The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos - Why Being Grateful Makes Us Feel Great (A Thanksgiving Re-run)

Episode Date: November 24, 2025

It's Thanksgiving - a good time to think about gratitude and being selfless. Concentrating on the things we have to be grateful for is a great way to boost your happiness. So thank the people who've done good things for you, and think of ways you can help others too.   This circle of gratitude – the science suggests – will also make you a better friend to one of the most important people in your life… your future self. In a re-run of a 2020 episode, Dr Laurie investigates this effect with Northeastern University’s Professor David DeSteno – author of “Emotional Success: The Power of Gratitude, Compassion and Pride.”See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed Human. Welcome to Decoding Women's Health. I'm Dr. Elizabeth Pointer, chair of Women's Health and Gynecology at the Adria Health Institute in New York City. On this show, I'll be talking to top researchers and top clinicians, asking them your burning questions and bringing that information about women's health and midlife directly to you. A hundred percent of women go through menopause. It can be such a struggle for our questions. quality of life, but even if it's natural, why should we suffer through it? The types of symptoms

that people talk about is forgetting everything. I never used to forget things. They're concerned that, one, they have dementia, and the other one is, do I have ADHD? There is unprecedented promise with regard to cannabis and cannabinoids, to sleep better, to have less pain, to have better mood, and also to have better day-to-day life. Listen to Decoding Women's Health with Dr. Elizabeth Pointer wherever you get your podcasts. Pushkin. Hey, Happiness Lab listeners. Here in the U.S., Thanksgiving season is just around the corner.

And that means it's a time of year to connect with an emotion that's super important for feeling happier. Gratitude. Many of us associate gratitude with things like thank you cards or toasts around the dinner table. but research shows that gratitude can also be a powerful tool for reaching our future goals. How can gratitude help your performance, you ask? Well, to answer that, I'm turning back to one of the episodes we did all the way back in 2020. In this throwback episode, I talked to my friend David Desteno. David is a professor of psychology at Northeastern University, the host of the How How God Works podcast, and the author of Emotional Success, the power of gratitude, compassion, and

pride. David's work shows how the simple practice of gratitude might be the very habit you need, not just to feel happier, but to be nicer to your future self. I hope you enjoy this episode. Have a happy Thanksgiving, and here's to being a bit more grateful. Most of the time, I like to think I'm a relatively nice person. But if I'm being completely honest, there is one person out there that I do tend to screw over constantly. Now, mind you, I don't intend to be a jerk to this person. I mean, I actually care about her a lot. So I'm not purposefully out to get her.

But I do inadvertently wind up making her life a lot more difficult. I've roped her into doing all kinds of things she didn't want to deal with. I've cheated her out of money. I've made her pick up the pieces whenever I miss a work deadline. And I've even forced her to eat healthier while I get to pick out. This poor girl winds up being the collateral damage in nearly every bad decision. I've ever made. So who is this easy mark?

That person I'm constantly sabotaging? She is future Laurie. She's me just in the future. Tomorrow, Laurie, or next month, Lori. And let me tell you, from her perspective, right now, Lori, is a real bitch. To be happier in 2020, I need to stop screwing over future Laurie.

That's the only way I'm going to form better habits and meet my new decade goals. But how do I stop sabotaging my future self? What can we all do to avoid instant gratification and take better care of our tomorrow selves? Our lying minds give us a quick answer to this question. We need willpower. I bet you still have the intuition that gritting your teeth is the way forward.

But that just-forced-yourself kind of willpower tends to disappear as soon as times get rough, deserting us in the very moment we need it most. But what if I told you that science teaches us an easier way to kick ourselves into goal mode, one that makes delaying gratification to protect our future selves a total breeze? Sound too good to be true? Well, it gets even more shocking because my favorite thing about this willpower supercharge strategy is that it doesn't just help you achieve your future goals.

It can also make you happier in the process. So if you're ready to harness some self-control and feel better, Then join me, Dr. Laurie Santos, for the next installment of The Happiness Lab, 2020. I wanted to learn more about this strategy that helps you achieve your future goals and feel good. So I dropped a line to my friend David Desteno. Are we rolling? Here we go. I'm David Desteno, professor of psychology at Northeastern University and author of emotional success,

the power of gratitude, compassion, and pride. So, Dave, one of the things I love about your book is that it really discusses in a lot of detail the limits of willpower. I think in the book you actually call it a candle in the wind. So why is willpower so fragile? Well, let me give you some examples of why I say that. So we tend to use willpower when we're trying to pursue a long-term goal, you know, something that has a big reward in the future, but might be difficult in the moment or require some effort on our part to persevere toward, you know, whether you're trying to study to do well in school or, or I'm. an exam, exercising and eating right, saving money rather than buying the new iPhone. And we tend to try and use willpower to overcome our desires for more immediate gratification. And if it's

something that we consider even more important, you know, this time of the year we can think about New Year's resolutions, right? Eight percent of New Year's resolutions are kept till the year's end. Twenty-five percent are gone in the first week or two of January. And so we're doing something really wrong, right? If pursuing our long-term goals, we all know leads to success, yet our failure rate is that high. And there's a lot of reasons why willpower is weak. For most of our history here on Earth as a human species, the future was very uncertain. I didn't know if the food I was looking at was going to be here tomorrow. I didn't know if I was going to be here in two months. But now the world is a lot more certain. And it's just that

our mental calibration hasn't caught up to that certainty. If you're always using willpower to kind of tamp down desires for what you want in the moment, then your body isn't kind of a perpetual state of stress. You're always trying to tamp down one desire to persevere towards something in the long term, to not eat something you want, but to exercise. That is a problem. Worked by Greg Miller, who's a psychologist at Northwestern University, was looking at this in terms of students in high school and college who were studying for exams. What he found is when you train kids in these cognitive strategies to build willpower, to build grit, to kind of suppress their desires. Yeah, they perform better, but there was actually premature aging to their DNA because of

the stress, which if you extrapolate out, means, yeah, I'm doing better, but I'm not going to be around as long to enjoy the fruits of that success. But the other problem is, oftentimes, we choose not to invoke willpower in the first place, because we're really good as humans at engaging in rationalization, right? I deserve the extra scoop of Ben and Jerry's. I've been good this week. I deserve to spend money on myself or whatever it might be.

And if we go that route, we're not going to engage in willpower in the first place. We're going to give ourselves the easy way out. This looks pretty bad for New Year's resolutions, right? Like this one thing we usually rely on willpower is not going to save us.

So if not willpower, if not pushing ourselves, you know, what can we do? You know, economists talk about this problem as they use a fancy term, which is called intertemporal choice, which basically means do I want an immediate gratification now or am I willing to forego that so that I can have a better gain in the future? And if you think about why we as a human species have the ability for self-control, self-control didn't evolve so that I could save from my 401K.

None of it existed for most of our evolutionary history. What mattered for our success was the ability to be a little bit, Selfless as opposed to selfish. That is, to cooperate with others, to be fair, to be honest, to be generous. Those are the traits that allowed us to be good partners and valuable partners to other people. And what underlie those abilities are what I call moral emotions, things like gratitude, things like compassion, things like authentic pride, not arrogance and hubris. They tend to make us more willing to be selfless, to cooperate with others, to engage. in self-sacrifice to be willing to tamp down our desires for immediate gratification. You know, people often ask me, Lori, you know, Dave, if I want to be a success, should I be a nice guy or a nice woman, or should I be kind of a selfish jerk? And by that, I mean, should I cooperate and work, you know, fairly with others, or should I basically exploit others and be very self-interested? And the answer, what science shows is, you know, I say, well, what's

your time frame? Right. And if you want to be a success, in the short term, yeah, you can be a jerk, you can be selfish, you can exploit others. Individuals who are self-interested who exploit other people's rise very quickly, but over time they begin to fail because no one wants to cooperate with them. No one wants to work with them. And individuals who are selfless, who have the ability to control their desires for immediate gratification and selfish behaviors do well in the long run. And so a lot of what I argue in this book and in my work is that we are not used. using the emotional tools that we have in our arsenal to help us succeed in the long run.

We're relying on these weaker tools of kind of tamping down emotional responses via willpower that researchers shown are pretty fragile. So let's zoom in on one of these tools in particular. You mentioned gratitude. Like, what is gratitude? Yeah, so gratitude is the emotion that we feel when someone gives us something of value at some cost to themselves. A present or financial assistance, it can be, you know, a shoulder to cry on. It can be someone who's going to help us and mentor us. The important thing about it is

that we feel that the benefit that this person is giving us, we couldn't achieve very easily on our own. And they're doing it not to help themselves, but at some cost. And it's not a feeling of indebtedness in the negative sense, but a feeling of this person really helped me and I value that and I want to go above and beyond to pay them back. That feeling is gratitude. I mean, gratitude sounds awesome and it increases happiness, but at first blush, it doesn't seem obvious that this emotion has anything to do with willpower. You know, that feeling grateful isn't going to help me eat healthier or get to the gym in the morning. But like, what's the connection there? Well, the beautiful thing about gratitude is, and any emotion really, is while we feel it,

it kind of sets our expectation for what we should value and what we should do next. Why would you have an emotion that's only focused on the past, right? If you're feeling an emotion that can't change anything you do in the future, it's a waste. Even metabolically, why would the brain want you to waste its time feeling something? And so I tell people gratitude is really about the future. It makes us value long-term goals more than immediate gratification. You may still doubt the idea that gratitude is more powerful for protecting our future selves than good old-fashioned willpower.

But there's some super cool scientific. results to back it up, once that we'll hear about right after this break. The Happiness Lab will be right back. Hey, it's Dr. Lori Santos here. November always feels like the right time for a little reset before the holiday rush. I've been thinking about taking a trip up to a small town in New England to see the last of the fall foliage. I want to sip cider by the fire and just unplug. I'm also looking forward to relaxing walks with my husband. There's something about quite. quiet streets lined with golden leaves that feels like the perfect pause before the busyness of

December. And as I start planning, I've been thinking, well, if I'm away, my home doesn't just need to sit there empty. I could host it on Airbnb. It's a simple, practical way to make extra income and make your home work for you. Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at Airbnb.com slash host. Welcome to Decoding Women's Health. I'm Dr. Elizabeth Poyner, Chair of Women's Health and Gynecology at the Adriah Health Institute in New York City. On this show, I'll be talking to top researchers and top clinicians, asking them your burning questions and bringing that information about women's health and midlife directly to you. A hundred percent of women go through menopause. It can be such a struggle for our quality of life,

but even if it's natural, why should we suffer through it? The types of symptoms that people talk about is forgetting everything. I never used to forget. things. They're concerned that, one, they have dementia, and the other one is, do I have ADHD? There is unprecedented promise with regard to cannabis and cannabinoids, to sleep better, to have less pain, to have better mood, and also to have better day-to-day life. Listen to Decoding Women's Health with Dr. Elizabeth Pointer wherever you get your podcasts. To getting more exercise and stopping procrastination and saving more money, turns out it's our lying minds.

We tell ourselves that all we need is a bit more willpower, that our self-control will save us. But as we've seen, when push comes to shove, our rationalizing minds will just say it's okay to screw over our future selves, just this once. But what if we tried a different strategy? What if we harness an emotion like gratitude, one that naturally primes us to protect our future selves?

This was exactly what researcher did. David Desteno set out to test. He devised an experiment to see whether people could be nice to their future selves in the face of attempting reward. So in our lab, we bring people in. We have them answer a bunch of questions of the form. Would you rather have $10 now or $30 in three weeks, right? And to make it real, we tell them we're going to pick one of your answers and honor it. So if you said I'd rather have $10 now than $30 in three weeks, we gave you $10.

If you said I'd rather have $30 in three weeks, we'd send you a chance. check in three weeks. And what we found, right, is that most people tend to be pretty impatient. That is, they discount the value of future rewards a lot. So, for example, our average subject said they would take $17 now rather than $100 in a year. Another way of saying that is they viewed $100 in a year is worth $17 now. And I don't know about you or your listeners, but if you don't need that $17 to survive right now, then passing up an opportunity to quintuple your money, given with the banks are paying is not the greatest decision. When we made people feel grateful, right, suddenly how much they discounted the future, how impatient they were to get that money in their hands

changed, these folks suddenly viewed $100 in a year, not as worth $17 now, but as worth $30. So we'd have to give them at least $30 before they passed up the opportunity for $100 in a year. What that means is they're discounting the value of a future reward less. And if you take this and you extrapolate it out to the real world, to decisions that matter, you know, other people have found that people who experience gratitude are more willing to exercise for better health. They're more willing to save their money rather than spend it on impulse buys. They're more willing to work harder for long-term goals.

And so what we see here is just by changing the emotional state you're in, how much you value the future changes. And so that raises the question of, you know, how did you, as this clever experimentalist, get people to experience gratitude? You know, how do you make people more grateful in the lab? One way we do this is we have them doing this task on the computer that's designed to be god-awful boring.

Psychologists are good at that. Yeah, exactly. The god-awful boring task. And right, as they think they're about to be done, the computer is rigged to crash or to look like it crashes on them. And then the experimenter comes in and says, oh, I'm sorry, you're going to have to do this all over again. Let me go get the tech. And, of course, people are not happy.

We have somebody else in the lab who our subjects believe is another subject taking the study, but it's actually an actor who works for us. And this person will get up, walk over to them and say, oh, this is terrible. I'm pretty good with computers. Let me see if I can help you. And so, you know, she starts futzing with the wires and surrepetitiously hits a key that starts it's a timer, and lo and behold, bang, the computer comes back on. And 95% of our subjects are incredibly grateful for this. Five percent of them think somehow they fixed it themselves. But for the most part, they get excluded. But for the most part, if people are very grateful because

they don't want to do this, this got off on task over again. And in that way, what we can find is that the people who are actually experiencing gratitude in the moment, compared to people who are feeling neutral or people who are feeling happy. And that was important because we wanted to show it wasn't just that you were feeling positive, but that it was something really particular about gratitude. What gratitude makes you do is engage in self-control. And as I said, evolutionarily speaking, that's so you're willing to be less selfish. But if you think about it, when you feel gratitude, there's one person besides strangers or people you meet on the street or friends who you can help that's important to your own future goals. And that is your own

future self. And what we find is when you're feeling grateful, yes, you're willing to sacrifice for other people, but you're also willing to sacrifice for your own future self. And that's how you can pivot the power of gratitude from just being this emotion that has kind of a moral cast, to do the right thing, to repay debts or to behave morally, to actually help your own future self achieve her or his own goals. I wanted to talk a little bit about some of the specific domains in which gratitude helps, because I just find these data is totally fascinating. So In your book, you show that gratitude doesn't just help you on financial decision-making. It'll also help you, like, at your job. Yeah, it just depends what your job is. So, you know, Adam Grant has this great data where he shows that people who are working in a call center and talk about a thankless job. You're calling people up for fundraising, asking people to donate money. When gratitude is expressed in those offices, people's productivity goes up 50%. And not only do they work harder, but the

they're actually happy about it. They feel good about it. And so there's no stress there. When you're a doctor, right, if you're feeling gratitude, it makes you more willing to invest the effort to do the right thing. And so you're more willing the data show to engage in greater thought in terms of your diagnoses. And so gratitude in whatever the realm is that we're talking about by giving you more patients, by giving you and nudging you, is going to improve the outcome. And while it's doing it, it's going to solve two other problems for you. And this is something else that I really want to talk about is that it does it in a way that's better for your mind and your body in terms of your physical health and your mental well-being. And so talk about the mental well-being part

because one of the things we're trying to do is to help people find strategies that can allow them to achieve their goals, but in doing so can make them happy in the moment too. And that's really the amazing thing about gratitude is it doesn't just help you exercise more and save more. If Feels good, unlike willpower. That's right. So David Brooks likes to talk about that there are two types of virtues people have. Resume virtues, which are the virtues like being dogged, working hard, having grit, trying to get ahead. And eulogy virtues, things like being fair, being generous, being kind.

And the eulogy virtues are the ones that ultimately we want to be remembered for. They're the ones that draw other people to us, that give us the relationships that help our lives. lives. And so if we're pursuing our own success in whatever realm it might be, you know, as I said, for millennia, the way to do that was to have good character to be fair, be generous. It used to be that eulogy virtues and resume virtues were the same. There was no difference between them. But because of the way we structure our lives now, we can pursue success in a very atomistic manner. That is, you know, we can just be dogged. And if we earn enough money, we can meet all of our needs. we don't have to have other people around us as much.

But that leads to a not very fulfilling life, and it's a very stressful existence. When you choose to pursue success by cultivating emotions like gratitude, by virtue of what you're doing, yes, it's going to give you the self-control, to pursue your goals, to have patience, to persevere in the face of difficulty. But it's also going to change your relationships, right? when we feel gratitude, not only do we work harder, but we show more appreciation to others around us. It makes us behave more loyally. It makes us behave more compassionately toward other people. And so we build that social safety net that are there to buttress us. And so, you know,

when you look at gratitude, people who feel more gratitude, yes, they exercise more, yes, they save more, yes, they get ahead in life more. But they also sleep better at night. They also have better blood pressure. They show less stress reactivity than do people who don't experience gratitude more often. They even have better cholesterol. How and why these things are intertwined is an interesting story, having to do with the stress and do they exercise more because of that gratitude, et cetera. But gratitude really is a buffer. It helps us pursue our resume virtues and our eulogy virtues at the same time. What's so striking about this, though, is that I think if you asked people, people often think those resume virtues and eulogy virtues are in conflict,

right? Like, you know, to boost up your resume, you've got to, you know, stop feeling for your fellow man. That's right. But it's just the opposite. So so much of this podcast is about the idea that our minds are leading us astray, right? We have this bad intuition about what gratitude's going to do. Like, it makes us weak. You know, it's going to make us help others rather than getting a head of life. Yeah. And part of that, right, is, you know, I think our resume and our eulogy virtues, we think of them as distinct. But for most of our evolutionary history, they weren't. And we're kind of told that, you know, the way to succeed is to be self-interested. But if you actually look at the data, it's not true. You know, I think we're being sold a bill of goods. You know, it is in the short term,

right, the faster way is to kind of be self-interested. But in the long run, it is people who experienced gratitude, who experience compassion and empathy that do really, really well. You know, my friend Bob Franks and economist at Cornell, and he wrote this great book called Success and Luck. And he talks about the illusion that people have, that the way that any of us succeeded was through our own self-determination. And I'm not saying that doesn't matter. Of course it does. But there's a lot of luck along the way. And if you think about what a lot of luck is, is it's not really luck. It's people opening doors for us. It's people supporting us in our hours of need and helping us out. and us doing the same for them, right?

That's what a lot of luck is, not all. When people do that for us, we feel gratitude. And when we feel gratitude, it makes us not only want to pay those people back, but to pay it forward to other people. So, for example, in our studies that we were talking about, when we make people feel gratitude in the lab, and then they leave the lab thinking the experiment is over,

and we have a stranger approach to them who asks for help. They'll help the stranger, too. And the reason why is when you feel gratitude, it makes you want to help someone else, right? The brain is nudging you that way because in the long term, that's a successful strategy. And so the beautiful thing about gratitude is it makes us pay it forward and it creates kind of an ongoing cycle. And so I think people often feel that gratitude can be a sign of weakness, but really gratitude is an emotion of power. And so hopefully the listeners are sold on this idea that becoming more grateful is a good thing. But then that raises the question, how do you do that?

What can listeners do to improve their sense of gratitude? One strategy is simply doing daily reflections, thinking for a few minutes about what it is that you're grateful for in life. Lots of people do gratitude diaries. The trick there is we all have the two or three things that we're incredibly grateful for in our lives. But if you think about the same things over and over again, they're going to lose their power. You're going to habituate to it.

It's going to become boring. And so think about little things. Think about the person who gave you their seat on the bus or the subway. Think about the person who gave you directions. You let you go on the highway. Someone who held the door for you. And you might say, Dave, really, is that going to work? It does.

So, you know, I told you earlier about the way we induced gratitude in our lab, where we have these big shenanigans we go through where computers crash on people. But when we simply ask people, reflect on something in your life that you're grateful for, whether it's something somebody did for you, your parents, a friend, the universe, if you believe in God, God, whatever it might be, those simple reflections produce the same exact effects. And so it may sound trite, but it's not cultivating gratitude daily in your life. We'll do this through reflections. Another way is to engage in something called the reciprocity ring. This is great if you have an office and you're trying to create a culture of gratitude

or a classroom or even for families at home. Have everybody take a post-it note. and write on the Post-it note something they need help with. Then, on a board or on the refrigerator or wherever it might be, stick up those Post-it notes in kind of a circle. Now everybody take a different color poster note and write your name on it and go up and stick it next to a Post-it note that's up there already where a person's requesting help that you're saying,

ah, John says he needs help with this. I, Dave, I'm going to help him with this, right? And then what you do is draw lines or tie strings or tape, whatever you might be. And what you'll see is connections in this circle. And then most importantly, go give that assistance that you said. And what this does is a few things. One, it shows that asking for help is okay and offering to help is okay. And by you actually helping the person who you said you were going to help, that person feels gratitude. And what our research shows is when that person feels gratitude, it increases the probability very dramatically that they're just

going to go and offer help to someone else. And it's a way of creating kind of a norm and a culture for gratitude in your family or your classroom or your workplace. Have you used this in your lab or in your own family? Yeah. Before I started doing this research, I wouldn't say I wasn't ungrateful person, but I don't think I thought a lot about gratitude in my life. But what I realized through doing this work is that you can curate your own emotional life, right? Emotions don't just happen to us. We can curate what we feel by taking time to think about what we want to feel, by paying attention to the people that help us, as opposed to the people that annoy us. And so what I've begun to do in my own daily life now is to do that, is to focus on when

somebody does something for me or someone helps me, to not say thank you and quickly move by that, but to focus on it for a few minutes, to curate the emotions that I feel are important and valuable in my daily experience as opposed to the ones that aren't. And what happens when you do that is it begins to change the lens through which you automatically view your life so that suddenly gratitude isn't something that you're trying to curate, but it becomes a lens that you pick out things with daily in life. And I think it becomes a habit in some ways. And the beautiful thing about gratitude as opposed to habits is if I have a habit to save money

that works for saving money, if I have a habit to study that works for studying. But if I have a habit to experience gratitude, that's going to bleed over into making me better able to pursue my long-term goals in any realm. And I would encourage your listeners to try and create gratitude as a habit. After talking to Dave and hearing about his work, I've decided on a personal goal for this new decade. I'm going to stop sabotaging future Lari. I'm going to stop assuming that willpower will save me. Instead, I'm going to harness the power of my moral emotions. I'm going to work harder to become a bit more grateful, starting now.

So here goes. I'm so grateful that Dave and so many other scientists took time out of their busy schedules to share these insights with us. I'm so, so thankful that we all have a fresh start with this new decade to make a bunch of positive changes that we want to see in 2020. And I'm so, so grateful for you. Thanks so much for listening to this podcast. And thank you for being a part of this journey to use science to live a little bit better.

And finally, I'd be super grateful if you joined Future Lari for our third bonus episode of The Happiness Lab 2020. Welcome to Decoding Women's Health. I'm Dr. Elizabeth Pointer, chair of Women's Health and Gynecology at the Atria Health Institute. in New York City. On this show, I'll be talking to top researchers and top clinicians, asking them your burning questions and bringing that information about women's health and midlife directly to you. A hundred percent of women go through menopause. It can be such a struggle for our quality of life, but even if it's natural, why should we suffer through it? The types of symptoms that people talk about is forgetting everything. I never used to forget things. They're concerned that, one, they have dementia, and the other.

one is, do I have ADHD? There is unprecedented promise with regard to cannabis and cannabinoids, to sleep better, to have less pain, to have better mood, and also to have better day-to-day life. Listen to Decoding Women's Health with Dr. Elizabeth Pointer wherever you get your podcasts. This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed Human.