Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 156: Shawn Achor, The Science Behind Gratitude

Episode Date: October 10, 2018

While so much of science is dedicated to finding the causes and cures for depression, anxiety and stress, Shawn Achor studies the opposite. He is a happiness researcher. Achor looks at the science of happiness and uses research-based techniques to make us more optimistic and help us lead happier lives. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

It kind of blows my mind to consider the fact that we're up to nearly 600 episodes of this podcast, the 10% happier podcast. That's a lot of conversations. I like to think of it as a great compendium of, and I know this is a bit of a grandiose term, but wisdom. The only downside of having this vast library of audio is that it can be hard to know where to start. So we're launching a new feature here, playlists, just like you put together a playlist of your favorite songs.

Back in the day, we used to call those mix tapes. Just like you do that with music, you can do it with podcasts. So if you're looking for episodes about anxiety, we've got a playlist of all of our anxiety episodes. Or if you're looking for how to sleep better, we've got a playlist of all of our anxiety episodes, or if you're looking for how to sleep better, we've got a playlist for that. We've even put together a playlist of some of my personal favorite episodes. That was a hard list to make. Check out our playlists at 10%.com slash playlist. That's 10% all one word spelled out..com slash playlist singular.

Let us know what you think. We're always open to tweaking how we do things and maybe there's a playlist we haven't thought of. Hit me up on Twitter or submit a comment through the website. Hey y'all, it's your girl, Kiki Palmer. I'm an actress, singer, and entrepreneur. I'm a new podcast, baby, this is Kiki Palmer. I'm asking friends, family, and experts,

the questions that are in my head. Like, it's only fans only bad, where the memes come from. And where's Tom from MySpace? Listen to Baby, this is Kiki Palmer on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcast. [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ From ABC, this is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris.

[♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ Hey, hey, this is special special edition of the podcast we're posting because I Interviewed somebody fascinating for a good morning America story his name is Sean Acore. He's a happiness researcher He's perhaps best known for his book the happiness advantage back story here is I saw Sean speak at The next story here is, I saw Sean speak at a, I was speaking at a Disney event, Disney owns ABC News, so I sometimes am conscripted to speak at various Disney events, which is always actually really fun. We were speaking at this event to the Imagineers, and I was talking to the buff meditation and Sean went on before me to talk about his research and to happiness and what makes

us happy, what makes us unhappy, how being happier actually can make you more successful. And it was just such a great speech. And I said, I wanted to know him more. I didn't get a chance to speak to him after the speech. And then I was speaking separately to some folks at Good Morning America about a possible story about gratitude. And I really, I remembered, oh, that guy Sean Hoy just heard the other day, talked a lot about the power of gratitude and all this data that shows that

gratitude can improve your life in a really meaningful ways. So I engineered an interview with Sean. He took us Me and a crew from Good Morning America to a school in Illinois a junior high where he's been teaching the kids all these sort of happiness hacks. It's actually, by the way, teachers, not just the kids, but the kids and the teachers. They're on a year-long curriculum to learn about gratitude, happiness, meditation, and I was very impressed

by what we saw at the school. And while at the school, I didn't interview with him about his personal story, about gratitude, about happiness, about his experiences with meditation, about, again, all the things that we think may make us happy, but actually don't, he's just a fascinating guy. So we wanted to post the entire interview. Fair warning, the audio will sound a little bit different than it normally does on a 10% happier podcast because we didn't do it in a radio studio with big fancy mics. We did it out in the field in this. We weren't actually in a field.

We were in the field, which is a term of art and TV. We were in a library at a junior high in suburban Chicago. So audio is not a little bit different, but it's going to be crystal clear. And I think you're really going to like this guy. Here he is, Sean Acor. All right. Well, thanks for doing this for sure absolutely thank you i was start with the same question which is how did you get into meditation so i am what i started in positive psychology research at harvard um... and one of the things that we were looking for were interventions that changed people's life

the most most of the things we were researching were things we had heard about from every major religious tradition, every ancient guru and philosopher for thousands of years, and we just decided to test it. So one of the ones that kept popping up immediately was the idea of meditation or attention training. So I have to admit, I probably did 80 hours of academic research on meditation

before I even sat down to try it once. And I knew all of these reasons why it was so important, but to actually put it in a practice, I had to stop seeing all the research and actually do it. And as soon as I did, I got hooked and addicted to it, because I had such a positive effect upon me, just like we were seeing in the research, and just like we've been hearing about from all these traditions. I want to talk about the positive impacts in a second, but just situate me a little bit in your life at that time.

So you're at Harvard doing positive psychology research. Right. Actually, before I even ask about your narrative here, define positive psychology research. Positive psychology is a movement in social psychology that said, we know so much about depression and disorder. Why aren't we studying the other side of the spectrum? So we think anxiety and depression, those are hard things you can study. But why couldn't we equally study things like joy or compassion or optimism?

So what we got interested in is how do you use the scientific method to actually see if we could quantify changes to people's levels of optimism or happiness? If we can measure something, we can see what changes it. So as soon as we realize that we could quantify changes to optimism or happiness, it led to an entire field that we now call positive psychology. And so where were you in your life when you ended up at Harvard studying this stuff? Was it an undergrad at that time or a grad student who came back specifically to study this stuff? So I spent four years as an undergraduate at Harvard and then when I graduated I lived for eight years after that in the dorms with the students

counseling them them during the first year at being at Harvard in the midst of all the anxiety and depression and stress that they were under. During that time I was a researcher. So I was actually at Harvard Divinity School studying Christian and Buddhist ethics, looking at how your belief systems changed the way you act in the world. And that's part of the way that I started learning about meditation initially. But then, in this field of positive psychology,

which was starting to emerge at the time, we started realizing we could study some of those same questions I've been asking at the Divinity School. Why people wake up in the morning. What causes them to feel gratitude? So when was this hell on ghost? So this would have been, I graduated in 2000. So I was in Harvard Divinity School until 2002 and then I was at Harvard until 2008. Researching in psychology and at the Divinity School and then working with the students. What do you think you personally were interested in this topic? So I became personally interested first of all because what I've been studying at the Divinity School

are things like what causes people to feel more compassion and joy. So when I learned from the psychology department that maybe we can measure some of these things, I was already interested in. But why were you interested in joy? Because it's a great question. As a, I'm just thinking back to my, when I was that age, I mean, I guess I was interested in joy. I wanted to feel joy. If somebody would ask me, would you want to feel joy? Yeah.

But it wasn't the thing that I was looking for. I didn't have a keen interest in that emotion specifically. You know what caused it to emerge is I felt so grateful to get to go to Harvard in the first place. I wasn't a valedictorian of my public high school in Waco, Texas. I didn't get perfect SAT scores. I was a volunteer firefighter back in Waco and I got in and was there on a military scholarship. So I felt so grateful to be there.

It felt like such a privilege. But then I looked around some of the other students and they were miserable sometimes. They didn't see it as a privilege. Their levels of happiness were actually extraordinarily low. And what it got me to start thinking about is some of the things I thought would create happiness wasn't working for people. So I got fascinated about what is it that creates joy in people's lives, partly because it's an interesting topic, but partly because I want to know it for myself.

Because I didn't want to go too far down one path thinking this is going to create happiness in my life and find out that next job or that next promotion or that next degree wasn't going to create happiness I wanted. And if that was the case, what do I do about it and what creates real happiness within my life. But it's also something I experienced myself because while I was at Harvard Divinity School, I just graduated. All my friends left.

I'm there in the dorms with a freshman. My job is to make sure that they don't go through depression themselves. And I suddenly started going through two years of depression myself. I grew up optimistic. My parents are positive. I had a good childhood. I was at Harvard. I had no external reason for being depressed and yet I was.

So I didn't know how to handle it. I didn't even know what it was at first. And as I started getting deeper into the depression, I stopped thinking that happiness was a choice for me. I thought happiness might be for other people, but I must have genes that predispose me towards depression and that's the end of the story. The very first journal entry I tried writing, I wrote, I don't remember feeling happy, and I don't think I ever will again. Which sounds melodramatic now. Now that I'm a happiness researcher, but at the time, I couldn't access happiness.

And so all of this was coming together at the same time. I was studying all these major religious traditions. They were seeking happiness, joy, and compassion. We were learning that you could quantify changes to people's levels of happiness, and I felt like I had lost access to it. And my job was to help Harvard students not become depressed themselves.

So as I started learning these tools, I had to apply them within my life. And as soon as I started applying them, I started learning how powerful they are. And the more powerful I saw them become, the more I wanted to study them to see how we could get this out in the companies and schools everywhere. So, let's stay because you talk about tools, plural, and we're going to get to the tools, plural, but let me talk about a tool, singular meditation, and you say you started doing

it. Sounds like somewhat reluctantly because you had to study it 80-hours, approximately before you actually sat and did the thing. What kind of impact did it have on you? Meditation, physical. Yeah. Well, it was actually one of the hardest habits for me, to be honest. The other habits came more naturally to me. Meditation was hard. I thought because maybe I had tendencies towards attention deficit that might have I might have gotten from being supposed to too much technology or too much going on in my life that for me it's very hard to sit and stop for a moment. I was also in the Harvard climate which is you look around and you feel like you're going

to sleep at two in the morning, you know someone's staying up till three in the morning studying. So in the midst of hypercomparison competition, you feel like if I stop for two minutes, I'm going to fall behind where I would be in terms of my potential. But as soon as I stopped, while it was hard for me to do, the benefits were almost immediate for me. I realized, could first recognize how anxious I was, feeling like I need to be in another place all the time, instead of being in that one moment right there.

And the more I started realizing about, and studying the benefits of meditation, I realized that if I wasn't taking those two minutes a day, I was severely hampering other aspects of my life that I loved, my emotional health, my physical health, my connectiveness to others, my spiritual depth. All of that was sacrificed by not taking a few minutes today to be able to meditate. So when I started meditating, not only could I be aware of where I didn't want to be, but it also gave me moments where I could see I want more of this. I want to have this piece where I don't feel like I need to be somewhere else in this moment. I want this feeling of I can actually be content in this moment, not after I get that

next grade or get the next degree. So, those small benefits started to accumulate. I found that the more I did it, it's one of the things that walk me out of the depression I was experiencing at Harvard. I would credit depression, I would credit meditation as one of the things that pulled me out of it. But in addition to that, I was sleeping better, which had an impact upon my level of happiness as well, decreased my levels of depression. So for me, the benefits were so quick that I became addicted to it very quickly, even though it was hard the first couple of times. What was the flavor of meditation you were

doing? And what was the dosage? So it was great. So I originally started at 30 minutes a day of meditation and that's a big chunk. Failed miserably at it, it's a lot. Right, so I'm studying somebody that studies how to create positive habits and I had a checklist of doing it for 21 days, 30 minutes a day and I couldn't get there. Actually one of my first experiences meditating, I set the timer on my phone for 30 minutes. And when the timer went up, I went off. I was actually not sitting where I was meditating. I was up doing an email in front of my desktop.

Like my brain had auto-piloted from a thought I had to I need to go email in this moment, which I didn't need to. 30 minutes with way too hard for me. I kept dropping the time down. The first time I made it to 21 days ago, I had to do five minutes a day. But I felt so accomplished for doing that five minutes.

I had a friend who would go study in India and do very long courses in meditation. He suggested that I try to eliminate every thought that I had and just be able to focus on my breath. So that's where I tried to keep all my attention. It's just on my breath. I found that to be too hard. I think for me, that was a later stage meditation for me.

What I would do is I would just try to feel certain parts of my body. So it actually allowed my brain to still keep moving, but it was like, first I'm going to feel my hands on one side and then just try and feel my elbow and then feel my shoulder. So by the end of the five minutes, I felt every part of my body and almost a check-in with it. And that's what got me into it. Often referred to it as a body scan. The body scan.

A classical meditation technique. How has your meditation evolved over the years because this was mid-Auts where many years later? What did your practice look like now? evolved over the years because this was mid-Auts where many years later, what do you practice look like now? So I try different things. I try some things where I try to focus my thoughts down to my breath, adjust to my breath, and try to eliminate any other thoughts, so just focusing on the breath going in and out of my nose.

I find that to be very difficult, but it helps with being able to focus my brain down. I have to say my favorite ones. I don't know if there's any, you would know if there's a name to this one, but sometimes what I do is I stop all thoughts except, instead of watching my breath go in and out, I go back to my old house that I used to live in, and I try to walk through different memories.

So I'm like, oh, I remember what that door, not felt like, and then I remember what that wall, and I remember the hole that was in the tile in my friend Intraway. But what it does is it brings all my thoughts down to that one place. So I'm not thinking about like an interview I have or a stress that I have or what am I about to do next where I'm going to eat. It's down to that one thing.

But then I also feel like it's reconnecting me to parts of my life that I had forgotten about. Parts of me that were lost. So I'll go back to my old high school, I'll go back through, you know, thinking about a friend I had had that I'd forgotten about for a while and just trying to think about that person for five minutes. I find that to be extraordinarily helpful for me as well. So as a positive psychology researcher, a happiness researcher, and now we've written

at least two books, what are the other tools that are important to you in order to maintain your own happiness? So I think that there's several. The ones that we originally studied for the Happiness of Ange was that which is your first book. The first book with the Happiness of Ange, and that's when we first started realizing

happiness could be such a benefit in somebody's life. So what do we do to pursue more of that happiness? So we looked at these five habits. We were looking for daily habits that would help help move its way from I think in our society we've come to believe that we are just our genes in our environment. So our genes predispose us to obesity or depression or intelligence or creativity, and our genes predispose us to obesity or depression or intelligence or creativity. And the environment is whatever happens to you at a school or happens to you at work or in a family. But we think that's all it is.

And what I love about your work and what I love about positive psychology is that it says, if we actually make conscious actions within our life, changes to our daily habits or the way we interact with others, we can actually break the tyranny of genes and environment over the trajectory of our levels of optimism. There is, we don't have to be victims of the genes that we didn't pick, or the environment that's become so big that there are things we could be doing within our lives. So if we can get people to do one of these five, all of these we've been testing in isolation, we can get people to make movement on the baseline around which they fluctuate in terms of happiness. So the original one and the highest success rate was gratitude.

So we got people for 21 days in a row to think of three new things that they were grateful for each day. So not repeating, but scanning the day a new. And they're not just saying what you're grateful for, but why? That was actually one of the keys that we realized later on in the studies. It was that it wasn't what you were grateful for that matter. It was the meaning behind the things you were grateful for and the scanning for your day. Because as soon as you stop that activity,

that takes 45 seconds, you can do why you brush your teeth. Your brain basically creates a background app, taking some of your resources to scan all day long for the positive. So for me, not only could I see that impact, I started seeing more things, I was grateful, I started feeling more like a grateful person. When we tested people that tested low-level pessimist, 21 days later, our testing is low-level optimist

on average. If they continue the pattern, it continues to change and arise, which is amazing, because that's one of the genetic ones. You can't touch, right? You're born a pessimist, you die a pessimist, and then the story. And what this research was showing is not at all,

a 45 second disruptor into somebody's life could actually help them become more optimistic throughout the entire course of their day. So gratitude, we got them for two minutes a day to do a journaling activity that we'd call the doubler, which is you think of one pause of meaningful experience each day.

And then for two minutes, you bullet point three details. You can remember about that experience, what I was wearing, what I was thinking about, what I said. What your brain is doing in that moment is it's reliving the experience because it's scanning back through the memory. But your brain can't tell much difference between visualization and actual experience.

So your brain doubles that memory, you've identified a meaning, and when you do it for 21 days a row, our brains are pattern-makers, so your brain connects the dots for you. So you start to see the trajectory of the meaning. That seems like gratitude, too. I think it is. To me, I think what it does, it's taking something that you find meaningful,

and then delving deeper into it. So to me, I think that they're, they go, you know, hand at hand with one another. The purpose of the doubler was specifically to get somebody to scan for meaning in their life. So I can be grateful for my son because he gave me a hug yesterday. The meaning behind that might be, you know, because I want so desperately for him to feel loved within his life, because that's something that, because I care for him so much. Um, in those moments where you get somebody to journal about it,

what you're doing is you're creating a narrative around that meat and that memory. So that, your brain has recorded all these separate things that could occur within your life. But when you go back in journal about it, what you're doing is you're wrapping it in an packet, right, like with the beginning and with an end, and you've just wrapped it as a meaningful experience. So that hug, I can go back and think about what shirt he was wearing or what I just said to him or he just gone off of this bicycle. So I'm reliving that experience and repackaging that memory.

So what happens is my brain, I believe it only takes one meaningful moment in a day for your brain to judge that day as a meaningful one. So instead of just scanning for the grateful, it's creating a narrative around your day. And then when you do it for 21 days a row, your brain connects the dots. You start to see how the meaning is pulling you throughout each day. So you might have a terrible rest of the day, but that day was meaningful because of this memory, which would have gotten lost if we didn't take the time to scan for it.

So gratitude, or you often call them gratitude, which is the sort of the noun, or I guess they're both nouns. It's sort of the thing you do, as opposed to the overarching sort of value or trait. And then the doubler, and then you're working through the list of five years. I'm sure 15 minutes of fun mindful cardio activity even a brisk walk they found if you did it for a significant period of time it turns out it's the equivalent of taking an anti-depressant for the first six months for the next two years you have a 30% lower relapse rate back to depression.

So why that's important is not a repudiation of anti-depressants at all at the inner society, is an indication of why exercise was valuable. It's a gateway drug. When people exercise, they start believing that their behavior has an impact upon their mood. So they start creating all these other constellations of positive habits in their life.

So sometimes they're struggling to get somebody to meditate or to think of three things that they're grateful for. If they're extra-sizes one of the things that they can add into their life easily, we get them to do that. And then we import that belief that their behavior matters into getting them to meditate or do these other activities or to eat healthy or to go to sleep at a better time. The fourth one that I normally suggest that we've done out of companies in schools was the idea of meditation, which I know you're so versed with.

We would go out to Google, for example, and get them to take their hands off of your keyboard for two minutes a day, and just watch their breath go in and out. And they'd feel for the rest of the day like they're two minutes behind because they're in such a high-paced environment, but their accuracy rates improved by 10 percent, levels of happiness rose, and stress levels dropped. At Google, which has endless swimming machines, microkitchens with food every 250 feet. So what you have is, it wasn't the environment creating the happiness that was occurring there.

What was happening is once you're in an environment, being able to practice on these positive habits, it had such a massive impact upon the well-being of the people that are living there. And the final one is the most powerful of the five in short form, which is we got people for two minutes a day. Every day when they'd start their work to write a two minute pause of email,

praising or thinking one new person each day. So you think through somebody on your team or a family member or an old teacher or coach or an ex that you dated or a friend that you haven't talked to a while and just write them a two minute text message or email praising teacher or coach or an ex-tea-dator, a friend you haven't talked to a while. And you just write them a two-minute text message, or email, praising them, or thanking them for one significant thing.

It doesn't have to be huge. It just has to be something real. When we do this, it's beautiful, because if you do it for three days in a row, you get addicted to it because you start believing that you're like, I can't believe I'm the type of person who does this, right? Because you spend all day long thinking about how amazing you were for sending that positive email in the morning.

And it transforms something that's soul draining, like email into something you can't help but open your inbox for the first time during the day without creating a positive impact upon space life. It literally transforms such a task as becoming overwhelming into one where you feel like you have power. But the real value is that 21 days later when we test you again in social connection, social connection is one of my favorite pieces of positive psychology. Social connection is the breadth, the depth, and the meaning in your social relationships.

And we found that when people do that two-minute action, turns out their social connection score rises to the top 10% worldwide. The reason I love social connection so much is social connection is not only the greatest predictor of our long-term levels of happiness by far. It outstrips everything else we study in positive psychology. If you have social connection, you can create happiness. If you lose it, happiness drops almost immediately.

But the other reason is so powerful. Social connection is as predictive of how long you will end up living, as obesity, high blood pressure or smoking. And you know how hard we have to fight in our society against the negative. But we sometimes forget to tell people how powerful a positive intervention could be. Literally a two minute positive note that you're writing in the morning or a few minutes of meditation can literally transform not only our levels of happiness but our social connection that has all these cascading impacts to our health outcomes as well. But the pillar number five of your five point plan that also seems to me like a gratitude

practice. It is and it's a great point. It's an external one. So what we got people to do is to not just think things that they're doing Greatfully, but actually express that gratitude out to somebody else, right? In some ways gratitude seems inexorably linked to generosity Slash kindness. Yeah, I heard a quote somewhere That someone said that there's not a single moment of happiness that doesn't occur In the absence of gratitude. For real happiness to occur, we need to be able to be grateful for an experience that's actually going on

within that moment. If we're not aware that we're happy in that moment, we might actually miss the fact that we were actually experiencing an elevated mood or levels of joy within our life. So I think gratitude is the cornerstone for all of this, scanning the world in a different way, but also being able to express it to other people, but also transforming the narrative around which we view our lives to see the things we're grateful for. Like I could tell my entire life story, telling you all the failures I've had and mistakes that I've made in relationships and work and things that didn't work out well, or I could retell my entire life, think about how grateful I was that some of those relationships didn't

work out. And so those jobs didn't work out because it led me to do the work that I'm doing. So gratitude could completely transform a life narrative and one that's meaningful as opposed to one that seems with a loss of meaning. I want to dive deeply into gratitude soon but I want to ask you a personal question first. You're a positive psychologist having this research you've written a bunch of books, you go around talking to people about happiness all the time.

How happy are you? Do you ever fall off the habit of banwagon in any way? So absolutely. My wife and I joke because my wife's a happiness researcher as well. Some of our friends say that either our kids are going to be really happy or really screwed up because there's a lot of pressure. As soon as you tell people you're happiness researcher, they look at you very differently.

And I have to say I'm grateful for it because I feel like people hold me to a standard where they expect me to be optimistic. So some days I don't feel like being optimistic. I get this positive pure pressure to be positive within those moments. So I get some tilting in that way. But I don't think people are happy all the time and you know

and i don't think that's necessarily our goal uh... or or my goal i think people they're happy all the time sometimes that's a form of mental disorder right the you you become uh... divorce from reality there are bad things are going on this world there's something that's occurring uh... so i i definitely experience anxiety and stress, days where I don't feel grateful, but having done these positive habits and having the fact that I get to talk all the time on this,

it allows me to be reminded of some choice I have within that situation. And the more that practices habits, when I go into that trough, the trough has become shallower. And I'm able to more quickly come back out of the negative, back into the positive, much faster than I ever have in the past. So while I'm not happy all the time, I feel like while I'm fluctuating,

I'm fluctuating at a higher and higher level than I have my whole life. That being said, I think something else really important to say about happiness is that to me, the opposite of happiness isn't unhappiness. I think unhappiness fuels great change. If I'm lonely, it makes me want to go out and see other people and to meet other people or surround myself with people. I think when we get angry, it's oftentimes because of injustices or incurring in the world or discrimination, or I think we should feel those feelings of anger and frustration and sadness because they can create great political, economic, and

personal change. To me, the opposite of happiness and what I try to fight so hard against is apathy, which is the loss of joy we feel moving towards our potential. And that's why I think happiness, happiness can't just be pleasure. If it's just pleasure, the words don't even mean something separate from one another. Pleasure is so short lived and most can experience pleasure. It's very quick. Happiness is not something that is just pleasurable. Happiness to me is the joy you feel moving towards your potential. It just want to highlight that because that is your definition that you use. The joy you feel as you're moving towards your potential you just want to highlight that because that is your definition that you use the joy you feel as you're moving toward your potential i and i love it for two reasons the first reason is that joy is some

you can experience even when life is not pleasurable right i think that's a huge change within people's lives because if i think life should always be pleasurable and then it's not and i feel like i'm not happy and i'm doing something terribly how it puts a meat on the bone with that but i can you feel joyous when you're really sick so uh... well i think even in the midst of sickness i might have a friend who comes to bring me chicken noodle soup or in the midst of sickness i get time to watch all these movies that have been

wanting to watch or in the midst of sickness i can be thinking about i'm so grateful that i'm not sick all the time or in those moments i can feel joy as i'm reading a poem or as I'm, you know, at home getting spend time with my son because I'm not out at work. There's access to joy that could occur within those moments. If I go on a long run, my legs might be burning, but I can still feel joy as I see what my body's capable of. Childbirth, not high levels of pleasure the whole time, but moments of joy that could correspond with some of the highest

levels of fear and pain we can experience. So, I think what we're hoping for people to do is to realize that joy is something you can experience even when life is difficult and challenging. The other side of it is, I think we're afraid of happiness as a society. I think we're afraid of happiness because we think if we're too happy, we won't push so hard

to be so successful. Or our kids are gonna slack off in school. Or we can't be happy right now because then we would never fix some of the problems we need to fix within this world. Like the inequalities or the discrimination. To me that's what pleasure could do, but joy does the complete opposite of the human brain. I think joy turns on the brain to as high as possible level.

The research we're seeing in the happiness of managed work is that when the brain is positive, every single business and educational outcome we know how to test for rises significantly. So if we have big challenges in a student's life and my life, we need to find a way to bring the best brain possible to bear upon that situation. It's so interesting. This is the second time I've met you. And you read as super like you have very bright eyes.

You've seen a peppy and optimistic, and the question that automatically enters my mind when I'm in the presence of somebody like that is that real? How sustainable is that? And it's so interesting to hear you say that, oh yeah, of course you wake up some days and you don't feel like being optimistic.

Right. But you said you thought it was good that there was this positive pure pressure in your life that because the expectations are higher for you given who you are and what you do, I would imagine that there could be good and bad. That some days when you're just like in a bad mood, you didn't get enough sleep. I don't know. You had a fight with your wife or whatever. Right.

That the expectation would, that you be peppy and optimistic would actually be incredibly and exquisitely annoying. I think it's very intuitive comment and I think that if I didn't feel the license to be myself when I needed to be, then it would feel very difficult. Like I've met and worked with a couple celebrities who are like comedians, right? And their job is to be that person. I want him or her to be the person I saw on the movies. And like, I don't really realize

that they were acting in that moment. Like, I want them to be that character that I saw on television or I saw on a movie. And I think they feel imprisoned. And I feel like they feel like they can't go into a Starbucks without, you know, somebody asking them for an autograph or do that character bit.

So then they find themselves sequestered in their homes and they lose social connection and then their love is happiness plummet. For me, I feel like when I need to vent and experience, you know, tell somebody that I'm going through a hard time, one of the very first things going through depression helped me figure out was I need to be real with those emotions. So the turning point for me in depression was when I stopped trying to treat it like

all the other things I had done in my life. I was good at checking off individual metrics, getting the grades I need to get into a school that I wanted to. So when it came time for depression, I thought, I can think my way out of this. I don't need anyone's help. I put up this image that I was positive and optimistic, even though it was hurting on the inside. And the turning point for me was when I opened up to my

eight closest friends and family, not to everyone, but to my closest friends and family, and told them, I've been going through depression for two years. I have no idea how to get out of this, and I really need your help. And the groundswell support was amazing, right? They were calling me and emailing me and meeting up with me to be there for me. But the real value was, as soon as I put down that fake image of who I was, right, it allowed them to be a friend back to me,

then it meant that there is mutual bond that was occurring where they would tell me things that they were going through, depression or loneliness or addiction, that they felt like maybe they shouldn't be telling other people because I wasn't, I was setting a social script for that. So when I let them in, it allowed them to let me in as well. And what would wake me up in the morning when I was going through depression? For a while it was like, do I want to go out of bed or not?

The question would be, am I happier not today? Am I depressed or not today? And after a while, it starts starts shift where I need to get out of bed because I need to be there for my friend because she's really suffering right now. Or I need to get out of bed even though it's two o'clock in the afternoon, I don't want to get out of bed because I need to meet up with my friends

because I don't want them to be drinking. And what was happening in those moments is that instead of one person trying to get himself, himself or herself out of depression, we were doing it together. My favorite psychology study right now is the one I started big potential with. Big potential being your second book. Big potential is the second book.

And for me, it was the turning point because happiness of anage was about if you do these individual pause of habits, your individual outcomes improved dramatically. What we start to realize now that we have big data is that happiness, I still think it can be a choice if we start to act within our lives, but I don't think it's an individual choice. It's an interconnected choice. When I choose to be optimistic and grateful, I give somebody else's license to make those same choices as well. When they're being positive, it's so much easier for me to choose this. You create this virtuous cycle. What we started realizing was that if you treat happiness like self-help, which is where we put it in bookstores, you get small potential.

You get one person trying to climb a hill by themselves. When you start to treat it, looking at the entire ecosystem of potential, some amazing things start to emerge. So, the story I want to mention was the study to researchers in Virginia found that if I'm looking at mountain, I need to climb in front of me. They found that if I'm viewing that mountain by myself, my brain judges that hill to be 10 to 20 percent steeper than the mountain of the exact same height I saw while standing next to a friend. That shouldn't be happening at all, right? The mountain doesn't change. I always thought our perception in the mountain was

accurate and it turns out that the hills in front of us look 10 to 20% steeper if we think we're doing it alone versus with other people. So now when we do these gratitude exercises, when we, for me meditation, I had a friend that would walk me through it and he would call me and let me know that he was meditating. Sometimes we try and meditate at the same time. The gratitude exercises we do around the dinner tables. I do it with my son, with some of the companies we worked with, we did it at staff meetings to start the meeting

with one another. When you move it from just an individual pursuit to one we do together, you get this incredible, you go from small potential to big potential. You actually get to see how much happiness we're able to keep the word capable of and how to sustain it in a much better way. I think I heard you say that happiness is a team sport. Yes, happiness is a team sport. I believe that.

I think we make happiness harder when we feel like we have to do it alone in an isolation. I actually think, so I got to speak out at the CDC, the Center for Disease Control a year ago, and they told me, while I've been doing all this research on happiness and going out and sharing this around the world, depression rates in the United States doubled. Same depression screener. And yet, double the rates of depression. Anxiety rates are the highest they've been in our schools. Loneliness is high. Loneliness is high. Hospitalizations for suicide have doubled for every single age group including including eight year olds. I know you have a son. I have two young children. I don't want them growing up in this world where they feel that the

hyper comparison, hyper competition steals their joy and happiness as they're in school and as they're out in the workforce. What I want them to realize is that happiness is not zero sum. That somebody else is happiness on social media isn't a threat to my happiness. In fact, I could experience joy when my friends have good things that happen to them. If I have the right lens for it, then I'm starting to see that happiness, when we connect our happiness to other people, they were able to raise one another up instead of trying to compete in which everyone loses out in that situation so what's driving you mentioned

double depression rates anxiety spiking loneliness suicide hospital visits lots of disturbing metrics what do you think driving all that i think it's i think it's two things things. I think it's a lot of things. I think two of the biggest things are one, I think that with the emergence of social media, we can hypercompare and compete all the time. I'm not against social media.

I think it could be an incredible tool for connecting people and deepening our social knowledge, which deepened social support, the greatest predictor of happiness. I think it could be done right. I think oftentimes we judge our worth based upon the number of likes that we get, or we see all these successes in other people's lives, or look at how beautiful somebody else's life is, not knowing their interior life. And as a result of that, we start to feel less about our own levels of happiness. I think there's a great quote that comparison is the thief of joy.

And I believe that as soon as I start comparing my wealth or successes or academic achievements with anyone else, I'm immediately in a losing game. And I think that we're in that within our schools with a lot of the hyper competition where we think if I'm not in the top x percent and don't get into this school and then don't have this job. There's no way I'll feel happiness in my life. So people contact me, they'll say my kid is looking at eight different colleges. We have no idea they're panic, which way they should go, which way do you think would

create happiness? Big school, small school. And I write back and I say, happiness exists down every single one of those paths, including not going to college, if you're able to create a deep social fit with the people that are around you and you're able to get your strengths to emerge. So I think that's one side of it is that I think we use

social media the wrong way, and it's so omnipresent within our lives. So when I work with schools, for example, on the things we do, and I'm going to teach my son this as well, is that if you're on social media, I'm going to spend 15 minutes on social media, but when I'm winning, trying to feel loved, like, did people like my post, you know, did they've re-tweeted, and you know, I got 10 people to like it, and I see a cap video that's 12 million views, right?

Like, I can very quickly think about it about myself, and I always left feeling drained or worse about myself. But what I now do is when I go in, I spend the same 15 minutes, but I go in, and I always left feeling drained or worse about myself. But when I now what I do is when I go in I spend the same 15 minutes but I go in and I like people's post and I'm commenting on how great their kids look or how amazing that vacation is or that promotion and what I'm doing is I'm using the same moment to create such a positive change to somebody else's life. When I finish I feel energized but also I feel like I have deep social connection. Could you not check your own legs? I do you know it's hard for me to completely ignore it I mean I have to admit one of the things I work on is that when I go out to I just had a talk earlier this week I got a standing ovation at the end of it and a guy came up to me and he told me that he would have given my talk a five out of ten and he had some suggestions how to do it. I

remember the five out of ten, right? Literally that's what I was thinking about on the plane and what I could, like that's, for me, I would like to be able to move away from that because in that moment, so many people came up and told me about how this research was exactly what they needed to be here that day. If my brain had focused on that reality,

which is reality, I would have been much healthier than if my brain had focused on the one negative which was a skewed way of looking at the world but also an unhealthy and maladaptive way to look at the world so it's something i work on all the time while i know it trying put it into practice uh... requires effort

but so on social media your game now is you may check your own likes but you're the primary emphasis is on liking other people stuff and making nice comments. It is. I have to say I try not to read comments anymore because there's so much negative that comes out and some of those where people are maybe you're not ready to hear some of the information you have or assume that you're a different type of person than you actually are. So the last I look at the likes, the happier I am, I really do try to focus my energy on what I'm saying, and then try to like other people's stuff, and then I get out as quickly as possible, because I know it's a temptation for me to immediately look at the likes,

or how many book sales I have, or anything like that, that just immediately pull me away from any type of happiness I was feeling within my life. So I think that's one aspect of it. I think the other aspect is I think we're alone. I think we're, I think that's one aspect of it. I think the other aspect is I think we're alone. I think we're I think we feel lonely. I feel like we feel like we're having to do. We become so independent right so quickly within our lives and then you know all I need is a phone and I can go anywhere in the world. Phone maybe a wallet right. So we feel like we can kind of do everything and we scatter as a society. Like I can live away from my

parents away from my social connection. If I want a good job, I'm going to move away from my family and friends for that job because it's going to make me so much happier. And what I think has happened within our society is we've eroded so much of our social connection. There's so many fewer points of people, you know, doing things together, right? Aside from like the school and the military, you really often don't get those deep bonds. In fact, you know, I work with the military with some of the work that we were doing initially. And they're amazing because not only, you know, so many companies say, you know, we're going through so much stress, we're going to lose great people. Then I work with the military and that on board you with boot camp, right?

Like they put you through stress. But if you look at stress with the right lens, like that you're growing, and with other people, which is why they break down the individual, like I could do this all by myself, you create these meaningful narratives you talk about the rest of your life. So I think that there's a way of transforming our pursuit of happiness and success, we're creating those deep social bonds

that when we do that, we're able to create more positive change. So I think the more independent our societies become and the more far-flung we've become from our social roots, the less happiness we experience. So one of the greatest predictors of happiness is social connection. So as I was doing this research, I was up at Harvard.

And I was at this amazing school. I was getting to do all this phenomenal research. I went down to Latin America and worked with some families there. There were under threats of express kidnappings and extreme poverty and political unrest. And I was looking at their levels of happiness and they were extraordinarily high. And I was trying to figure out why. And it was social connection every time.

They had deep bonds with their family and friends in the midst of it. And I came back to Snowy Boston where I felt alone and I was pursuing my success and competition with other people. And I hadn't created the social bonds I needed to because I was working so hard. So I left Boston, left Harvard and went down and moved to the exact same street as my sister in San Antonio, Texas. And we hired our next door neighbor. We started working all together.

We moved three times and all these families started moving together Because we realized that if you don't have that social connection very little of what we do within our life We'll actually create long-term levels of happiness. Stay tuned more of our Conversation is on the way after this raising kids can be one of the greatest rewards of a parents life But come on, someday, parenting is unbearable. I love my kid, but is a new parenting podcast from Wondry that shares a refreshingly honest and insightful take on parenting. Hosted by myself, Megan Galey, Chris Garcia, and Kurt Brown-Oller, we will be your resident

not-so-expert experts. Each week we'll share a parenting story that'll have you laughing, nodding, and thinking, oh yeah, I have absolutely been there. We'll talk about what went right and wrong, what would we do differently? And the next time you step on yet another stray Lego in the middle of the night, you'll feel less alone. So if you like to laugh with us as we talk about the hardest job in the world, listen to, I love my kid, but wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen ad-free on the Amazon Music or Wondery app.

Alright, so I've asked you a ton of questions without actually getting to the reason why we're here in the Jane Adams, high in uh... shamburg Illinois we talked a little bit about gratitude but the reason we're here today surrounded by all these cameras is we're doing a story for good morning america about gratitude and

we uh... i the reason why you're our prime mover in the pieces because i had heard you you and i were speaking at the same event uh... for uh... the disney I had heard you and I were speaking at the same event for the Disney Imagineers and you went before me and I was listening to you're talking. I really loved it and you talked a lot about gratitude. So let's just start at the high level. You talked a little bit about the science that shows that gratitude is beneficial, but

can you just go just dive into that again and give a sense of why is gratitude something that we should be trying to operationalize in our lives? Evolutionarily, our brains are designed to look for threats all the time. So the default function for the brain is to look for threats. I have to say one thing interesting that's a little side note, but I get people that think happiness is shallow, right, and the deepest people are the ones that are brooding and they're negative in the midst of it. But I have to tell you that negativity is the easiest thing for the brain to do.

It's the most primitive function of the brain without any thought we could be negative. To create happiness requires higher order parts of the brain to be able to experience and to shape an experience where you are looking at with a lens of gratitude. It's very easy to look for threats. It takes a lot of depth to look for things we're grateful for in the midst of the challenges and the complexities of life. So if our brains are predisposed towards looking for threats, we literally need to train the brain to scan the world for things that are positive within our life. So, part of what we found is that the brain is limited. Whatever you attend to first becomes your reality. So if you start by scanning every environment for the threats and the fires you need to put

out and the negatives within your life, you have no resources left over to scan the world for the things you're grateful for in that moment or the ways you could transform that reality into a better reality. So what gratitude does is it shifts some of those resources away from just looking for threats and helps us to actually look for things that move us forward within our lives. So in the research what we found is that if people practice thinking of three new things that they were grateful for every day and we applied that into somebody's life at 84 years of age, down to four years of age, what we found is we could take people who were testing his pessimists because they were constantly looking for the threats and negatives in their life.

And 21 days later, on average, their testing is low level optimist. If they keep the pattern going for 6 months, they rise to low to moderate level of optimist, because what their brain is doing is practicing using our brain's resources to look for the things that move us forward. So if I play tennis for 8 hours a day, I'm going to become amazing at tennis. The same thing is true for gratitude. The more that my brain scans for the positive, it's not ignoring the negatives within our life. Our brain has no problem seeing those.

It's actually filling out the rest of reality, helping us to see the things in our life that are positive, that give our life meaning, but also turn on the brain to its highest possible level. We know that when the brain is grateful and positive, every single educational outcome, every single business outcome, we know how to test for, rises significantly, and many of our health outcomes as well.

So I've read that you get better sleep, you have better relationships. So can you run through some of the other things that you've seen from gratitude? Yeah, so when our brain is grateful, it's scanning the world for the positive. At positive, our productive energy rises by 31%. It turns out that our likelihood of promotion rises by 40%. Intelligence rises significantly. Memory deepens are social bonds become deeper so we feel more connected to one another. We're sleeping better. It turns out our symptoms

feel less acute. The same level of stress within somebody's life when you're positive and grateful has a 23% drop in the negative effects of stress upon your life. So headaches, back aches fatigue, drop by 23% for the same level of stress, which means stress is inevitable,

but its effects are not. And it's changed based upon whether or not you're grateful for the meaning involved and the things we're stressful for in the first place in booted circles we say pain is inevitable suffering is optional i'd love that and that's exactly what we're finding the research you know what i love about positive psychology research is it it just is reconfirming

everything we've heard about for thousands of years right people are like oh i love this cutting edge technology and positive psychology i'm like literally right? We were like, oh, I love this cutting edge technology and positive psychology. I'm like, literally, these are the oldest things we've ever heard. We're actually just starting to realize how powerful they are. And now that we have big data, now we can actually see some of those things we thought we couldn't see long-term effects. Like, if I do something nice for you, I hope to see you smile or see some change in your life. And if it doesn't happen, I can't see it. But now with big data, we can actually test to see if your altruism or your compassion impacts people two to three degrees

separate from you that you never even met, and we can measure it. So, you talked before about coming up, what was the practice three things a day that you're grateful for? So, what we have people do. And, I'm sorry, I know you're going to answer that question, but like, what does that practice look like in reality? Is it a meditation or how do we do it? I think 99% of people, and we've tested this, think that they're grateful, but very rarely do we actually practice it. We decided, let's see if we could root-signize gratitude within somebody's life.

Initially, I worked with a large company and we got them to think of three things they were grateful for every day for 21 days a row and no impact upon them at all. Which is why we test this because we assume to have effect them. But it turns out by day three they were repeating. Every day they were grateful for my work, my family, and my health. And then with a very new oncylns, they would scan the world for all the threats they need to put out all day long. So two researchers found that if you get them, get somebody to look for three new things they're grateful for each day.

So, they're scanning a new. And not just what you're grateful for, but why? So, if I say I'm grateful for my son Leo, I don't benefit from that. If I say I'm grateful for my son, he gave me a hug yesterday, which means I'm love for Godless today. That works. We work with homeless populations, and sometimes they say, I can't think of anything I'm grateful for.

But as they do this, looking for big and small, 21 days later, they have 63 unique things that they've been grateful for over a three week period of time, which not even the entire point. The entire point of it is that as you scan the world differently, it turns out your brain gets stuck with those new patterns, starting to scan notches for threats, but you're building your mental muscle to be able to scan for the positive and the midst of stress.

So over the whole course of your day, your brain starts to see these pinpoints of positivity that are occurring that your brain was missing before. Basically what it's doing, and what we've talked about this before, is your brain is basically in that two-minute a day that you think of three new things you're grateful for. That you can do why you brush your teeth, that you can do around a dinner table,

that you can do in a classroom. That those thinking of things you're grateful for it that you can do why you brush your teeth you can do around a dinner table you can do in a classroom that those thing you think you're grateful for each day uh... your brain basically is building a background app to scan constantly the rest of the day use resources to scan for things that are going on right because i know i have this exercise i'm going to do it some points i got to collect data for it it's exactly it so you can do uh... i'm just to get nittyitty here, so do you set a timer? Do you do it around the day? What are the options for how, when, where, we do these two minutes?

So the original studies were to think of three new things you're grateful for right before you go to sleep, because they thought that when code your memory is differently overnight. For me, I find that I do it first thing in the morning, because it changes my day. I also use this spot check, so if I'm having a bad day, like I have a flight this delayed, right? Or frustrated that I hit a red light that I didn't want to. I can actually use that moment to say, okay, I have to stop my resources going down this path where I'm now going to catalog all the negatives that, you know, why I should feel like I'm having a terrible day. And actually use those

resources to think, here are three things I'm grateful for in this minute. And to me, it's hard sometimes, right? Like, I feel justified in feeling negative in that moment. But as my brain stops, it literally can't do both at the same time. So your brain actually has to stop on one train track and move to a different track to scan the world for things you're grateful for. What I find is not only do I find those things, but suddenly it puts into perspective the negative that was going on within my life.

So I use it as a spot check, I use it first thing in the morning, I suggest people do it while they brush their teeth because you're going to brush your teeth anyway, it's about the same amount of time it takes to think of three new things you're grateful for. So it's a mental cue that you can see within those moments. But where gratitude becomes so powerful, as you've seen here at the school, is when you do it with other people. So what we do is we get parents of children with four-year-olds who seem predisposed towards pessimism and get them to practice thinking of three things that they're grateful for to

start the dinner. We found that if you do that for six weeks in a row, six months later, before and after school, those kids are testing not as low-level pessimists, but low-level optimists on average. 84 year old men who have practiced pessimism their whole life, you get them to practice gratitude on a daily basis for 21 days a row, same pattern emerges, which means that while genes and environments set the initial baseline for us, by adding a two minute pause of habit into our day, we can actually change the trajectory of somebody's life, which is so much more powerful than that's my optimistic kid and that's my pessimistic kid.

What we're realizing is happiness and gratitude are an easier choice for some people, just based upon their genes and their environment. But given the fact that we can practice adding these elements into our life, these habits, we can actually walk somebody out of depression and negativity to actually see the world with an optimistic and much more adaptive lens. So as part of this story, I want to try your program. So are you saying all I need to do is this two minute thing, or are there other things that I should also try? There's some other things to try.

One last thing I think about gratitude I love is something we start doing as a family. You take, you make a visual. So we would take, we have this glass jar that we have. And anytime something good happens, that's what we're writing, thinking of those things we're grateful for. We just, if it's something really good, we jot it down on a little scrap piece of paper, and then fold it up and put it into this jar. This is during your dinner time routine. This is dinner time over the course of the day.

My son comes home from school and he tells me something amazing about a petting zooery actually pet, you know, a bearded dragon. And I'm like, that's amazing. He felt so proud about it. Let's ride it down. And so we crumpled it up and put it in there. And as we watch over the course of weeks and a month that jar gets more and more full.

So I don't even have to be reading those as I walk past it in the kitchen to actually feel like, wow, there's so much to be grateful for my life It's a cute visual cue within my life and then at the end of the month or as soon as it gets full or at the end of the year We can go back through and pull them out and we totally forget that my son had pet illizard at school and it Reminds you of that how powerful that positive was but then gives you access to all this positive in your life I mean, I think one thing that's so powerful, the idea of big potential was how do you create

happiness with other people? And some people are like, you know, we're not a kindergarten, you know, we're not like a zappos, we can't be, you know, happy all the time, we're very serious with what we do. So, we went to a level one trauma center in Orlando, to Orlando Health, and we worked with the meetings, the staff during meetings, where they were going through resource allocation about who would live or die, life and death situation. We did for two years where every day,

every person in the meeting would think of one thing that they were grateful for. So it wasn't just the leader, every person in the room had to think of something. Like you were saying, you had to come into that meeting having already scanned for something you're grateful for because they did this every day. But for two years, not only were they

thinking of something they're grateful for, they were also hearing the gratitude to the people that they were on their team. Two years after we were implementing this change at the hospital, the post-night club shooting occurred, three blocks down from them. All the victims went there. It was the most traumatic and difficult night

that they had had as a community. Several hours later, they started their staff meetings with things that they were grateful for. But what they were most grateful for, they said, was as they were listening to other people's gratitude, they weren't just doing resource allocation together. What they were doing was deepening their social bonds. I was learning not about just your work,

but also the things that motivate you that helped their social bonds. I was learning not about just your work, but also the things that motivate you, that help deepen those bonds. So when the most difficult thing occurred, they weren't doing it alone. They were doing it with a team that they felt deeply connected to. It built emotional immune system. And that, I love that term emotional immune system, but those social bonds were built just through people talking about what they were grateful for on an internal level as opposed to getting up and saying Hey, thank you over there Jane for doing x, y or z which I would imagine have a that kind of sort of shout out would have a Bigger impact on the social bond. We haven't tested to know which one has a bigger impact I think they both have unique impacts. I think that hearing something about your life

Opens doors into your world that I might not know about, right? Like I might be able to pray somebody to work for something that they've done at work, but I might not know how grateful that they were, that their kid was able to hold a spoon for the first time, or how grateful that they were, that their sister-in-law just overcame cancer, right? So it gives you a deeper social connection point to hear those things that people are grateful for in their life.

There is initial studies that I thought you know people the best if you know all the dirt on them, right? Like if I know all the worst things about your life, we really know each other, we're really friends. What they found was the deepest social bonds that were occurring, where when I knew what actually caused you the most joy within your life, the moved you forward. Because those are the people who totally get you. Those are the people who you feel like you're connected to. So those moments of access to help, we have tested the praise and recognition piece

being able to give praise to other people. One of the studies we did at LinkedIn, we found that if you were able to praise other people and do shout outs for peers, not just top down, but peers. If you got three plus touch points of praise over the course of the year, it turns out the retention rates went from 80% to

94%, which was stunning, right? Same building, same pay, same company, and yet people wanted to stay there, because they got three pieces of praise over the course of the year. I think a piece of praise can have dramatic impacts upon other people, which is why I think gratitude has to happen at multiple levels. I think gratitude has to happen at the internal level to think I'm things I'm grateful for. I think it has to do it with an external expressing of gratitude out to other people, but also transforming the narrative we have about our lives to see the things we're grateful for. Why I'm grateful for the job I have. Why I'm grateful for the day that I'm having. Why I'm grateful for the country I live in.

Why I'm grateful for the spouse I have. Okay, Dr. A. Or give me the country I live in. Why I'm grateful for the spouse I have. Okay, Dr. A. Or give me the prescription because we were talking about I wanna get on a plan and we're also gonna recruit some kids and their families from Jane Adams, junior high to do this plan too. So I've got, just say I've got a week.

What are the two or three things I should be doing every day that could infuse my life with gratitude? Now that you've convinced me that this is so valuable. Based upon this research, I would pick two things. I would both of them relate to gratitude. I would first of all practice each morning for two minutes a day, thinking three new things you're grateful for, and if you feel really motivated,

actually riding it down, so you can go back and look at it at the end of the week. That has the highest benefit for doing that. It'll train your brain to become more optimistic. The other thing we want you to do is once you've been practicing this gratitude, at some point during the day, we want you to write a two minute email or text message

praising or thinking a different person each day for that week, praising a high school English teacher or a spouse or a child or an old coach you had. And writing to that person for just two minutes, two minutes maximum, so keep it short. But what you're doing is you're scanning for social connection, then you're activating somebody through that praise and recognition. Oftentimes, they're going to actually respond to that gratitude with gratitude of their

own. But at the end of the week, when we found that we did this for a significant period of time, it actually doesn't take that long. Your brain starts to realize you have this incredibly deep and rich social connection around you and you've meaningfully activated those people as well. So social connection is the greatest predictor of long-term happiness. So I would practice three gratitude and I would write a single two-minute positive email each day to somebody else and watch the impact of how you view about your day. So it doesn't have to be, it can be somebody from my life who I haven't been in touch with for a while,

but it also could be to my producer Doug, who's sitting right over here, who's done a great job on this story. So I send Doug, my man, a two minute email, that counts under this. Absolutely. Wherever you decide to send it to somebody you just met, or it could be somebody in your favorites list,

it just has to be two minutes, where you feel good about writing that note to that person. And what you do is you immediately start to feel like my behavior matter. You're going to spend literally all day long thinking about how amazing you were for writing that email or text message in the morning because you keep thinking about it all day. You'll have all this work you have to do, but you'll come back to that email was amazing. That was worthwhile. The email was meaningful.

You also said that before we started recording that the other knock on positive effect that this could have is that many of us open our out I'll speak for myself I open my email with a sense of dread yes because it's going to be so much stuff there that I need now need to do or deal with right but if I know that I'm going to have some positive incoming most likely because I just sent out positive outgoing that actually might change the flavor of the whole enterprise that's absolutely true right so activities that we dread sometimes of outgoing that actually might change the flavor of the whole enterprise. That's absolutely true, right?

So the activities that we dread sometimes for our life, soul draining activities like email can be where we feel overwhelmed, suddenly instead of feeling overwhelmed, if I write a two minute pause of email to start my email experience, I start by having a meaningful impact upon somebody else. I can't help but open my inbox without having a meaningful impact upon somebody. But also, now as I start to open my inbox, I start to get these positive meaningful notes back in. So now it becomes a greater source of happiness.

The other wonderful thing about doing this gratitude externally is that I give other people license to talk about the things that are going on well in their life, but also give them license to say positive things about me as well, which means that you're getting more and more positive reinforcement over the course of the day. We went to pad access to otherwise. So do I need to, I'm going to do this for a week, our families are going to do this for a week.

Is that enough or do we need to, you know, is it like exercise, you know, use it or lose it? This gratitude muscle they are helping us build, do we need to keep doing these practices or once we've done a week, we're good to go? If you've done a week, you're already going to see the positive benefits immediately. For ever. But not forever. So, the same way that brushing your teeth is valuable.

If you brush your teeth for a week, you'll see dental benefits. But if you stop brushing your teeth, your teeth can revert to a negative level. No one tries to shower for one week out of the year and then hope they stay clean the rest of the year. It doesn't work. These are things that if we could impact somebody's life at a daily level, these become so powerful, which is why I love the work that we're doing at schools.

Because we get our kids to brush their teeth from a very young age. But that's oftentimes where we stop in terms of these daily habits. But all of this research shows that we can create these happiness hygiene habits. That if for just two minutes a day, we got a kid, the thing of three things that they're grateful for, or if we expressed our gratitude once over the course of the day to somebody else, it turns out not only do we train our brain to become more optimistic and positive, but if we keep the pattern going, it actually allows us to make the choice of happiness and easier

choice. But so in terms of a habit, a biting habit, I get how two minutes a day of thinking about three new things that you're grateful for could really be scalable, but the two-minute email every day, do you truly do that every day, seven days a week? I don't do it every day, to be honest, but I do it every day, I do it, I enjoy it, I'd say I do it five times a week, and it becomes the source of joy because you almost want to do it, right?

Like you do actually want to do it, you look forward to being able to do it, so I don't have, you know, a thousand people in my social network to be able to write. So what I'm looking for is one person I can write to you. Somebody I met at a talk, somebody that read a book and they wrote in and said something nice to me. I write in and say something nice back to them about how much they meant to me that they did that. Just one over the course of the day.

So I can repeat, I can, you know, write to my wife today and I can write to her, you know, 60 days from now, or 40 days from now. All it is is what you're doing is you're scanning for the fact that you do have social connection, that there is a meaningful relationship there, and then you activate somebody else. So we have the opportunity to do that on a daily basis. It's just trying to create a routine and pattern out of it. Otherwise, we just assume there were kind people.

We assume we're grateful people, but we never really really practice one the most important elements of our entire life so let's talk about you you've been teaching gratitude in schools including the one in which we're sitting right now what kind of impact you see on on students I wish I learned all of this happiness research when I was so much younger I remember in school like we would talk about reading writing and arithmetic but we wouldn't necessarily talk about optimism or hope or compassion or social connection, which we now know are some of the greatest predictors of a long-term success rate for a child and our health outcomes.

Given the fact that we have such high levels of anxiety and stress and depression in our schools, what I want more than anything for is for this happiness research to find its way into the schools, which is why this is such a passion for me? Being able to find a way of taking positive habits and putting them into a school, into a child's life, but then watching how their educational outcomes improve on the back side of this, their health outcomes improve, their levels of happiness improve. The more we're able to show that happiness has a positive impact upon these educational outcomes, the more we're able to go into these schools to create these positive changes, which then become the change agent

for the entire rest of the community as these students go home to their parents who are now working out at companies and are involved in the community. So I think if we can create great levels of happiness for the students, it spreads out everywhere. What is the parable of the orange frog? The orange frog was a story about how there's all these frogs that are green and one of them has an orange spot, which he hates, because it makes them different from everyone else. But after

while he starts realizing he becomes more orange every time he chooses one of these positive habits to do within his life, which makes them more different from other people. But then he starts realizing being orange is advantageous and contagious. So he's able to being orange is advantageous and contagious. So he's able to change the other frogs within the spawn. So when the storm hits, when the negative thing occurs, they're actually able with these different responses to the world to have a more adaptive response.

So we took this language from this book called the Happiness of Ange, which was the scientific explanations about how we could prove that these positive habits had an impact upon your life. And we how we could prove that these positive habits had an impact upon your life. And we realized we could use this narrative to bring this into the lives of students. So they would think of themselves not as trying to do scientific research, but trying to be more like spark the orange frog, and how they could be different at first to be positive within these schools, but then how it became contagious. And as you've seen around the school, how that idea of positivity being not only licensed, but contagious, and that it's advantageous, that it improves our outcomes, that it makes

happiness not only more of an option for people, but it starts to spread. One of the concerns I had looking around at the school, and I talked to the superintendent about this, is that you have all these slogans everywhere. Yes. But, you know, I'm just thinking about how I was when I was in seventh and eighth grade and how I continue to be, which is a bit cranky and sarcastic, that I would, I would over time start to turn those slogans in the sources of irony or things that I wouldn't take, it wouldn't lose, the slogans wouldn't lose their meaning,

or I would make fun of them in some way. So do you worry about that? Because there's a lot of, you know, sort of join the movement stuff around here, it's a different. I've worried about it at first, because I think slogans that aren't backed up with action are become a detriment in the long run.

One of the things I think has to happen for real change to occur is that there has to be a mindset change and a behavioral change linked together. So you can't just think, I'm going to choose happiness, but not change in your life. It doesn't have a long-term impact. So if we put up slogans at a school and thought that that was going to create happiness at school, it doesn't. What creates happiness is deep social connection, optimism, and gratitude. And we can build those things by creating daily habits within to our life, teaching our students to be able to make these choices, but making sure that this is not once a year type of message,

but that every day they're getting exposed to some of this positive research. Every day, they're actually practicing some of these positive habits, and they're doing these not only within their own life, but hopefully they're bringing it home to their parents. So one of the things that they do here at the school are these parent universities where they get the parents to come up to the school and the kids teach the parents how to do these positive habits with them so that it's not just something that's happening at school, it's happening at home.

So now these slogans like happiness can be a choice if you work on it or happiness is the joy you feel moving towards your potential. Those become a visual cue for the real change that's occurring within people's lives. So it's not like Nancy Reagan telling you just say no, it's actually a slogan that you attach to in a meaningful way. And the exciting thing, I think the thing you've seen here at the school, is how it creates a culture where you want to be part of this.

The more I get exposed to children and the students of these schools worldwide, they want to be positive. They want to be able to feel like their behavior matters. They're seeking for it. That's why they're out on social media. That's why they're out doing sometimes reckless things because they want deep social connection. So if we could wrap that social connection around some of these things that improved people's quality of life, we could actually create some deep impact within people's lives just a quick

question or two on gratitude before I let you go it seems to me that it's possible to do gratitude incorrectly so nothing drives me crazier than when I see hashtag blessed on social media with somebody standing in front of their jet that doesn't feel to me like authentic gratitude it just seems like bragging. Right. So I think that's an outstanding point. I think gratitude has to be authentic,

but also has to move us somewhere. I think of happiness is about just feeling pleasure, and I don't have to move or change or impact other people's lives. That's complacency, that's not happiness. For me, happiness is the joy you feel moving towards your potential, and that potential is being a better human being, a better friend, a better parent, a better teacher.

So that when we're being grateful, what we're hoping for is that grateful energy will then spur us towards positive change to make somebody else's life better. I'm grateful that I have helped today, so I want to be there for anyone who's sick right now. I'm grateful for this positive education, so I want to make sure more kids learn about the impact of gratitude upon their lives. So gratitude should actually be the starting place for the positive meaning that we see within our lives and positive action. So it never stops, it just grows. Another way you could do it wrong, I think, would be to thank somebody in a way that they felt was inauthentic.

Yes. So one of the things that we look at is that if you give a piece of praise that's inauthentic, our brains are designed to look for deception. It's one of the very first things we evolved to make sure that you weren't faking me out and we're actually a threat to me. So if you're giving a piece of praise and it's not real, people pick up on that immediately, whatever age they are.

So what we need to do is if we're going to give a piece of praise, it has to be based on something concrete specific and that we have knowledge of an action that's occurring there, that that person feels good about. So then once you've done that, you're building up something that they already feel like was powerful within their life, so they actually start to agree with that statement, and then you're building up something that builds a strength within their life. The more we fake it or try to, you know, reward somebody for lack of success or lack of movement, I don't think that those things necessarily benefit us long run. We get a lot pushed back about like, are you just saying we should hand out trophies

to every single person at our school to make them feel good? It doesn't make the kids feel good. They know that that's a trophy for participation versus a first place one. But what I want them to do is that as we're praising, to not just praise the people at the top, the kids who scored the goal, I also want to take those moments to praise the base, the people that were standing on the sideline cheering for them. I want to praise the parents that got them out there in the middle of the rain to get there.

I want to praise the superintendent for being able to make sure that there's funding for the school so that they can actually have that game start in the first place. Because then what you're doing is that success was creating praise for a lot of people. It was authentic as opposed to all the praise being heaped just at the top, you know, 5%. Last question on gratitude. There are many people with whom we inhabit this planet who have really grave personal circumstances, illness, abuse within the family, they live in a war zone. How is it possible for those people to be grateful

as this too much to ask for people in certain extreme circumstances? So can I give a medium answer to this? Link answered it. Do it at you. I got the opportunity to speak to a large government to organization. And I was so excited to go speak there

and about two minutes into my talk. This woman raised her hand. She said, I think you're really funny and engaging, but it's totally inappropriate for me to smile and be happy at work. I work in the Human Attrocity Commission. And my job is to look for the worst things that are going on the world.

So if I'm coming and smiling and happy all the time, I'm not doing justice to what's going on the world. But then she went on to tell me that two of the people on her team had attempted suicide. She can't keep people on her team. And when she goes to a pool at night to see her daughter, she feels guilty for feeling happy sitting around the pool with her daughter.

What's happening in those moments is that in the midst of the atrocities that are occurring in the world, if we think we can't feel happiness until they're all gone, we lose the very fuel, the very positive energy that gives us the meaning and the successes to feel like we're having an impact so we keep showing up every day to stop those problems. So when I first got into this research, I thought happiness might, you know, be too hard for certain people in the world. The most angry I've ever gotten as a positive psychologist was at a company who brought me in to work with their senior leadership on happiness. But when I asked if I could bring it to the store floors, they said, no, we can't bring it there. Many of them are part time. A lot of them don't have high levels of education. A lot of

them have people that are family members in prison. We honestly don't pay them that much. It made happiness only an option for the privileged and the rich. And when we do this research, what we're seeing is something completely different. We're seeing that we're learning about happiness from, I work with farmers in Zimbabwe who lost their lands. There was so much happier than some of the bankers I was working with who didn't get their bonuses once. We're finding kids in Svetos, South Africa.

They were so grateful to go to school. They were so happy to be there. Now, go back to Harvard and they're playing misery poker trying to figure out who had the worst hand in terms of the stresses that they had with in their lives. What we're finding is we've found levels of happiness at every single aspect of this world. In every environment, we've looked at so far from cancer wards to prisons to impoverished countries to people that have been in combat zones and what's amazing the happiest place of hospitals amongst the staff everywhere is their cancer wards which is incredible so what I think it is is overturning our assumptions about the impact of what we could be grateful for in our life. We could be grateful for more than just being the wealthiest or the most successful.

We could find meaning in the daily activities that could move us forward. I think happiness could remain an option wherever we live in the world. Before we go, let's plug all of your work. I call this the plug zone. Where can we find you in social media? So I know we have mixed feelings about social media. But where can we find you in social media? What's your website?

Remind us of the names of the books, et cetera, et cetera. Give us everything. So you can follow me on Facebook and Twitter at Sean A. Corp. But if you really want to go deeper into this, I have a 12-minute free TED Talk that summarizes some of this happiness research. So if you just Google TED Talk and Sean, it pops right up. Or how do I spell Sean?

Sean is S-H-A-W-N, last name A-C-H-O-R. You can go to my website, SeanAquor.com, A-C-H-O-R.com. But if you want to go really deep into this and practice this with your families, I have a book called The Happiness of Anage Which started all this work that we're doing in schools and a new book called Big Potential Which looks at how we could actually pursue happiness with one another and our schools and our teams our families instead of trying to do it alone Great job. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. It's so nice to get to meet you Okay, that does it for another edition of the 10% happier podcast. If you liked it please take a minute to subscribe, rate us. Also

if you want to suggest topics you think we should cover or guests that we should bring in, hit me up on Twitter at Dan B Harris. Importantly I want to thank the people who produced this podcast, Lauren Efron, Josh Cohen, and the rest of the folks here at ABC who helped make this thing possible. We have tons of other podcasts. You can check them out at ABCnewspodcasts.com. I'll talk to you next Wednesday. Hey, hey, prime members. You can listen to 10% happier early and add free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today, or you can listen early and add free with Wondery Plus in Apple Podcasts. Before you go, do us a solid and tell us all about yourself

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