dumb it is. Maybe it's really profound. Like, I'm grateful to God for giving me life. Maybe it's not. Maybe it's a little thing, like, I can't, you know, that little bag of peanuts I ate today. It was so salty and delicious.

Starting point is 00:32:25 Whatever happens to be, you be you. But write down things that you're authentically grateful for, five things. Write them down and keep the list. I recommend actually taping it up to your bathroom mirror or to your computer screen before you go to bed on Sunday night. Then each day, when you wake up Monday through Saturday, take two minutes, two full minutes, look at it on your watch and study your gratitude list. say and go through each one say yeah and really internalize it every sunday update the list maybe you keep one thing maybe you substitute something else in keep it to about five items so it doesn't sprawl into the you know the 600 item gratitude list which is not going to be very helpful for you but do that

Starting point is 00:33:04 that's a weekly protocol so i'm assigning you that homework on this you're at office hours so you know fair's that's assignment number one that's weekly sundays and then for two minutes each morning second start one day a week. I recommend Monday morning by writing one text or email of appreciation to somebody for something that you really appreciate the work that they did, something you admire, a favor of they did, whatever it happens to be. If you're in a position of power or authority in your company, this is going to change your relationship with the people who work for you. But even if you're not, then this can be a really, really important, good thing to do, either at work or in your personal life. But every Monday, I would say one text or email, make it two if you're

Starting point is 00:33:44 trying to get kind of ambitious here, but don't make a 10 because it'll take up too much time. It'll become a burden and you won't do it. So just one or two. And by the way, you might want to write it down on Saturday or Sunday. That's the one I'm going to write it so that you remember, right? And write that. This is your weekly protocol is the gratitude list and the gratitude note, right? That's your weekly thing starting now.

Starting point is 00:34:06 The third thing to do is opportunistic public action, which when you have opportunities, start looking for ways to thank people publicly, right? Find ways to kind of give people flowers that they're not expecting. You know, there's this is one of these wonderful internet videos and these memes where people just run up to somebody and give them a bouquet of flowers and run away just to look at their reaction, to look at the positive emotionality that actually, and what that's doing is you can see somebody who's really worried about their day and then somebody just runs up and gives them a dozen roses.

Starting point is 00:34:37 And as long as it doesn't seem like weird or creepy, what that does is that's emotional interruption that we were talking about before, right? And that's an override that creates an emotional override, which is a lovely thing to see. Do that opportunistically as often as you can. So when you see opportunities to do it, something that you read and reach out on social media and say, I just saw this really great article. I thought it was beautifully written, this essay. I thought it was wonderful.

Starting point is 00:35:05 Maybe you find something that really moves you, a song that really moves you, and you want to talk about it on a platform that you find useful and say, I just thought that was really, really beautiful. I'm grateful for that song. Maybe the artist sees it. Maybe the artist doesn't, but it will really help you in an opportunistic way. When you hear something, see something, witness something that you find is beautiful and you want to, and you have the opportunity to express your gratitude to do that. Okay, step four is authenticity check. Is having an authenticity check. Am I being a suck up or not? Or am I being authentic? That's a really important thing to do. taking care, making sure that is very clear to yourself, because you're the person who matters

Starting point is 00:35:44 on this. It's your happiness, after all, that you're being authentic at all the things that you do and systematically saying, am I expressing gratitude for things for which I'm truly and only truly grateful grateful grateful. Actually, I didn't put in part five, did I? Part five is grateful contemplation. Use that how you want. Maybe a little bit of grateful contemplation when you first lie down before you go to sleep at night and maybe the first thing when you wake up in the morning. Try that. All right. That's number five. Grateful contemplation. Your five-part protocol. We have time for a couple of audience questions, and there's some things that I really like. Anne Howell writes in by email. I talk about raising success and happiness at work.

Starting point is 00:36:21 What about the trade-off between success and happiness? This is important, right? Like when you need a job that is more successful insofar that it pays you more and you need more for your family, but it's not necessarily a job that you like. How do you make that trade-off? Here's a weird thing from the literature. For most people, that's not a trade-off. And the reason is that when they're doing something that authentically find to be a calling, that they do it really, really well, and they tend to be compensated pretty well for it. And so the important thing to do is to find your calling. Here's the thing.

Starting point is 00:36:54 There's a great concept in Japanese called Ikigai. Some of you have heard about it, I-K-I-G-A-I-I-I-I-I-I-E-K-G-G-G-G-E-G-G-E-G-E. And Ikigai is really the way to find your calling, and your calling has four parts to it. What I love, what I'm good at, what the world needs, and what people will pay me for. In other words, if it doesn't fit one of those things, it's not your calling. And looking for something that actually fits the Venn diagram, what I love, what I'm good at, what the world will needs, and what the world will pay me for, that's really a beautiful thing, because then there's not this tradeoff that we're talking about. In the meantime, when there are tradeoffs, it's very important to focus on the gratitude that you have for the ability to support your family, to support yourself and to support your family. I remember one time my wife has always really struggled with her, with her, you know, dentists and all that.

Starting point is 00:37:45 Because she grew up in Spain, dental work wasn't good. So by the time we got married and immigrated in the United States, she was at the dentist all the time. And, you know, she had a really painful dental procedure, like two root canals and crowns and it was expensive and it was time consuming. and I said, I'm sorry. And she said, you know what? I'm not sorry. And I said, why not? She said, I'm actually unbelievably grateful.

Starting point is 00:38:07 I live in a country where I have a great dentist and I can actually pay this dentist. And that's the truth of the matter about most things, isn't it? It's actually finding the reason to be grateful, which gets us back to the main idea in this episode. Maxwell Love also, that's a great name, writes to us by email, How do I find something bigger than myself besides just relationship and religion? Well, not always besides relationship and religion. Don't make sure that you're not exempting relationship and religion, spirituality, philosophy, the transcendent.

Starting point is 00:38:41 These things are really important. Love and transcendence are critically important. But what else, right? Right, Maxwell, what else is what we're talking about? This is kind of related to Anne's question about calling. I got to do a whole episode on calling because, man, I've been thinking about this an awful lot. And I've got a whole chapter in this new book coming out next March about how finding your calling actually directs you to the meaning of your life.

Starting point is 00:39:03 Calling at work, as a matter of fact. Here are the three questions to ask yourself. What are my values? What are the things I truly care about the most? What are the things I care about? Second, what is it that serves those values? What is it that serves those values? And third, what could I be doing every day that would actually be?

Starting point is 00:39:24 serve those values in work or not in work. And to do a little contemplation on those things, you can't feed that into chant GPT because literally it will use the wrong side of your brain. These are right hemisphere questions of mystery and meaning. And you can only do that by doing the work. Max will go for a nice long walk and contemplate those questions. And you'll be led. You won't find the answers. Those answers will find you, which is what we ultimately want. Well, we've come to the end of this episode. I hope you're having a lovely Thanksgiving week. And if you're watching this after Thanksgiving week, I hope you're having a wonderful year of thanks and that this episode is going to help you to be a more grateful person.

Starting point is 00:40:05 These techniques have certainly helped me in my life. I'm not perfect. I'm still an ungrateful wretch. Just ask my wife. But when I need help, this is what I do. And this will help you too. Let me know your thoughts at the email address, office hours at arthurbrooks.com. Keep writing in those questions keep, by the way, please share this episode or any episode of this with your three million closest friends because we need a movement of happiness and gratitude, don't we? And how do people actually discover good stuff by their smart friends who are already consuming that good stuff? That's you, not me.

Starting point is 00:40:36 Like and subscribe on Spotify, YouTube, Apple, any place where you're getting this podcast and lead a comment, I'm going to read it. And I appreciate you for taking the time, not just for listening or watching this, but for making a comment. Follow me on social media, Instagram, LinkedIn. other platforms. You can find me all over the place and you'll be getting content that you're actually not even seeing here, some of the stuff that's actually original to those particular platforms. And if you want some essays on this, more essays along these lines. My newest book is

Starting point is 00:41:03 the Happiness File. The Yellow Book right behind me and check it out if you like. And don't forget to patronize our wonderful sponsors who make this show possible. Have a great week. Happy Thanksgiving to you and your family. I'm grateful to you. As I put a bite of turkey in my mouth, I'm going to be grateful that you're actually creating a better world alongside me. Have a great week. See you next week.

Office Hours with Arthur Brooks - 5 Steps Toward a More Grateful Life

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