The Science of Gratitude & How to Build a Gratitude Practice

00:00:00.320 | - Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast,

00:00:02.280 | where we discuss science and science-based tools

00:00:04.880 | for everyday life.

00:00:05.900 | I'm Andrew Huberman,

00:00:10.240 | and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology

00:00:12.680 | at Stanford School of Medicine.

00:00:14.460 | Today, we are talking all about the science of gratitude.

00:00:17.560 | In part, we're doing this

00:00:18.380 | because of the upcoming Thanksgiving holiday,

00:00:20.560 | which of course is all about giving thanks, gratitude,

00:00:23.720 | but also because there's now a wealth of data

00:00:25.960 | showing that having an effective gratitude practice

00:00:29.700 | can impact a huge number of health variables,

00:00:32.840 | both mental health and physical health in positive ways,

00:00:36.060 | things like cardiovascular health,

00:00:37.480 | things like relationships, things like mental health,

00:00:40.500 | things like physical and cognitive performance,

00:00:42.720 | and these are not small effects.

00:00:44.100 | These are very large positive effects.

00:00:46.880 | However, in researching this episode,

00:00:48.700 | I was completely surprised as to what constitutes

00:00:51.520 | an effective gratitude practice.

00:00:54.680 | I, I think like many of you,

00:00:56.300 | would have thought that an effective gratitude practice

00:00:58.160 | simply involves writing down a few things

00:01:00.560 | or many things that we're grateful for,

00:01:02.200 | or thinking about those,

00:01:03.680 | or really making an effort to somaticize

00:01:07.520 | or feel some of the elements of gratitude

00:01:10.840 | while writing out that list or thinking about that list.

00:01:13.700 | It turns out that an effective gratitude practice

00:01:16.520 | doesn't resemble that at all.

00:01:18.300 | The neuroimaging data, the physiological data,

00:01:20.620 | looking at things like inflammatory markers,

00:01:22.780 | other studies purely looking at the psychology

00:01:26.240 | and the long and short-term effects of an effective

00:01:28.640 | gratitude practice point to a completely different approach

00:01:32.000 | to using gratitude to positively impact health metrics.

00:01:35.800 | Fortunately, these are things that we can all do

00:01:37.280 | very easily.

00:01:38.660 | Some of them are actually fun.

00:01:41.040 | You can do them in a variety of contexts.

00:01:42.960 | So today we're going to talk about the science

00:01:44.640 | of effective gratitude practices,

00:01:46.720 | and we're going to describe what those are

00:01:48.280 | and how you can incorporate them into your life.

00:01:50.680 | Before we dive into today's topic,

00:01:52.280 | I just want to highlight a particularly interesting set

00:01:54.680 | of findings from the literature.

00:01:56.600 | This is a study that came out in the journal Cell Report,

00:01:58.960 | Cell Press Journal, excellent journal.

00:02:00.760 | It's very relevant to today's topic.

00:02:02.940 | In fact, we're going to spend more time with this paper

00:02:04.720 | a little bit later in the episode.

00:02:06.680 | The study involved having subjects listen to a story.

00:02:10.780 | The subjects are all listening to the same story,

00:02:14.760 | but those subjects are not listening to it together.

00:02:16.820 | They're not rounded up in a circle or all in a room.

00:02:19.240 | They're in separate rooms or entirely separate locations

00:02:22.600 | on the planet, or they are actually brought

00:02:25.400 | into the laboratory on separate days.

00:02:27.960 | What this study found is that different subjects listening

00:02:32.240 | to the same story undergo the same variation in heart rate.

00:02:37.240 | In other words, the gaps between their heartbeats

00:02:41.160 | start to resemble one another in response

00:02:43.680 | to the same story.

00:02:44.980 | Now, this is very interesting.

00:02:46.320 | This is a coordination of the physiology of the body

00:02:50.640 | in response to a narrative, a story in different people.

00:02:54.560 | And yet when they line up the heart rates

00:02:57.000 | of these different people who listen to the story

00:02:59.120 | at completely different times,

00:03:00.600 | they find that those heart rates map onto one another

00:03:03.460 | almost identically.

00:03:04.600 | It's really remarkable.

00:03:06.620 | We're going to talk about what this means

00:03:08.300 | in terms of coordination of neural circuits in the brain

00:03:11.140 | and neural circuits in the body and the organs

00:03:13.720 | such as the heart, but also the lungs

00:03:15.200 | and other organs of the body,

00:03:16.400 | and what this means for changing one's overall state.

00:03:20.040 | A key thing that's going to come up today again and again

00:03:23.140 | is the distinction between traits

00:03:25.840 | which are pervasive aspects of who we are

00:03:29.640 | and how we tend to react to different types of circumstances

00:03:32.680 | and states which are more transient.

00:03:34.780 | They tend to, you can invoke a state in somebody,

00:03:37.600 | a state of fear or a state of relaxation.

00:03:40.040 | But what this study really starts to point to

00:03:42.580 | is that there are specific approaches

00:03:44.320 | that any of us can take in order to really rewire

00:03:47.520 | our nervous system such that we are calmer

00:03:50.440 | if we want to be calmer in certain circumstances,

00:03:52.880 | that we are more responsive in certain circumstances

00:03:55.560 | if that's our goal.

00:03:56.640 | So we'll return to how one would go about doing that.

00:03:58.840 | I think these results are just beautiful

00:04:01.520 | in the sense that they really show

00:04:03.320 | that our brain and our body are highly coordinated

00:04:05.380 | because people are listening to the story

00:04:06.800 | and the heart rate is changing in response to the story,

00:04:10.300 | but that there is a, what we call a stereotopy,

00:04:14.120 | a sort of stereotyped response to a given story.

00:04:17.560 | In my mind, there was no reason

00:04:18.760 | why the results had to be this way.

00:04:20.560 | Two people listen to the same story,

00:04:21.960 | why should their heart rates be almost identical

00:04:23.880 | to the same story?

00:04:24.980 | Very, very interesting and points to the power

00:04:27.160 | of narrative and story in coordinating our physiology.

00:04:30.920 | And this is something powerful that we can leverage.

00:04:32.980 | Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast

00:04:35.340 | is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford.

00:04:37.940 | It is however, part of my desire and effort

00:04:39.900 | to bring zero cost to consumer information about science

00:04:42.560 | and science-related tools to the general public.

00:04:45.380 | In keeping with that theme,

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00:09:11.180 | Let's talk about gratitude.

00:09:12.540 | And to begin, I'd like to emphasize the various aspects

00:09:15.000 | of mental and physical health that have been shown

00:09:16.760 | to benefit from a regular gratitude practice.

00:09:19.860 | There are studies showing

00:09:20.760 | that performing a gratitude practice twice or three times

00:09:25.400 | or even just once a week can lead to a pervasive,

00:09:28.520 | a long lasting impact on subjective wellbeing.

00:09:33.080 | People report feeling happier, more meaning, joy,

00:09:35.880 | even awe for their life experience

00:09:38.560 | simply in response to adding a gratitude practice.

00:09:41.440 | The key thing is it has to be the right gratitude practice.

00:09:43.720 | And we're going to talk about

00:09:44.600 | what the right gratitude practice looks like

00:09:46.840 | in just a little bit.

00:09:48.320 | But there are additional benefits of a gratitude practice.

00:09:52.200 | There are studies showing that a regular gratitude practice

00:09:56.160 | can provide resilience to trauma in two ways.

00:09:59.720 | It can provide a reframing and resilience

00:10:02.360 | to prior traumatic experiences.

00:10:04.240 | So buffering people against the negative physiological

00:10:07.520 | effects and psychological effects of earlier trauma,

00:10:10.020 | but also inoculating them in many ways

00:10:12.960 | to any traumas that might arrive later in life.

00:10:15.980 | So that's a powerful thing.

00:10:17.660 | And today we will talk about

00:10:19.300 | how that's actually accomplished.

00:10:20.560 | It's actually accomplished by shifting the way

00:10:23.260 | that the fear and defense networks

00:10:25.260 | in the brain actually function.

00:10:27.380 | We'll get right down into the details of that.

00:10:29.680 | The other thing that a gratitude practice does

00:10:31.600 | is it's been shown to benefit social relationships,

00:10:34.680 | but not just for the relationship

00:10:36.660 | in which you express gratitude, right?

00:10:38.440 | So on the face of it, you might think,

00:10:40.060 | okay, if I express gratitude for somebody over and over,

00:10:42.560 | over and over, over and over,

00:10:43.840 | then I'm going to feel better about that person.

00:10:45.520 | And indeed that is one effect of a gratitude practice

00:10:48.360 | that's called a prosocial or inter-social gratitude practice.

00:10:51.880 | But there are now several studies,

00:10:54.800 | recent studies in good journals,

00:10:56.480 | pointing to the fact that a regular gratitude practice

00:10:59.600 | can also enhance one's social relationships

00:11:01.900 | across the board, in the workplace, at school,

00:11:05.080 | with family, in romantic relationships,

00:11:07.040 | and even one's relationship to themselves,

00:11:08.880 | which is really what the subjective feelings

00:11:10.400 | of wellbeing are.

00:11:11.500 | So it's clear to me that an effective gratitude practice

00:11:15.240 | has an outsized effect on many, many aspects

00:11:19.240 | of mental and physical health.

00:11:20.720 | And for those of you that are coming to this conversation

00:11:22.840 | thinking gratitude practice,

00:11:24.820 | oh, that's kind of wishy-washy or woo,

00:11:26.680 | it's going to involve putting your hand on your heart

00:11:28.720 | and feeling into all the amazing things

00:11:30.640 | that you happen to have,

00:11:31.520 | even when things are really terrible,

00:11:32.920 | that's not where we're going at all.

00:11:34.760 | And equally important is to understand that the neurochemical,

00:11:40.700 | the anti-inflammatory, and the neural circuit mechanisms

00:11:45.720 | that gratitude can invoke are equally on par

00:11:50.480 | with some of the effects of pharmacology,

00:11:53.160 | of things like high-intensity interval training

00:11:55.120 | and exercise, and other things that we think of

00:11:57.300 | as kind of more potent forms of self-intervention.

00:12:00.640 | So if you are of the mindset that a gratitude practice

00:12:04.120 | is kind of weak sauce, buckle up,

00:12:06.760 | because the data actually point to the fact

00:12:08.680 | that a gratitude practice is a very, very potent way

00:12:12.160 | in which you can steer your mental and physical health

00:12:14.700 | in positive directions,

00:12:16.360 | and that those effects are very long-lasting.

00:12:18.880 | Before we dive into the tools and mechanisms

00:12:21.000 | and scientific studies around gratitude,

00:12:23.120 | I'd like to just set the framework for the discussion.

00:12:25.520 | Gratitude is what we call a prosocial behavior

00:12:28.140 | or a prosocial mindset.

00:12:30.600 | Now, you can be grateful for something

00:12:32.780 | without it involving anybody else.

00:12:34.880 | So the social part isn't meant to convey anything

00:12:37.420 | about interpersonal relations, although it can.

00:12:39.580 | And today we're going to talk a lot

00:12:40.800 | about how interpersonal relations can be incorporated

00:12:43.720 | into a gratitude practice in really powerful ways.

00:12:46.600 | But prosocial behaviors are basically any behavior

00:12:49.540 | or mode of thinking that allow us to be more effective

00:12:53.880 | in interactions with other people, including ourselves.

00:12:57.440 | Now, prosocial is not just a name

00:12:59.560 | that we give these different tools

00:13:01.800 | and practices and mindsets.

00:13:03.760 | They're actually neural circuits in the brain

00:13:06.100 | that are specifically wired

00:13:07.900 | for prosocial thoughts and behaviors.

00:13:10.200 | And these are distinctly different

00:13:11.740 | from the circuits in the brain

00:13:13.020 | that are involved in defensive behaviors.

00:13:15.440 | So without getting into too much detail just yet,

00:13:17.900 | we will later, we have circuits in the brain

00:13:20.720 | that are what we call a repetitive.

00:13:22.640 | They are designed to bring us closer to things

00:13:24.960 | and to bring us into closer relation

00:13:28.040 | to the details of that sensory experience.

00:13:31.020 | Now, that could be a delicious food that you're eating.

00:13:33.160 | It could be interacting with a loved one.

00:13:34.800 | It could be interacting with a friend

00:13:36.280 | or anyone that you happen to like.

00:13:37.940 | It could even be in your relation to yourself.

00:13:39.940 | These circuits that we're calling prosocial circuits

00:13:42.500 | light up in the brain in neuroimaging,

00:13:44.560 | meaning the neurons are firing more actively,

00:13:46.720 | more electrically, robustly,

00:13:49.720 | sort of like turning up the volume on these neural circuits

00:13:52.640 | in the brain.

00:13:53.660 | And the neural circuits in the brain

00:13:55.360 | that are associated with aversive or defensive behaviors,

00:13:59.400 | things like backing up,

00:14:00.500 | things like covering up the vital organs of the body,

00:14:02.700 | things like a quaking of the voice,

00:14:04.720 | all of the things that are associated

00:14:05.920 | with defensive behaviors are actually antagonized,

00:14:09.200 | meaning they are reduced

00:14:10.720 | when the prosocial circuits are more active.

00:14:13.760 | So the framework here that I'd like to set

00:14:15.680 | is that we have this kind of seesaw

00:14:17.400 | of neural circuits in the brain.

00:14:18.920 | One set that are prosocial

00:14:21.120 | and are designed to bring us closer to others,

00:14:23.600 | including ourselves,

00:14:24.920 | closer to certain sensory experiences, right?

00:14:27.420 | Because a lot of prosocial behaviors

00:14:29.140 | can also be geared towards things like pets or food

00:14:32.400 | or anything that we find we want to be closer to

00:14:35.080 | and want more of.

00:14:36.120 | Whereas the defensive circuits involve areas of the brain,

00:14:39.840 | yes, such as areas that are involved in fear,

00:14:42.480 | but also areas of the brain and body

00:14:44.880 | that are literally associated with freezing

00:14:46.840 | or with backing up.

00:14:48.160 | So the way to think about gratitude

00:14:49.880 | is that it falls under this category of prosocial behaviors,

00:14:52.520 | which are designed to bring us closer

00:14:54.120 | to different types of things

00:14:56.720 | and to enhance the level of detail

00:14:59.880 | that we extract from those experiences.

00:15:02.280 | Now, the existence of these two neural circuits

00:15:04.720 | that I've placed on this sort of a metaphorical seesaw,

00:15:08.520 | if you will,

00:15:09.360 | runs counter to a lot of the messaging

00:15:13.320 | or the ideas that were put forth in the last century

00:15:17.160 | about the psychology of happiness and gratitude

00:15:20.960 | versus the psychology of depression and struggle

00:15:25.960 | and concern about the future.

00:15:28.240 | In fact, I'd like to read a quote from the great,

00:15:30.360 | and we really should call him the great Sigmund Freud

00:15:33.360 | because despite having certain traits

00:15:37.820 | that people criticize him of,

00:15:40.140 | Freud was indeed a genius about many aspects of psychology.

00:15:43.840 | But I just want to read you

00:15:45.840 | Freud's stance on happiness,

00:15:48.360 | and this invokes elements of gratitude as well,

00:15:51.080 | and then you can gauge for yourself.

00:15:53.000 | Quote, "Our possibilities of happiness

00:15:56.720 | "are already restricted by our constitution."

00:15:59.600 | So he's saying that we're basically wired

00:16:01.300 | to not have happiness easily.

00:16:03.840 | "Unhappiness is much less difficult to experience.

00:16:06.280 | "We are threatened with suffering from three directions,

00:16:08.820 | "one from our own body,

00:16:10.360 | "which is doomed to decay and dissolution

00:16:12.660 | "and which cannot even do without pain and anxiety

00:16:15.800 | "as warning signals.

00:16:17.020 | "Two, from the external world,

00:16:18.860 | "which may rage against us with overwhelming

00:16:20.960 | "and merciless forces of destruction.

00:16:22.960 | "And three, and finally, from our relations with others,

00:16:26.600 | "the suffering of which from this last source

00:16:28.800 | "is perhaps more painful to us than any other."

00:16:32.300 | That's Sigmund Freud.

00:16:33.580 | And not all of his writings were that pessimistic,

00:16:36.540 | if you will.

00:16:37.360 | What Freud is referring to there

00:16:40.820 | are those defensive circuits.

00:16:42.380 | And of course, he talked about psychological defensives.

00:16:44.920 | And in full disclosure,

00:16:46.160 | I am a huge fan of much of the psychological literature

00:16:51.020 | and psychoanalysis of Sigmund Freud

00:16:53.800 | and his descendants, Jung and others.

00:16:56.340 | I think there are strong elements of truth there,

00:16:58.620 | but it gives you a sense of the kind of mindset of psychology

00:17:01.700 | early in the last century.

00:17:03.800 | And then of course,

00:17:04.640 | was the emergence of the positive psychology movement,

00:17:06.880 | which was really about invoking the understanding

00:17:10.600 | and eventually the elucidation of the neural circuits

00:17:14.320 | for things like happiness and awe and affiliation

00:17:17.400 | and things that we are calling prosocial circuits.

00:17:20.020 | So the field of psychology has a dark and light,

00:17:23.300 | if you will.

00:17:24.200 | And the field of neuroscience has a dark and light.

00:17:27.380 | You have these, what we call parallel pathways in the brain.

00:17:30.300 | And we have parallel pathways in the mind

00:17:32.220 | that set us up for feeling good about things

00:17:34.300 | or for feeling less good about things.

00:17:36.620 | I think what's really salient from the quote from Freud

00:17:38.860 | is that what he's saying is our default

00:17:41.580 | is to be concerned about the future,

00:17:43.680 | to be wrapped in our defenses.

00:17:46.560 | And to some extent that's true.

00:17:48.580 | And the reason we can say that's true

00:17:50.660 | is because most of us need a gratitude practice.

00:17:55.320 | We need to do certain things in order to feel good

00:17:58.560 | and to feel happy.

00:17:59.520 | We actually have to put work into it.

00:18:01.240 | It is quite possible that there's an asymmetry

00:18:04.060 | in the way that these prosocial versus defensive circuits

00:18:07.040 | are set up such that because defensive circuits

00:18:10.660 | are designed to keep us safe psychologically

00:18:12.940 | and physically safe, that they have more robustness

00:18:16.240 | or they can actually drive our behavior more easily.

00:18:19.180 | I'll give you an analogy in the system

00:18:21.240 | that I'm most familiar with as a neuroscientist,

00:18:23.300 | which is the visual system.

00:18:24.720 | In the visual system, we have parallel pathways.

00:18:27.700 | We have neurons in our eye that respond

00:18:30.540 | when things in our environment get brighter.

00:18:32.660 | Literally when the lights go up,

00:18:34.340 | these neurons start firing like crazy.

00:18:36.300 | And we have neurons in our eye that respond

00:18:38.300 | when things get darker, when things start dimming

00:18:40.560 | or go from white to black.

00:18:42.540 | The circuits for detecting darkening are much more robust

00:18:48.320 | and much more numerous than are the circuits for brightness.

00:18:51.140 | And that is probably related probably to the fact

00:18:54.740 | that dark objects or experiencing looming,

00:18:59.740 | meaning incoming objects and being able to perceive them

00:19:03.580 | is something that's vital to our survival.

00:19:05.900 | Whereas being able to perceive the brightening of things

00:19:08.820 | might be important to survival in certain contexts,

00:19:11.140 | car lights coming at you at night or something of that sort,

00:19:13.620 | but not as often in a kind of a evolutionary

00:19:16.780 | or ethological context as the darkening of things.

00:19:19.520 | So I think Freud's quote and the field of psychology

00:19:23.020 | now point to the fact that indeed we have the capacity

00:19:27.700 | for happiness and we have the capacity for great worry

00:19:30.400 | and concern and depression and unhappiness.

00:19:33.480 | And the neural circuit literature also supports that.

00:19:36.920 | The key thing for today's discussion is that gratitude

00:19:40.560 | turns out to be one of the most potent wedges

00:19:43.780 | by which we can insert our thinking.

00:19:46.240 | And as you also see the physiology of our body

00:19:49.460 | between these two circuits and give a little more levity,

00:19:53.440 | if you will, to the side of the seesaw that's associated

00:19:56.440 | with positive prosocial feelings.

00:19:59.400 | And if you keep imagining this seesaw imagery,

00:20:03.760 | what's really beautiful about gratitude practices

00:20:06.280 | is that if they're performed repeatedly

00:20:09.040 | and not even that often, but repeatedly,

00:20:11.640 | then one can actually shift their neural circuits

00:20:14.820 | such that the seesaw that I'm calling prosocial

00:20:17.500 | versus defensive behaviors can actually start to tilt.

00:20:20.220 | And the little hinge, if you will,

00:20:21.660 | on the seesaw in the middle can be adjusted in

00:20:24.060 | a little tighter when the side for gratitude

00:20:28.560 | and for wellbeing and for feelings of happiness

00:20:31.360 | is a little bit higher.

00:20:32.800 | What this means is that whether or not Freud

00:20:35.220 | was right or wrong, whether or not the neuroscientists

00:20:38.300 | in one camp or another right or wrong,

00:20:40.300 | we now know with certainty that a regular gratitude practice

00:20:43.660 | can shift the prosocial circuit so that they dominate

00:20:47.120 | our physiology and our mindset in ways that can enhance

00:20:51.020 | many, many aspects of our physical and mental health

00:20:53.940 | by default.

00:20:54.840 | So we don't always have to constantly be in practice

00:20:57.320 | trying to be happy.

00:20:58.920 | So the succinct way of saying all this is yes, indeed,

00:21:02.180 | we might be wired or in such that we have

00:21:05.300 | a greater propensity for unhappiness than happiness,

00:21:09.260 | but gratitude practices provided they are the effective ones

00:21:12.940 | and they are performed regularly can shift those circuits

00:21:17.320 | such that we are happier on average,

00:21:19.760 | even when we are not performing those practices.

00:21:22.240 | Now I'd like to talk about some of the neurochemistry

00:21:24.920 | and neural circuits associated with gratitude

00:21:27.580 | and prosocial behaviors.

00:21:29.680 | Numerous times on this podcast,

00:21:31.080 | I've talked about so-called neuromodulators.

00:21:33.560 | Those of you that might've forgotten

00:21:35.240 | or have never heard of neuromodulators before,

00:21:37.440 | neuromodulators are chemicals that are released

00:21:39.360 | in the brain and body that change the activity

00:21:42.480 | of other neural circuits.

00:21:43.640 | They make certain brain areas more likely to be active

00:21:46.820 | and other brain areas less likely to be active.

00:21:50.560 | These neuromodulators have names like dopamine, serotonin,

00:21:53.000 | acetylcholine, epinephrine, and so on.

00:21:54.960 | The main neuromodulators associated with gratitude

00:21:58.960 | and prosocial behaviors tends to be serotonin.

00:22:02.440 | Serotonin is released from a very small collection

00:22:05.820 | of neurons in the brainstem called the RAFAE,

00:22:09.940 | R-A-P-H-E, the RAFAE nucleus,

00:22:12.640 | and a few other places in the brain.

00:22:14.200 | And the RAFAE neurons send these little wires

00:22:16.720 | that we call axons out to numerous places in the brain.

00:22:20.040 | And they tend to increase the activity

00:22:22.160 | of particular neural circuits that lend themselves

00:22:26.200 | to more approach to particular types of experiences.

00:22:30.840 | That makes total sense if you think about it.

00:22:33.160 | Have a chemical that under certain circumstances

00:22:36.120 | is released in the brain that triggers the activity

00:22:39.360 | of neural circuits that makes the organism, you,

00:22:42.900 | more likely to stay in an interaction with something

00:22:46.440 | or even lean in and seek a more detailed interaction

00:22:49.760 | with that person, place, or thing.

00:22:53.280 | Beautiful work from a cognitive neuropsychologist.

00:22:57.040 | His name is Antonio Damasio.

00:22:59.120 | He's a world-class neuroscientist.

00:23:02.400 | He's been in the game a very long time.

00:23:04.200 | Has explored the so-called neural correlates of gratitude.

00:23:07.420 | And two main brain areas are activated

00:23:11.040 | by these serotonergic systems.

00:23:13.400 | And when people experience something

00:23:15.960 | that makes them feel gratitude,

00:23:18.460 | even if it's shallow gratitude or deep,

00:23:20.840 | and if it's all the way to deep gratitude,

00:23:22.940 | they see activation of these particular brain circuits

00:23:25.580 | I'll mention in a moment.

00:23:26.500 | And the amount of activation scales

00:23:28.720 | with how intensely the person experienced

00:23:31.600 | the feeling of gratitude.

00:23:33.480 | And those two areas have particular names.

00:23:35.460 | You don't need to know the names,

00:23:36.540 | but for those of you that want to know,

00:23:37.840 | they are the anterior cingulate cortex

00:23:39.920 | and the medial prefrontal cortex.

00:23:41.880 | And of course, these brain areas are connected

00:23:43.340 | to a number of other networks in the brain.

00:23:45.440 | In fact, that's how they get you or others

00:23:48.560 | to lean into certain experiences

00:23:51.060 | because when these areas are active,

00:23:53.400 | certain thought processes get invoked.

00:23:56.040 | Those thought processes probably resemble something like,

00:23:58.980 | hmm, I'd like to experience more of this

00:24:01.020 | or hmm, this feels really good.

00:24:02.500 | And then they literally feed onto your muscles

00:24:06.580 | via the neurons, making you happy to stay stationary

00:24:10.860 | if you're experiencing something you like,

00:24:12.320 | or to move closer to something that you find attractive

00:24:16.020 | to you literally.

00:24:17.700 | So these are powerful circuits.

00:24:19.580 | Of these two brain areas,

00:24:20.900 | the one I'd like to focus on the most

00:24:22.740 | is the medial prefrontal cortex.

00:24:25.900 | Many of you have probably heard

00:24:26.980 | of the medial prefrontal cortex

00:24:28.540 | because this is the area of the brain

00:24:30.760 | that is involved in planning and in deep thinking

00:24:35.140 | and evaluation of different types of experiences,

00:24:37.760 | past, present, or future.

00:24:39.800 | It seems actually that pretty much every study

00:24:42.380 | of a human anything seems to involve

00:24:44.340 | the medial prefrontal cortex,

00:24:45.660 | or at least one could get that impression

00:24:47.740 | just by looking at scientific abstracts

00:24:49.440 | and papers these days.

00:24:51.580 | So I think it's worth us taking a step back and asking,

00:24:53.900 | what does the medial prefrontal cortex really do, right?

00:24:57.220 | How could this one piece of neural real estate

00:24:59.560 | that we all have right behind our forehead,

00:25:01.720 | how could that be involved in so many different things?

00:25:04.340 | And the reason it can be involved

00:25:05.540 | in so many different things,

00:25:06.580 | and the reason it's especially important for gratitude

00:25:09.220 | is that medial prefrontal cortex sets context, okay?

00:25:13.600 | It sets context,

00:25:14.940 | and it literally defines the meaning of your experience.

00:25:19.300 | Now, this is not at all an abstract phenomenon.

00:25:21.660 | I'm going to give a very physiological example of this,

00:25:25.880 | and then we're going to translate it to gratitude,

00:25:27.800 | but I really want everyone to understand

00:25:29.840 | how is it that medial prefrontal cortex

00:25:32.140 | sets the context of everything in your life?

00:25:35.760 | Well, it does it the following way.

00:25:37.480 | You have a number of circuits deeper in your brain

00:25:40.420 | that simply create some sensations or they allow you,

00:25:44.120 | I should say, to perceive certain sensations.

00:25:46.580 | Let's use the example of cold exposure,

00:25:49.140 | something that we'd sometimes talk about in this podcast

00:25:51.140 | for other reasons.

00:25:52.080 | If you were to deliberately place yourself into an ice bath,

00:25:56.320 | it would be uncomfortable,

00:25:58.660 | even if you're adapted to cold and so forth.

00:26:01.000 | The discomfort is non-negotiable.

00:26:05.740 | However, if you are doing it because you want to,

00:26:09.000 | or because you have knowledge

00:26:10.600 | that there are particular health benefits,

00:26:12.740 | the medial prefrontal cortex can then control areas

00:26:18.880 | of your deeper brain, like the hypothalamus,

00:26:21.280 | to positively impact the neurochemicals

00:26:24.060 | that are released into your system.

00:26:25.440 | You'll still get a lot of adrenaline

00:26:27.120 | by getting into the ice bath,

00:26:28.800 | but the fact that you are doing this deliberately

00:26:31.880 | and your knowledge that you are making the choice,

00:26:34.380 | that it's you that's deciding

00:26:35.840 | to put yourself through this discomfort,

00:26:38.460 | has been shown to create a very different

00:26:41.840 | and positive effect on things like dopamine,

00:26:45.240 | on things like anti-inflammatory markers

00:26:48.200 | in your immune system, et cetera,

00:26:49.740 | compared to if someone pushes you into an ice bath,

00:26:53.660 | or if you are doing it because someone insists

00:26:56.400 | that you do it and you really, really don't want to.

00:26:58.780 | So there's a very subtle distinction here.

00:27:00.800 | It's just the distinction of motivation and desire

00:27:04.940 | or lack of motivation and being forced into something.

00:27:07.680 | And there are a number of other effects of this

00:27:09.640 | that have been described.

00:27:10.800 | In the episode with Robert Sapolsky

00:27:13.200 | that I did earlier this last year,

00:27:15.220 | he talked about a study in animals,

00:27:17.240 | which has also been shown in humans.

00:27:18.600 | If you take a mouse, for instance,

00:27:20.360 | and it runs on a running wheel,

00:27:22.000 | which mice really like to do,

00:27:23.800 | there are many positive effects on reducing blood pressure,

00:27:26.400 | improvements in neurochemistry, et cetera, in that mouse.

00:27:29.480 | However, if there's a mouse in the cage right next to it

00:27:32.880 | that's trapped in the running wheel

00:27:34.200 | and it has to run every time the other mouse runs

00:27:37.240 | because the wheels are linked,

00:27:38.640 | well, then the second mouse that's forced

00:27:41.120 | to do the exact same running experiences negative shifts

00:27:45.480 | in their overall health metrics.

00:27:46.680 | Blood pressure goes up, stress hormones go up, et cetera,

00:27:49.300 | because it's not actually making the choice.

00:27:51.520 | Medial prefrontal cortex is the knob,

00:27:54.640 | or the switch rather, that can take one experience

00:27:58.720 | and allow us to frame it

00:28:01.080 | such that it creates positive health effects.

00:28:04.000 | And the exact same experience framed

00:28:06.720 | as something we don't want to do or that we are forced to do

00:28:09.540 | can create negative health effects.

00:28:11.620 | Now, how exactly the neurons

00:28:13.400 | in medial prefrontal cortex do that is rather complicated

00:28:16.360 | and frankly, not completely understood,

00:28:18.580 | but it's somehow able to adjust the activity

00:28:21.220 | of other neural circuits that are purely reflexive.

00:28:23.400 | As we say in neuroscience,

00:28:24.260 | like really dumb neural circuits

00:28:25.720 | that are just like switches and place a context onto it.

00:28:29.400 | So gratitude is a mindset

00:28:34.160 | that activates prefrontal cortex

00:28:37.760 | and in doing so sets the context of your experience

00:28:41.400 | such that you can derive tremendous health benefits,

00:28:44.600 | which leads us to the question,

00:28:46.160 | what kind of gratitude practice

00:28:48.760 | is going to accomplish this, right?

00:28:50.640 | Because it is not simply the case that I could take a knife,

00:28:53.080 | don't please don't do this experiment and cut my hand

00:28:55.760 | and say, oh, you know, I'm going to enjoy this.

00:28:58.680 | I'm doing this because this is good for me

00:29:00.880 | and it won't hurt.

00:29:01.780 | Of course, it'll hurt just like the ice bath is cold

00:29:03.480 | no matter what, but I can't lie to myself, right?

00:29:08.480 | If I have some knowledge that cutting myself is bad for me,

00:29:12.920 | that's very hard to override.

00:29:14.720 | And so the medial prefrontal cortex

00:29:17.240 | has a tremendous capacity to set context

00:29:20.320 | and it does that beautifully with respect to gratitude,

00:29:23.260 | but you can't simply lie to yourself.

00:29:25.280 | You can't simply say, oh, well,

00:29:27.240 | every experience is a learning experience

00:29:29.420 | or a terrible thing that happens, oh, good.

00:29:33.380 | I'm just going to say good.

00:29:34.820 | And that your body will react as if it's good for you.

00:29:37.540 | That's a myth.

00:29:38.520 | And frankly, it's a myth that's fairly pervasive

00:29:41.320 | in the self-help and self-actualization literature.

00:29:44.960 | We have the opportunity to reframe

00:29:46.800 | and set context on our experiences,

00:29:49.000 | but that requires a very specific set of practices.

00:29:51.840 | We can't simply lie to ourselves

00:29:53.560 | or quote unquote fake it until we make it.

00:29:55.760 | Neural circuitry is very powerful and very plastic.

00:29:58.420 | It can be modified and it's very context dependent,

00:30:01.640 | but it's not stupid.

00:30:02.800 | And when you lie to yourself about whether or not

00:30:05.560 | an experience is actually good for you or not,

00:30:08.580 | your brain knows.

00:30:11.340 | So what does an effective gratitude practice look like?

00:30:14.980 | Well, let's examine what an ineffective,

00:30:18.660 | what a poor gratitude practice looks like,

00:30:21.380 | because therein lies some really important information,

00:30:25.080 | including the fact that I,

00:30:26.640 | and I think millions of other people out there

00:30:29.240 | are doing it wrong.

00:30:30.260 | Most gratitude practices that you see online

00:30:34.280 | and that people talk about in various talks and so forth

00:30:38.040 | involves something like writing down or reciting

00:30:42.380 | or thinking about five or 10 or three or 20 things

00:30:46.860 | that you're especially grateful for.

00:30:48.920 | And then really trying to feel into some of those,

00:30:52.120 | really try and think deeply about the emotions,

00:30:56.100 | the sensations, the perceptions that are associated

00:30:59.280 | with those particular people, places,

00:31:01.020 | and things on your list.

00:31:02.340 | Most studies actually point to the fact

00:31:07.440 | that that style of gratitude practice

00:31:10.800 | is not particularly effective in shifting

00:31:13.660 | your neural circuitry, your neural chemistry,

00:31:16.240 | or your somatic circuitry, the circuits in your body,

00:31:19.480 | 'cause you literally have organs and neural circuits

00:31:21.400 | that are connected, the circuits of your brain and body

00:31:24.320 | toward enhanced activation of prefrontal cortex,

00:31:28.280 | enhanced activation of these pro-social neural networks

00:31:31.400 | that we were talking about earlier.

00:31:33.400 | Now that may come as a surprise to many of you,

00:31:35.720 | and certainly came as a surprise to me.

00:31:38.220 | There is some evidence that if there's a shift

00:31:42.400 | in so-called autonomic arousal during these gratitude

00:31:46.320 | practices, these ones that I'm calling ineffective,

00:31:49.100 | that they can be made slightly more effective.

00:31:51.640 | So what do I mean by a shift in autonomic arousal?

00:31:54.240 | Well, very briefly, we have a aspect to our nervous system,

00:31:58.020 | both within our brain and body

00:31:59.360 | that we call the autonomic nervous system.

00:32:01.480 | It's a little bit of a misnomer

00:32:02.560 | because autonomic means automatic.

00:32:04.640 | And in fact, we can take control

00:32:06.720 | of the autonomic nervous system.

00:32:08.320 | It has one branch, meaning one set of connections

00:32:11.840 | and circuits that are associated with making us more alert,

00:32:14.600 | the so-called sympathetic nervous system,

00:32:18.100 | or I should say sympathetic arm

00:32:19.480 | of the autonomic nervous system,

00:32:20.600 | but that's really a mouthful.

00:32:21.820 | It's really associated with enhanced alertness

00:32:24.500 | of any kind for excitement or fear.

00:32:26.880 | And it has nothing to do with sympathy.

00:32:28.480 | It's just about enhanced alertness.

00:32:30.080 | And then the other arm of the autonomic nervous system

00:32:33.080 | is the so-called parasympathetic arm

00:32:35.680 | of the autonomic nervous system,

00:32:36.960 | but that's also a mouthful.

00:32:38.240 | So let's just say it's the calming aspect

00:32:41.360 | of the autonomic nervous system.

00:32:42.800 | So it's associated with decreased heart rate,

00:32:45.180 | decreased breathing rate, et cetera.

00:32:47.840 | So we have these two aspects to our autonomic nervous system

00:32:51.960 | and it has been shown that if people are brought

00:32:54.800 | into a state of heightened sympathetic tone,

00:32:58.380 | meaning more alertness,

00:33:00.540 | then the intensity of the emotions that they experience

00:33:03.920 | in their gratitude practice is enhanced

00:33:06.420 | and the effectiveness of that gratitude practice

00:33:08.840 | can be enhanced.

00:33:10.640 | This is seen nowadays somewhat commonly

00:33:14.000 | as having people, for instance,

00:33:16.620 | cyclic hyperventilated breathing,

00:33:18.600 | as we call it in my laboratory,

00:33:20.600 | breathing that's very intense of the inhale, exhale, inhale,

00:33:23.460 | exhale very deeply for 25 or 30 breaths.

00:33:25.840 | Then people will sit in a meditative stance

00:33:27.720 | or they'll focus on their notepad and paper

00:33:31.360 | and they'll write out the things that they're grateful for

00:33:33.680 | and then they'll really try and feel into those things

00:33:35.940 | or they'll think about those things.

00:33:37.620 | And it makes perfect sense

00:33:38.840 | as to why enhancing autonomic arousal toward more alertness

00:33:43.320 | would create more robust feelings

00:33:46.100 | or more robust impact of these gratitude practices

00:33:49.820 | because in that state, you are more alert

00:33:52.800 | and therefore you are able to bring more detail,

00:33:55.020 | more richness to the perception and the understanding

00:33:57.860 | of what those things on your list happen to be.

00:34:00.520 | But, and I should say

00:34:02.520 | that there are numerous other approaches to this,

00:34:05.280 | sort of self-help type stuff

00:34:06.680 | and self-actualization seminars,

00:34:08.480 | people will do things like cold baths

00:34:10.580 | or they'll do chanting

00:34:11.860 | or they'll have any number of different experiences,

00:34:14.440 | all of which are mainly geared

00:34:15.680 | towards increased autonomic arousal.

00:34:18.200 | There are even practices out there using pharmacology

00:34:20.420 | to create increased autonomic arousal

00:34:22.240 | and then drop into gratitude.

00:34:23.740 | Across the board, those increase the potency

00:34:28.960 | of the gratitude practice of listing things out on paper

00:34:31.720 | or in one's mind or saying them out loud.

00:34:34.460 | But somewhat surprisingly, at least to me,

00:34:37.940 | that form of just expressing thanks,

00:34:40.600 | expressing gratitude is not the most effective way

00:34:44.860 | to shift these pro-social circuits in positive ways

00:34:48.220 | for one's physiology and anatomy and psychology.

00:34:52.880 | Turns out that the most potent form of gratitude practice

00:34:57.260 | is not a gratitude practice where you give gratitude

00:35:01.120 | or express gratitude,

00:35:02.440 | but rather where you receive gratitude,

00:35:05.400 | where you receive thanks.

00:35:07.040 | And this to me was very surprising.

00:35:09.280 | There are a number of studies about this now.

00:35:11.520 | One in particular that I think is interesting

00:35:13.480 | is called the prefrontal activation

00:35:15.140 | while listening to a letter of gratitude

00:35:16.960 | read aloud by a coworker face-to-face,

00:35:19.320 | a NIRS study, N-I-R-S.

00:35:21.340 | I'll explain what all this means.

00:35:22.560 | You now know what the prefrontal activation part is.

00:35:25.260 | This is activation of the prefrontal cortex.

00:35:27.500 | The NIRS, N-I-R-S, study, that's just a technical term.

00:35:32.240 | It's a form of imaging brain activity.

00:35:35.420 | It's non-invasive.

00:35:36.480 | So it's kind of a skull cap.

00:35:38.640 | It looks like a hoodie with a bunch of wires

00:35:40.880 | coming out of it basically

00:35:42.160 | that can measure neural activity

00:35:43.720 | without having to remove any parts of the skull

00:35:46.080 | or put a person into one of these tube-like fMRI machines,

00:35:49.480 | which is very invasive.

00:35:50.760 | It's also a wonderful tool

00:35:52.100 | because it allows human subjects in the laboratory

00:35:55.580 | to move around and to engage with one another.

00:35:58.380 | So in this particular experiment,

00:36:00.240 | what they did is they had coworkers write a letter

00:36:04.340 | of gratitude of thanks to another coworker,

00:36:08.620 | unbeknownst to the other coworker,

00:36:10.100 | and then they sat down together

00:36:12.020 | and then they imaged brain activity

00:36:13.540 | as this letter was being read

00:36:14.940 | and as the letter was being heard, received.

00:36:17.640 | And it showed very robust effects

00:36:20.660 | on these prefrontal networks

00:36:22.680 | that pointed to the fact that receiving gratitude

00:36:25.660 | is actually much more potent

00:36:27.500 | in terms of the positive shifts that it can create

00:36:29.660 | than giving gratitude.

00:36:31.460 | So this raises a couple of important points.

00:36:33.200 | First of all, if you are somebody

00:36:35.320 | who is prone to write letters of gratitude,

00:36:38.900 | ideally, I think it's requisite

00:36:41.620 | that these be genuine letters of gratitude

00:36:43.460 | or saying things that are genuine expressions of gratitude,

00:36:48.460 | this could be by text or in-person or by phone,

00:36:50.960 | you have within you a very potent form

00:36:54.960 | of shifting somebody else's neurology.

00:36:57.300 | Now, that's wonderful,

00:36:58.900 | and I think there are many people like that out there,

00:37:01.660 | but for many people who want to experience

00:37:04.940 | the positive effects of gratitude,

00:37:07.320 | it's probably not the most advantageous approach

00:37:11.000 | to just sit around waiting,

00:37:12.020 | hoping that someone's going to deliver

00:37:13.900 | all these letters or words of gratitude.

00:37:16.100 | How is it that you can create that sense

00:37:18.240 | of receiving gratitude for yourself

00:37:20.280 | and thereby derive the effects of gratitude

00:37:23.140 | as outlined in this particular study?

00:37:24.920 | And there we go back to the important work

00:37:27.160 | of the great Antonio Damasio,

00:37:29.360 | who explored these neural correlates of gratitude

00:37:32.020 | to define the areas of the brain

00:37:33.560 | that are associated with pro-social behaviors

00:37:35.360 | like the prefrontal cortex.

00:37:37.360 | And what's really interesting about the work

00:37:40.280 | that Damasio and colleagues did is,

00:37:42.400 | first of all, they used functional

00:37:44.160 | magnetic resonance imaging.

00:37:45.500 | So this is a very high resolution approach

00:37:48.580 | to exploring what areas of the brain are active

00:37:51.360 | and it has very high, what we call temporal resolution,

00:37:53.760 | meaning you can see things in time at very fine scales.

00:37:57.240 | So a lot of mechanistic detail

00:38:00.040 | can emerge from these sorts of studies.

00:38:02.000 | What they did was interesting.

00:38:03.900 | Rather than have people express gratitude,

00:38:07.640 | they had the subjects go into the scanner,

00:38:10.660 | so their brains are being imaged,

00:38:12.200 | and they watched narratives, stories about other people

00:38:17.200 | experiencing positive things in their life.

00:38:22.000 | And in this case, these were powerful stories.

00:38:24.620 | These were stories about survivors of genocide

00:38:27.200 | so that's what they're watching.

00:38:28.520 | The subjects were subjects

00:38:29.800 | that were not survivors of genocide.

00:38:32.160 | So they were watching these videotapes

00:38:34.220 | of people that had survived genocide

00:38:36.880 | and had people help them along the way

00:38:40.880 | as part of their story of survival,

00:38:43.200 | either psychological and/or obviously

00:38:45.420 | they survived long enough to make the video,

00:38:47.640 | or physical survival.

00:38:49.120 | So within these stories,

00:38:50.860 | there was conveyance of a lot of struggle.

00:38:54.620 | These people talked about the horrible situations

00:38:56.680 | they were in, but also small,

00:38:59.300 | but highly significant features of their history

00:39:03.380 | that had led to their own feelings of gratitude.

00:39:06.280 | So for instance, it says a woman at the image,

00:39:09.380 | this is literally from the scientific paper,

00:39:12.320 | somebody had been sick for weeks.

00:39:14.040 | So the woman's describing how she'd been sick for weeks.

00:39:16.960 | And then another prisoner who was a doctor

00:39:21.400 | finds a particular medicine somehow,

00:39:23.440 | it doesn't describe how, and literally saves her life.

00:39:26.540 | Or an ally who was also in a stricken circumstance

00:39:30.560 | gave this person a pair of glasses

00:39:34.460 | when their eyesight started to falter.

00:39:36.860 | So these sorts of stories.

00:39:38.080 | Now, just hearing this in the context

00:39:40.120 | of nothing but a scientific paper and discussion,

00:39:42.180 | these probably aren't that impactful.

00:39:44.340 | What's really important about this study

00:39:46.240 | and is really important for all of us to know

00:39:48.300 | is that these stories of other people receiving things

00:39:52.000 | that were powerful for them in their life trajectory

00:39:54.400 | is embedded in story.

00:39:56.640 | And the human brain especially

00:40:00.220 | is so oriented towards story.

00:40:02.560 | We have neural circuits that like to link together

00:40:06.000 | past, present, future, have different characters,

00:40:08.840 | protagonists and antagonists.

00:40:10.680 | From the time we're very young

00:40:11.800 | until the time we're very old,

00:40:12.840 | story is one of the major ways

00:40:15.200 | that we organize information in the brain.

00:40:17.000 | There does seem to be storytelling

00:40:19.600 | and story listening circuits in the brain.

00:40:22.320 | So what's important is not simply

00:40:24.880 | that these people survive genocide,

00:40:26.480 | that's obviously important and wonderful,

00:40:29.160 | but it's not just that they were helped along the way,

00:40:31.800 | it's that the description of their help

00:40:33.720 | is embedded in a larger story.

00:40:35.800 | So the human subject in this scientific study

00:40:38.720 | is watching these powerful stories.

00:40:41.180 | And the neural circuits associated with prosocial behaviors

00:40:44.720 | and with gratitude become robustly active

00:40:48.320 | when they start to feel some affiliation

00:40:51.740 | with the person telling the story.

00:40:53.120 | They start to feel some resonance.

00:40:54.680 | We might call that empathy,

00:40:56.640 | but it doesn't necessarily have to be empathy.

00:40:58.840 | Empathy is a somewhat complicated thing to define

00:41:01.900 | because it involves literally a setting aside

00:41:04.840 | of one's own emotions and really focusing almost entirely

00:41:08.520 | or experiencing almost entirely the emotions of another.

00:41:11.460 | It could be sympathy, it could be empathy.

00:41:13.740 | What we do know is that the stories themselves

00:41:17.000 | were able to shift the physiology of the subjects

00:41:19.600 | in this study and activate these,

00:41:21.860 | what we're calling gratitude circuitry

00:41:23.980 | that involves the prefrontal cortex.

00:41:25.940 | So if you think about the earlier study

00:41:27.980 | that receiving gratitude is the most powerful way

00:41:30.460 | to activate these circuits for gratitude,

00:41:33.000 | the subjects in this study in many ways

00:41:35.820 | are receiving a sense of gratitude,

00:41:38.720 | but through the narrative of one of these other subjects,

00:41:43.320 | which I find fascinating.

00:41:44.800 | I would have thought a great gratitude practices

00:41:47.140 | would be to sit down and list out

00:41:48.260 | all the things you're grateful for.

00:41:49.480 | That just seems so logical to me,

00:41:51.180 | but it turns out that these neural circuits

00:41:52.860 | don't work that way.

00:41:53.700 | That to really activate these circuits for gratitude

00:41:56.480 | and the serotonin and probably the oxytocin system as well

00:41:59.480 | and its prefrontal networks,

00:42:01.380 | one has to powerfully associate

00:42:03.900 | with the idea of receiving help, okay?

00:42:07.100 | The subjects are associating or experiencing empathy

00:42:11.960 | or sympathy for somebody else who received help.

00:42:14.780 | In the other study we described a few minutes ago,

00:42:17.160 | the person hearing the letter was receiving gratitude

00:42:20.220 | and that would amplify the activity of these circuits.

00:42:23.040 | And that takes us to a larger theme

00:42:26.060 | of what are these prosocial circuits?

00:42:28.420 | And an important concept to emerge from this

00:42:31.380 | is one that's most often associated

00:42:33.720 | with the autism literature, frankly,

00:42:35.860 | which is this idea of theory of mind.

00:42:38.200 | So just very briefly, theory of mind is the ability

00:42:41.000 | to attribute or to understand the experience of another

00:42:45.900 | without actually experiencing the thing

00:42:47.820 | that they're experiencing.

00:42:49.000 | Again, it kind of sounds like empathy,

00:42:50.720 | but this was actually a term that's now been demonstrated

00:42:55.720 | in the psychology and neuroscience

00:42:57.520 | that's been linked to some very robust findings

00:43:01.000 | associated with brain areas and so forth

00:43:03.140 | that was looking at autistic kids and non-autistic kids.

00:43:07.700 | The person largely responsible for developing theory of mind

00:43:10.660 | is Simon Baron Cohen.

00:43:12.560 | I believe he's either the brother or the cousin.

00:43:14.620 | I can't recall which to the comedian, Sasha Baron Cohen.

00:43:18.260 | Simon Baron Cohen is a professor at Oxford University,

00:43:21.100 | or at least he was the last time I checked.

00:43:23.120 | And the theory of mind test can be done on adults

00:43:27.500 | or on children.

00:43:28.880 | And we can sort of do that experiment right now,

00:43:30.780 | if you like, and you can think about how you would behave

00:43:32.860 | if you were a subject in a theory of mind test.

00:43:36.420 | Theory of mind test involves you or a child

00:43:38.580 | or some other adults sitting down and watching a video

00:43:42.160 | of a child going into a room or a person going to a room,

00:43:45.020 | opening up a desk or a dresser, a drawer, for instance,

00:43:48.440 | or a desk drawer, and placing something in it,

00:43:50.860 | like a pen or a toy, and then leaving.

00:43:53.680 | And then another person walking into the room

00:43:56.760 | and clearly looking for something in the room.

00:44:00.460 | And one presumes it's the toy or the pen,

00:44:02.280 | depending on the context.

00:44:03.520 | People who have strong theory of mind

00:44:06.640 | make the obvious conclusion that the person looking around

00:44:11.400 | for the pen or the toy is confused, or they're perplexed.

00:44:16.400 | They don't know where the toy is.

00:44:18.160 | They're looking for the toy.

00:44:19.440 | Someone who is fairly far to one side of the autism

00:44:24.040 | or Asperger's spectrum will simply focus

00:44:28.200 | on the location of the object,

00:44:29.760 | on the location of the pen or the toy.

00:44:32.680 | And this is especially true in children.

00:44:34.260 | They will say, "Well, it's in the second drawer.

00:44:36.080 | It's in the second drawer."

00:44:36.900 | And they'll say, "Well, how does the person

00:44:38.720 | who comes into the room feel?"

00:44:39.640 | And they'll say, "Well, it's in the drawer."

00:44:41.220 | So they tend to focus on the specific factual elements

00:44:45.320 | of the scenario rather than place their mind

00:44:48.300 | into the mind of the other person, so-called theory of mind.

00:44:51.920 | Now, that doesn't mean that people with autism

00:44:54.240 | and Asperger's don't have empathy.

00:44:56.200 | In some cases, they can.

00:44:57.720 | It sort of depends on where they are

00:44:59.120 | on the spectrum and so forth.

00:45:00.600 | But theory of mind has very strong basis

00:45:04.560 | in these prefrontal cortex neural circuits

00:45:06.880 | that we were talking about, because as you now know,

00:45:09.720 | the prefrontal cortex sets context

00:45:12.540 | on what we see and experience.

00:45:14.040 | And the theory of mind task that I just described

00:45:16.860 | very briefly is a pure example of context setting, right?

00:45:21.860 | It's not about just the factual elements

00:45:25.700 | about the location of the objects.

00:45:28.020 | It's about the context.

00:45:29.140 | Someone is looking for something that someone else

00:45:31.180 | put someplace that makes it such that that object is hidden.

00:45:35.080 | So basically, theory of mind is your ability

00:45:37.180 | to put yourself into the mindset of another.

00:45:39.680 | And in order to get activation of these gratitude circuits,

00:45:44.380 | one needs to put themselves into the mindset of another

00:45:47.780 | or to directly receive gratitude.

00:45:50.080 | So let's just take a moment and start to think about

00:45:52.580 | how we are going to build out

00:45:54.000 | the ultimate gratitude practice,

00:45:55.900 | meaning the most effective gratitude practice for us to do

00:46:00.220 | because of all the many positive effects

00:46:02.020 | that an effective gratitude practice can have

00:46:04.680 | if it's the proper one.

00:46:08.160 | It's very clear that receiving gratitude is powerful,

00:46:11.360 | but it's also very clear that waiting around

00:46:13.500 | to receive that gratitude is an impractical approach.

00:46:16.340 | Now, there are methods that have been developed

00:46:19.500 | by my colleague at Stanford, Kelly McGonigal and others

00:46:23.780 | that actually have developed things for the workplace,

00:46:26.280 | for school, for coworkers and students

00:46:28.380 | to write out particular worksheets related to, you know,

00:46:32.500 | what they're thankful for from others and exchange them.

00:46:34.600 | And so those are very useful practices.

00:46:36.200 | I don't want to take anything away from the important work

00:46:38.520 | that Kelly and others have done.

00:46:40.520 | But in the absence of having other people

00:46:42.960 | to do these practices with,

00:46:45.140 | what we know for sure is that there has to be

00:46:48.380 | a real experience of somebody else's experience

00:46:53.140 | and that the best way to do that is story.

00:46:56.440 | So in thinking about how to build out

00:46:58.740 | an effective gratitude practice,

00:47:00.980 | it's very worthwhile, I believe,

00:47:02.940 | to find someone's narrative that's powerful for you.

00:47:07.940 | In many ways to think about this is

00:47:10.680 | it's got to be a story that inspires you

00:47:13.760 | because of the, for lack of a better phrase,

00:47:16.780 | the beauty of the human spirit

00:47:18.640 | or the ability of humans to help other humans.

00:47:21.860 | And I find this remarkable because what this really means

00:47:25.440 | is that the circuits for gratitude

00:47:28.080 | are such that we can exchange gratitude.

00:47:32.320 | We can actually observe someone else getting help,

00:47:35.280 | someone else giving help.

00:47:36.760 | And that observation of our species

00:47:40.020 | doing that for one another allows us to experience

00:47:44.200 | the feeling of a genuine chemical

00:47:46.880 | and neural circuit activation lift, if you will.

00:47:50.540 | Very, very different than simply writing out the things

00:47:53.820 | that you're thankful for, right?

00:47:55.680 | And so how would you do this?

00:47:57.800 | Well, people digest story in a number of different ways.

00:48:01.000 | People watch movies, people listen to podcasts,

00:48:03.880 | people read books.

00:48:04.980 | There are a tremendous number of stories out there.

00:48:07.520 | It's clear that an effective gratitude practice

00:48:10.820 | has to be repeated from time to time.

00:48:13.260 | So what I would not suggest is that we build a protocol

00:48:16.600 | in which you're constantly foraging

00:48:18.380 | for inspirational stories over and over again.

00:48:21.160 | Social media and the internet are replete with those.

00:48:24.280 | That's not going to be a very potent protocol or tool

00:48:27.200 | because the most potent protocol or tool for gratitude

00:48:29.820 | is going to be one that you repeat over and over again.

00:48:32.560 | Rather, the most effective protocol or tool

00:48:36.320 | is going to be either to think into,

00:48:40.800 | and you could write this out if you like,

00:48:42.380 | but think into when somebody was thankful

00:48:45.360 | for something that you did and really start to think about

00:48:48.720 | how you felt in receiving that gratitude,

00:48:51.640 | or, and or I should say, imagining or thinking about deeply

00:48:58.020 | the emotional experience of somebody else receiving help.

00:49:02.020 | Now, what narrative you select

00:49:05.180 | is going to be very dependent on you and your taste.

00:49:07.960 | It's going to be very dependent on what resonates with you.

00:49:10.840 | But again, I want to emphasize that the story

00:49:14.180 | that you select does not have to have any semblance

00:49:17.080 | to your own life experience.

00:49:18.720 | It's just about what happens to move you.

00:49:21.000 | And so the way that one could do this,

00:49:23.940 | and actually I've started this practice for myself

00:49:26.200 | on the basis of the learnings I've had

00:49:28.100 | in the last few weeks around preparing for this episode,

00:49:31.280 | is to find a story that's particularly meaningful for you.

00:49:34.040 | And then to just take some short notes, bullet point notes

00:49:38.000 | about maybe list out, for instance,

00:49:40.540 | on just a small sheet of paper or in your phone,

00:49:43.360 | if that's your preference, just list out, for instance,

00:49:46.960 | what the struggle was, what the help was,

00:49:51.700 | and something about how that impacts you emotionally.

00:49:56.040 | This is something just for you.

00:49:57.100 | You don't have to share it with anybody.

00:49:59.380 | That kind of shorthand list of bullet point notes

00:50:02.940 | serves as your shorthand for getting into this mode

00:50:06.160 | that we're calling gratitude.

00:50:07.320 | And actually closely mimics a lot of what was done

00:50:10.600 | in these various studies.

00:50:11.760 | Because even though the studies I've talked about

00:50:13.360 | up until now, we're really focused on

00:50:16.220 | what we call acute imaging studies

00:50:17.960 | where someone watched a story or received gratitude

00:50:21.300 | while the experiment was done, and then that's it,

00:50:23.520 | one and done.

00:50:24.580 | There are other studies looking at gratitude in this context

00:50:27.720 | over many weeks, up to six weeks.

00:50:29.480 | And what one observes is that there's so-called

00:50:32.360 | neuroplasticity of these circuits.

00:50:34.560 | Neuroplasticity is the brain and nervous system's

00:50:36.520 | ability to change in response to experience.

00:50:38.520 | And that these neural circuits

00:50:40.760 | start developing a familiarity with the narrative.

00:50:43.520 | So that, for instance, let's say you sit down

00:50:45.600 | the first time you've found a story

00:50:47.320 | that you find particularly compelling.

00:50:49.100 | You've written down a few notes about what that story is,

00:50:52.080 | just to remind you.

00:50:54.000 | And then you read those out and you think into the richness

00:50:56.800 | of that experience, that receiving of gratitude.

00:50:59.380 | Or if you prefer, you're doing the protocol

00:51:01.340 | where you're thinking about when someone was deeply grateful

00:51:04.100 | or was genuinely grateful to you,

00:51:06.320 | that you're thinking about that,

00:51:07.440 | the neural circuits become activated more easily

00:51:10.020 | with each subsequent repeat of the practice.

00:51:12.400 | Now, this could be done literally for one minute

00:51:15.380 | or two minutes or three minutes.

00:51:17.660 | This is not an extensively long practice.

00:51:20.080 | And that's another beauty of gratitude practices

00:51:22.700 | is that they have these outsized positive effects

00:51:25.500 | on so many aspects of our physiology,

00:51:27.560 | but these are very short practices.

00:51:29.460 | They're the kind of thing that you can do,

00:51:30.600 | walk into your car,

00:51:31.800 | the kind of thing you can just sit down for a minute

00:51:33.320 | and set a timer and do,

00:51:35.260 | because they are really about changing

00:51:36.720 | your state of mind and body.

00:51:38.400 | And if you have an experience of receiving gratitude

00:51:41.640 | or a story that's very potent for you,

00:51:43.840 | it becomes a sort of shortcut into the gratitude network,

00:51:47.260 | these pro-social networks,

00:51:48.980 | meaning the activation of these circuits

00:51:50.520 | becomes almost instantaneous.

00:51:52.240 | And that's very different

00:51:53.240 | than a lot of other practices out there.

00:51:55.400 | I'm not aware of any meditation practices,

00:51:57.400 | for instance, that you can do only a few times,

00:52:00.840 | and then within a week or so,

00:52:03.640 | you just have to do them for one minute,

00:52:04.920 | you immediately drop into the kind of optimal state

00:52:07.680 | that that meditation practice is designed to create.

00:52:10.120 | There are some shorter meditation practices

00:52:11.800 | that are very potent and very effective like that,

00:52:14.020 | but gratitude and the circuits associated with it

00:52:16.700 | appear to be especially plastic,

00:52:18.600 | meaning especially prone to being able to be triggered

00:52:23.200 | in the good sense of the word triggered

00:52:24.840 | just by simply reminding yourself

00:52:26.780 | of this particular narrative.

00:52:28.360 | Now there's another very clear and positive effect

00:52:30.760 | of using this narrative or story-based approach

00:52:33.840 | to a gratitude practice.

00:52:35.480 | And that's what story does for our physiology.

00:52:39.240 | Earlier in the episode,

00:52:41.440 | I mentioned this really incredible study

00:52:43.840 | in which listening to a story coordinated the heart rates

00:52:48.840 | of different individuals

00:52:51.400 | and literally changed the way that their heart was beating.

00:52:54.980 | The title of this study is

00:52:57.360 | "Conscious Processing of Narrative Stimuli

00:52:59.840 | Synchronizes Heart Rate Between Individuals."

00:53:01.960 | The first author is Perez,

00:53:04.500 | again, published in Cell Reports, Cell Press Journal,

00:53:06.820 | excellent journal, and it's a really elegant study.

00:53:09.780 | They looked at instantaneous heart rate.

00:53:11.340 | They use electrocardiogram to do that,

00:53:13.000 | which is simply a way to look at heart beats

00:53:15.400 | with very fine precision.

00:53:17.520 | They also looked at the breathing of subjects

00:53:19.680 | as they listened to these stories.

00:53:21.700 | Some of you may know that breathing and heart rate

00:53:24.480 | are actually linked to one another

00:53:25.800 | in a really interesting way.

00:53:27.300 | The simple way to put it is that when you inhale,

00:53:30.000 | your heart rate speeds up a little bit,

00:53:32.060 | and when you exhale, your heart rate slows down.

00:53:34.800 | And this is because of the movement of the diaphragm

00:53:38.240 | in your thoracic cavity,

00:53:40.580 | and the physicians and medical types call this

00:53:43.460 | respiratory sinus arrhythmia.

00:53:45.660 | There's a mechanism there we could get into,

00:53:47.280 | but I don't want to distract us from the main theme here.

00:53:49.640 | So just remember when you inhale, your heart rate speeds up,

00:53:52.140 | and when you exhale, your heart rate slows down.

00:53:54.480 | They looked at breathing,

00:53:55.320 | they looked at heart rate in different individuals,

00:53:57.900 | and listening to a story produced very consistent gaps

00:54:02.900 | between the heart rates of the people who are listening.

00:54:08.800 | Different individuals in the study who were not located

00:54:12.060 | in the same place when they listened to the story,

00:54:15.080 | listening to the story in different times,

00:54:17.220 | different days entirely,

00:54:19.620 | had very similar heartbeat patterns listening to this story.

00:54:23.860 | What this means for your gratitude practice

00:54:25.820 | is that having a story that you can return to

00:54:29.740 | over and over again, even if it's not the entire story,

00:54:32.500 | you're just using the shorthand bullet point version

00:54:35.240 | of your story, will create a perceptible and real shift

00:54:40.240 | in your heartbeat and in your breathing.

00:54:43.340 | And actually that's been demonstrated over and over now

00:54:46.080 | that an effective gratitude practice is one

00:54:48.500 | that can rapidly shift, not just the activation

00:54:51.060 | of these circuits in your brain for pro-social behaviors,

00:54:54.320 | but also activation of particular circuits in your heart

00:54:59.320 | and in your lungs and the other organs of your body,

00:55:02.760 | such that you can get into a reproducible state

00:55:06.340 | of gratitude each time.

00:55:08.620 | So an important component here is

00:55:11.020 | that there be some element of story.

00:55:13.200 | Again, you don't have to listen to or read

00:55:15.100 | or think about the entire story start to finish

00:55:17.300 | in order to extract these benefits,

00:55:18.900 | and that it be the same story over and over.

00:55:22.500 | And as a consequence, that's going to shift your physiology

00:55:25.300 | into presumably a more relaxed state,

00:55:27.820 | because typically that's the one

00:55:28.940 | that's associated with gratitude.

00:55:30.940 | Although activation of these gratitude circuits

00:55:33.960 | has also been shown to create sense of awe or sense of joy.

00:55:38.340 | There are a few studies looking at and kind of parsing

00:55:41.120 | the difference between gratitude and joy.

00:55:43.460 | I was able to find a few studies about that,

00:55:46.020 | but in general, they tend to,

00:55:48.020 | the neural circuits that are activated tend

00:55:49.840 | to overlap quite a lot with those

00:55:51.920 | that create a sense of gratitude.

00:55:54.300 | So we don't want to split hairs unnecessarily there.

00:55:56.700 | The key thing is that you want to use the same story,

00:55:59.860 | even if it's your own experience or somebody else's,

00:56:02.180 | and keep coming back to it over and over again.

00:56:04.280 | That makes it a very potent tool

00:56:05.940 | that you can get a tremendous amount of benefit from

00:56:08.900 | with even as short as 60 seconds of practice.

00:56:12.620 | Earlier, I talked about how you can't lie to yourself

00:56:16.180 | and say, "You know, I'm so grateful for this thing

00:56:19.060 | that I actually hate."

00:56:20.580 | And in a moment, I'm going to tell you

00:56:23.100 | about some scientific data

00:56:24.420 | that proves the statement I made is true

00:56:28.180 | and that you can't just lie to yourself

00:56:30.820 | and derive the benefits of a gratitude practice.

00:56:33.940 | The data are also going to point to the fact

00:56:35.700 | that if you are giving gratitude,

00:56:38.540 | not just receiving it, but giving gratitude,

00:56:40.660 | that too has to be genuine.

00:56:43.000 | There's a really interesting study

00:56:44.800 | published in Scientific Reports,

00:56:46.460 | which is a nature research journal.

00:56:48.780 | The title of it is "Neural Responses to Intention

00:56:51.780 | and Benefit Appraisal are Critical

00:56:53.820 | in Distinguishing Gratitude and Joy."

00:56:55.860 | It's a somewhat complicated study,

00:56:57.820 | so I'm just going to hit on some of the high points.

00:56:59.500 | But basically what they did

00:57:00.740 | is they used functional magnetic resonance imaging.

00:57:03.820 | So they could look at brain circuitry activation

00:57:06.540 | with very high precision.

00:57:08.420 | And they had people receiving money

00:57:11.540 | in the context of this experiment.

00:57:15.280 | And they had some knowledge as to whether or not

00:57:18.440 | the money that they were receiving

00:57:19.980 | was given to them wholeheartedly or reluctantly.

00:57:23.360 | And there were a number of different variables in the study,

00:57:25.340 | including how much money was given.

00:57:26.920 | So in some cases it was very little,

00:57:28.280 | in other cases it was modest,

00:57:29.480 | in other cases it was a lot more.

00:57:31.720 | And they also varied the extent to which

00:57:33.980 | the giver of the money, that they called the benefactor,

00:57:37.220 | was doing it wholeheartedly

00:57:38.660 | or seemed to be doing it somewhat reluctantly.

00:57:41.080 | And they looked at whether or not the sense of gratitude

00:57:45.260 | scaled with the amount of money received

00:57:48.260 | and/or the intention of the benefactor,

00:57:53.120 | whether or not the person giving the money

00:57:54.660 | was doing it wholeheartedly or reluctantly.

00:57:57.040 | And what's remarkable is that

00:57:59.680 | while the amount of money given was a strong component

00:58:04.200 | in whether or not somebody felt

00:58:07.240 | that they had received gratitude, which makes sense,

00:58:10.580 | the amount of money is some metric

00:58:13.440 | of whether or not somebody feels thanked,

00:58:17.000 | the stronger variable, the bigger impact,

00:58:20.000 | came from whether or not the person giving the money

00:58:22.860 | was giving it with a wholehearted intention

00:58:26.060 | and not a reluctant intention.

00:58:28.300 | And of course, there was an interaction

00:58:30.040 | where the best circumstance, of course,

00:58:31.840 | is where the person received a lot of money

00:58:34.020 | from somebody who wholeheartedly

00:58:35.500 | wanted to give them a lot of money.

00:58:36.800 | And they did every derivation of this,

00:58:38.360 | but this is important.

00:58:40.120 | This tells us many things

00:58:42.200 | that extend way beyond gratitude practices,

00:58:44.800 | which is that genuine thanks are what count, okay?

00:58:49.800 | We could probably presume that.

00:58:52.240 | But receiving genuine thanks is also a strong variable

00:58:56.800 | in determining whether or not we experience real gratitude

00:59:00.980 | or whether or not it's empty,

00:59:02.960 | regardless of the size of a gift.

00:59:05.120 | So this constrains our gratitude practices somewhat,

00:59:08.460 | but I think in an interesting and important way,

00:59:11.600 | you can't make this stuff up.

00:59:13.420 | You can't tell yourself that an experience was great

00:59:15.740 | or that I got a lot of money and therefore it justified it,

00:59:20.560 | even though I think that they gave it to me reluctantly,

00:59:23.080 | or my boss hates me, but they gave me a raise.

00:59:25.800 | That stuff stings for all the right reasons,

00:59:28.480 | because there are circuits in our brain and body

00:59:31.240 | that are oriented towards these prosocial interactions.

00:59:34.560 | And in some sense, what we are looking for as a species,

00:59:37.240 | what these circuits want, if you will,

00:59:39.600 | is to receive things from people

00:59:41.980 | that are giving them wholeheartedly.

00:59:43.820 | And that tells us that if we are the giver,

00:59:46.900 | that we better be giving wholeheartedly

00:59:48.960 | or we are undermining the sense of gratitude

00:59:51.640 | that someone is going to receive from us.

00:59:53.760 | So we are gradually building up

00:59:55.560 | the ultimate gratitude practice

00:59:58.000 | based on the variety of scientific literature

01:00:01.000 | that's out there.

01:00:02.340 | And I know that many people are probably interested

01:00:04.940 | in developing a gratitude practice that has long lasting,

01:00:08.080 | maybe even permanent positive effects

01:00:09.800 | on their neural circuitry.

01:00:11.320 | So with that in mind,

01:00:13.760 | I want to turn our attention to a really interesting study.

01:00:17.240 | It's entitled Effects of Gratitude Meditation

01:00:19.860 | on Neural Network Functional Connectivity

01:00:22.040 | and Brain-Heart Coupling.

01:00:24.100 | And to make a long story short

01:00:26.000 | and a lot simpler than that title,

01:00:28.920 | repeated gratitude practice changes the way

01:00:32.780 | that your brain circuits work.

01:00:34.640 | And it also changes the way in which your heart

01:00:37.680 | and your brain interact.

01:00:39.940 | You're familiar with the fact

01:00:40.880 | that your brain controls your heart

01:00:41.880 | because you could be stressed about something

01:00:43.240 | that's perceived with your brain,

01:00:44.600 | and then your heart rate will speed up.

01:00:46.520 | You're probably also familiar with the fact

01:00:47.960 | that if your heart rate speeds up

01:00:49.360 | for some reason or no reason,

01:00:50.840 | you're probably thinking, well,

01:00:51.660 | what's making my heart rate speed up?

01:00:52.920 | And that's because the brain and the heart

01:00:54.800 | are reciprocally innervated, as we say.

01:00:57.980 | They're talking to one another in both directions.

01:00:59.920 | It's a two-way highway.

01:01:02.120 | This study looked at changes

01:01:03.760 | in so-called functional connectivity within the brain

01:01:07.400 | and between the brain and the heart

01:01:09.600 | in response to gratitude practices.

01:01:12.280 | And as a control, they used what I think is very interesting,

01:01:15.040 | a resentment intervention.

01:01:16.880 | I think resentment is an apt control

01:01:20.880 | and quite different than gratitude.

01:01:23.080 | To make a long story short,

01:01:24.120 | what they found is that a repeated gratitude practice

01:01:27.000 | could change the resting state functional connectivity

01:01:30.860 | in emotion and motivation-related brain regions.

01:01:34.320 | If I haven't mentioned a strong enough incentive

01:01:36.420 | for doing a regular gratitude practice until now,

01:01:40.020 | this is definitely the one to pay attention to

01:01:42.600 | because what they found was a regular gratitude practice

01:01:46.240 | could shift the functional connectivity of emotion pathways

01:01:50.040 | in ways that made anxiety and fear circuits

01:01:53.320 | less likely to be active

01:01:54.880 | and circuits for feelings of wellbeing,

01:01:57.620 | but also motivation to be much more active.

01:02:01.420 | I find that remarkable and important

01:02:03.140 | because a number of people struggle

01:02:05.060 | with issues of motivation.

01:02:06.280 | A lot of people who are highly motivated

01:02:08.500 | also have issues with anxiety and fear.

01:02:10.680 | And so this study really points to the fact

01:02:13.320 | that it's a twofer.

01:02:14.320 | If you have a good gratitude practice

01:02:16.040 | and you repeat it regularly,

01:02:17.900 | you reduce the fear anxiety circuits,

01:02:20.760 | you increase the efficacy of the positive emotion,

01:02:25.760 | feel-good circuits,

01:02:26.940 | and the circuits associated with motivation and pursuits

01:02:29.800 | are actually enhanced as well.

01:02:31.520 | So that's very strong incentive

01:02:33.340 | to have a gratitude practice and one that you use regularly.

01:02:36.920 | We'll talk about how regularly in just a moment.

01:02:40.600 | I don't want to go into too many details of this study,

01:02:42.600 | although we will put a reference to it if you like.

01:02:44.440 | It includes a lot of FMRI data,

01:02:46.960 | imaging data of different brain areas,

01:02:48.480 | many, many tables and examples of matrices

01:02:50.720 | of before and after gratitude, after resentment, et cetera.

01:02:54.820 | You do indeed have circuits in your brain for resentment,

01:02:57.160 | whether you like it or not.

01:02:59.080 | We all do.

01:03:00.060 | And some people just,

01:03:01.560 | those circuits are more robust than others.

01:03:03.500 | But the remarkable thing is one can shift these circuits

01:03:06.680 | in the direction that I think most people would like,

01:03:09.400 | which is more sense of wellbeing and motivation

01:03:11.600 | and less resentment and fear, literally.

01:03:14.800 | And what's really cool about this study also

01:03:17.200 | is that the interventions are only five minutes long.

01:03:21.800 | It's incredible, five minutes long.

01:03:24.440 | And so as we start to build out

01:03:26.760 | our ideal gratitude practice,

01:03:29.280 | we know that it has to have certain features.

01:03:31.220 | First of all, it has to be grounded in a story,

01:03:34.240 | probably a story that you've heard

01:03:35.680 | in its entirety at least once,

01:03:37.400 | but then you can have a shorthand version,

01:03:39.880 | the so-called bullet points that I talked about before,

01:03:41.980 | that allow you to drop into that story

01:03:44.760 | or the emotional associations with that story.

01:03:46.880 | So you don't have to listen to the whole story each time.

01:03:49.000 | And that story should be one in which you are

01:03:51.160 | genuinely being thanked for something

01:03:53.400 | and it made you feel good,

01:03:54.740 | or it could be a story about someone else

01:03:57.480 | genuinely expressing thanks, okay?

01:03:59.640 | Based on the description of the gratitude practices

01:04:03.240 | that we talked about earlier.

01:04:05.720 | Your gratitude practice can be very brief.

01:04:08.320 | I mean, can it be as brief as one minute, 60 seconds,

01:04:11.300 | or five minutes, which still seems very brief to me,

01:04:13.840 | although in these studies,

01:04:15.080 | they were getting these really major effects

01:04:17.300 | just from five minutes of gratitude practice.

01:04:20.380 | Some of these papers involve people doing some

01:04:24.640 | focusing on their breathing and calming themselves

01:04:28.280 | as they go into the gratitude practice,

01:04:29.960 | but that's within the five minute block.

01:04:32.040 | So if you decide that you're going to do

01:04:34.180 | a gratitude practice that involves first,

01:04:36.840 | you know, doing some calming breathing,

01:04:38.760 | exhale emphasized breathing, for instance,

01:04:40.660 | or physiological size,

01:04:41.840 | things I've talked about before on this podcast

01:04:43.540 | that can help calm you down

01:04:44.480 | 'cause they have a lot of exhales,

01:04:45.760 | which you now know slows your heart rate down,

01:04:47.620 | and then doing your gratitude practice, that's fine.

01:04:50.820 | It's actually not necessary,

01:04:52.260 | but a lot of these studies used that.

01:04:54.800 | I think once a narrative has been set,

01:04:57.700 | you've heard the story and it has meaning for you,

01:04:59.740 | or you have a recollection of a story

01:05:01.700 | where you are genuinely thanked,

01:05:03.220 | then I think just 60 seconds

01:05:05.680 | or maybe 120 seconds should be sufficient.

01:05:09.160 | Then the question becomes how often

01:05:10.500 | to repeat this gratitude practice.

01:05:12.200 | That's not exactly clear from the existing literature.

01:05:17.260 | I can't point to any one study that says five times a week

01:05:19.760 | or four times a week.

01:05:20.600 | So I'm going to throw out a number

01:05:22.780 | which is three times a week,

01:05:24.560 | and then people will ask,

01:05:26.220 | well, when should I do that gratitude practice?

01:05:28.420 | And I'll tell you what I tell most everybody

01:05:31.580 | about most every practice with a few exceptions,

01:05:33.960 | which is the best time of day to do this practice

01:05:36.900 | is when you first wake up in the morning

01:05:39.620 | or before you go to sleep at night or any time of day.

01:05:42.900 | So we've talked about some of the neural circuitry changes

01:05:45.400 | associated with a regular gratitude practice.

01:05:48.340 | And I should mention

01:05:49.260 | that there's an additional neural circuitry shift

01:05:52.100 | that occurs.

01:05:53.340 | It relates to a structure

01:05:54.340 | that I mentioned just briefly earlier,

01:05:56.020 | which is the so-called ACC or anterior cingulate cortex.

01:05:59.500 | This is an area of the brain that has several functions,

01:06:02.020 | but more and more data are pointing to the fact

01:06:03.960 | that the ACC is actually involved in empathy

01:06:07.660 | and is involved in understanding

01:06:09.900 | the emotional states of others in general,

01:06:11.740 | even if it doesn't invoke a sense of empathy.

01:06:14.060 | And there are several studies that point to the fact

01:06:17.020 | that in humans who have a regular gratitude practice,

01:06:19.760 | the ACC becomes more robustly engaged,

01:06:23.220 | even with these very brief gratitude practices.

01:06:25.400 | We actually have a project in our lab.

01:06:28.780 | This is actually done in animal models

01:06:30.360 | where animals observe other animals

01:06:33.380 | experiencing certain emotional states.

01:06:37.200 | And one of the brain areas that we've identified

01:06:39.520 | as important for this,

01:06:41.420 | it's kind of a primordial form of empathy

01:06:43.580 | 'cause we really don't know what these mice are thinking.

01:06:46.460 | We work on humans.

01:06:47.500 | In the case where we work on humans, of course,

01:06:49.400 | we ask them and they tell us

01:06:50.900 | what they think they're thinking.

01:06:52.980 | With the mice, we ask them,

01:06:54.260 | but they don't tell us much of anything interesting.

01:06:56.020 | Instead, we measure a number of physiological signals.

01:06:58.620 | But the important point is that the ACC,

01:07:01.060 | the anterior cingulate cortex,

01:07:02.720 | seems to be an important hub for the generation

01:07:07.260 | and execution of empathy as it relates to feelings

01:07:10.380 | and empathic behaviors,

01:07:11.740 | altruistic behaviors of animals helping animals

01:07:14.420 | and humans helping other humans.

01:07:16.380 | We see this in the animal models.

01:07:17.740 | We see this in humans.

01:07:18.940 | So if you want to be a more empathic person,

01:07:21.820 | a gratitude practice is also going to be

01:07:24.080 | very effective for that, it appears,

01:07:26.580 | especially using this narrative type approach

01:07:29.020 | where you are using someone else's narrative

01:07:31.300 | of receiving gratitude as a way to tap

01:07:34.180 | into your own sense of gratitude.

01:07:36.300 | Thus far, we've mainly talked about the effects of gratitude

01:07:38.900 | on neural circuit activation and changes,

01:07:41.660 | a little bit about some of the changes that are happening

01:07:43.820 | in terms of the body, heart rate and breathing and so forth.

01:07:46.420 | But we haven't talked a lot yet

01:07:48.140 | about the changes in health metrics,

01:07:51.860 | in things like inflammation or reductions in inflammation

01:07:55.460 | and immunity and things of that sort.

01:07:57.860 | So with that in mind, I'd like to describe the results

01:08:00.140 | of a really interesting recent study

01:08:02.180 | that was published in the journal,

01:08:03.180 | Brain Behavior and Immunity.

01:08:04.700 | This was published 2021.

01:08:06.020 | The title of the study is Exploring Neural Mechanisms

01:08:09.580 | of the Health Benefits of Gratitude in Women,

01:08:11.700 | a Randomized Controlled Trial.

01:08:13.160 | The first author is Haslett.

01:08:15.340 | And basically what this paper showed was that

01:08:18.940 | women who had a regular gratitude practice

01:08:23.540 | of the sort that we've been talking about up until now,

01:08:26.300 | showed reductions in amygdala activity,

01:08:29.900 | a brain area associated with threat detection,

01:08:32.300 | a intimate part of the fear network in the brain.

01:08:34.760 | So reductions in amygdala activation

01:08:38.140 | and large reductions in the production

01:08:42.780 | of something called TNF-alpha,

01:08:44.460 | Tumor Necrosis Factor-alpha and IL-6, interleukin-6.

01:08:48.460 | Now, if you happen to have listened to the episode

01:08:50.380 | that I did on activating your immune system

01:08:53.560 | and immune function, you heard about TNF-alpha and IL-6.

01:08:57.640 | TNF-alpha and IL-6 are inflammatory cytokines.

01:09:01.100 | These are chemicals that exist in your body

01:09:03.820 | and that are released from cells when there is damage

01:09:08.780 | or kind of a systemic stress when your system is in duress.

01:09:13.120 | And in the short term, they can be beneficial.

01:09:15.140 | They can call in signals for wound healing

01:09:17.340 | and repair of cells, et cetera.

01:09:19.140 | But you don't want TNF-alpha and IL-6 levels to be too high,

01:09:22.900 | and you don't want those levels to be up for too long.

01:09:26.180 | And so this study is really nice

01:09:28.100 | because they showed significant effects

01:09:29.980 | in reducing TNF-alpha and IL-6

01:09:32.860 | in response to a gratitude practice.

01:09:36.180 | And because they also observed reductions

01:09:38.580 | in amygdala activation,

01:09:40.220 | this area associated with threat detection and fear,

01:09:44.260 | it's likely, and I should emphasize likely

01:09:47.260 | 'cause I don't know, that the direction of the effect

01:09:49.780 | is that there are neural circuit changes,

01:09:51.260 | which in turn shift the degree

01:09:54.100 | to which these inflammatory cytokines

01:09:55.860 | are released in the body.

01:09:56.740 | Although for all I know, it could be the other way too.

01:09:59.580 | It could be that having a gratitude practice

01:10:02.020 | shifts something about heart rate and breathing,

01:10:03.880 | which in turn shifts or lowers the amount

01:10:06.700 | of TNF-alpha and IL-6,

01:10:07.980 | and that in turn reduces activation of the amygdala.

01:10:10.500 | We don't really know the direction of the effect.

01:10:12.980 | Excuse me, but if I had to speculate,

01:10:14.660 | I would speculate that it was a shift in neural circuitry

01:10:17.340 | that led to a change in the circuits of the body.

01:10:20.980 | And another interesting aspect of this study

01:10:23.020 | is that the reductions in amygdala activation

01:10:25.940 | and the reductions in TNF-alpha and IL-6 were very rapid.

01:10:29.740 | They occurred almost immediately

01:10:31.940 | after the gratitude practice was completed.

01:10:34.980 | And even though that study was performed exclusively

01:10:37.280 | on female subjects,

01:10:38.960 | based on the biology and circuitry of the amygdala

01:10:41.940 | and the biology of TNF-alpha and IL-6

01:10:45.300 | performing this inflammatory role in both men and women,

01:10:49.380 | I don't see any reason why the results of that study

01:10:51.440 | wouldn't pertain to both men and women.

01:10:54.180 | So what about the chemistry associated with gratitude?

01:10:57.020 | Are there certain chemicals in our brain

01:10:58.560 | or that we could enhance in our brain

01:11:00.580 | that would enhance our gratitude practice?

01:11:03.020 | Indeed, there are.

01:11:04.900 | And earlier I mentioned the chemical,

01:11:07.140 | the neuromodulator serotonin as having a powerful influence

01:11:10.980 | on the activation of neural circuits

01:11:12.500 | associated with pro-social behaviors and gratitude

01:11:15.460 | and other sort of feel-good behaviors.

01:11:18.580 | To make a long story short,

01:11:20.060 | neuromodulators like dopamine and epinephrine

01:11:22.800 | and norepinephrine tend to place us

01:11:24.780 | into a state of exteroception,

01:11:27.900 | meaning a state of observing things

01:11:30.280 | and focusing on things outside the immediate reach

01:11:33.560 | of our body and confines of our skin.

01:11:35.220 | They tend to put us in pursuit

01:11:37.180 | or in thinking about things out in the future

01:11:39.660 | or out away from our physical body.

01:11:42.140 | Whereas the neuromodulator serotonin

01:11:45.300 | and some of the associated pathways like oxytocin

01:11:48.520 | and other neurochemicals tend to,

01:11:51.380 | I want to emphasize tend to be associated

01:11:53.460 | with states that are about contentment

01:11:56.300 | with what we have within the confines of our body

01:11:58.860 | and our immediate experience.

01:12:00.420 | So they're not so much about pursuit,

01:12:02.060 | but about gratitude and about appreciation

01:12:04.700 | for what we already have.

01:12:07.740 | I'd be remiss if I didn't therefore point out

01:12:11.080 | that if one were to shift their chemistry

01:12:14.500 | toward having higher levels of serotonin,

01:12:17.100 | you would by all logic experience

01:12:20.660 | heightened levels of gratitude.

01:12:22.260 | And indeed, some people do this.

01:12:23.560 | They will take compounds that increase serotonin.

01:12:25.820 | There are a number of compounds out there.

01:12:27.480 | As you know, I'm certainly not suggesting people do that.

01:12:29.880 | A couple of the supplement-based

01:12:31.820 | legal over-the-counter approaches to this

01:12:34.620 | are things like 5-HTP, which is a precursor to serotonin.

01:12:39.520 | Some people will take 5-HTP to try and enhance their sleep.

01:12:42.500 | I'm not a fan of doing that personally.

01:12:45.640 | I've talked about this in the sleep episode,

01:12:47.220 | but the state that we call sleep has a very complex

01:12:52.220 | and important architecture as it relates to neurochemicals.

01:12:55.660 | And by taking serotonin by supplement

01:12:58.180 | or by stimulating serotonin release

01:12:59.820 | by supplement with 5-HTP or with tryptophan,

01:13:02.540 | which is an amino acid precursor to serotonin,

01:13:05.940 | one can run into the problem of disrupting

01:13:08.140 | the normal architecture of sleep cycles

01:13:10.320 | throughout the night.

01:13:11.160 | I experienced that as if I've taken 5-HTP or tryptophan,

01:13:14.140 | I fall asleep very deeply,

01:13:15.320 | but then I wake up three hours later

01:13:16.940 | and I can't fall asleep at all.

01:13:18.540 | And actually it sometimes even messes up my sleep

01:13:20.500 | the subsequent night.

01:13:21.780 | Some people are not so sensitive to 5-HTP and tryptophan

01:13:24.500 | and they actually really like it.

01:13:25.540 | So again, you have to talk to your doctor,

01:13:27.580 | decide what's right for you.

01:13:28.580 | You're responsible for your health, not me.

01:13:30.340 | And you have to determine what works for you.

01:13:31.920 | Everyone's slightly individual.

01:13:33.500 | But one could imagine enhancing their amount of serotonin

01:13:38.500 | in their brain and body by taking 5-HTP or tryptophan

01:13:42.660 | before gratitude practice.

01:13:43.980 | That seems a little bit extreme

01:13:45.300 | given that the gratitude practice is only about a minute

01:13:47.420 | to five minutes long on a regular basis.

01:13:49.180 | But there may be instances in which you're really trying

01:13:51.480 | to amplify these circuitry in the brain and body

01:13:54.300 | that are associated with gratitude.

01:13:55.980 | And therefore that might be something

01:13:57.340 | that you want to explore.

01:13:58.960 | There's a new compound that's out there,

01:14:01.180 | a legal over-the-counter compound.

01:14:04.020 | At least it's legal in the United States.

01:14:06.180 | I don't know about overseas.

01:14:07.420 | And that's a compound called Kanna, K-A-N-N-A.

01:14:12.420 | It's an interesting compound.

01:14:14.200 | It goes by another name as well, which is,

01:14:16.900 | and I'm going to mispronounce this and I apologize.

01:14:19.220 | This is Selesium tortosium.

01:14:22.120 | Please see our timestamps

01:14:23.640 | if you want to see the spelling of that.

01:14:26.460 | But I'll just call it Kanna

01:14:28.300 | by its other name for short.

01:14:29.320 | It's an herb that is traditionally chewed

01:14:33.520 | prior to stressing endeavors,

01:14:35.340 | is how it's described on examine.com.

01:14:37.280 | But I looked at some of the studies on this.

01:14:38.860 | It's kind of interesting.

01:14:39.700 | It very likely increases the amount of serotonin in the body

01:14:43.220 | and pretty potently.

01:14:44.460 | It is generally taken in dosages

01:14:48.020 | of anywhere from 25 to 50 milligrams.

01:14:50.540 | And it creates a kind of a pro-social gratitude enhancing,

01:14:56.580 | or I should say gratitude circuitry, pro-social

01:15:00.080 | neural circuitry enhancing effect

01:15:03.100 | because of the ways that it interacts

01:15:05.180 | with the serotonergic pathways of the brain.

01:15:08.340 | So it also has another name.

01:15:10.240 | It's sometimes called the Zembrin, Z-E-M-B-R-I-N.

01:15:13.860 | Again, I'm not suggesting that people run out

01:15:15.540 | and take this stuff,

01:15:16.440 | but there is an emerging practice

01:15:19.180 | of people using Zembrin, Selesium tortosium,

01:15:23.380 | also called Kanna, K-A-N-N-A.

01:15:26.640 | In order to enhance the states that are about

01:15:29.440 | comfort and pleasure with what one has

01:15:33.540 | in their immediate sphere of experience.

01:15:36.060 | And so one could imagine if it's safe for you

01:15:39.180 | and right for you and legal where you live

01:15:41.420 | in enhancing serotonin by taking Kanna

01:15:45.540 | and then doing your gratitude practice.

01:15:47.900 | What's the logic behind that?

01:15:49.180 | Well, oftentimes we hear about supplements

01:15:53.300 | and pharmacology for quote unquote increasing plasticity

01:15:56.500 | or opening plasticity.

01:15:58.060 | If I had a dollar for every time someone said,

01:15:59.780 | "I hear that such and such opens plasticity."

01:16:02.800 | Well, indeed there are molecules associated

01:16:05.260 | with the thing that we call neuroplasticity,

01:16:07.200 | but neuroplasticity is not an event, it's a process.

01:16:10.820 | Meaning it has many, many steps.

01:16:12.400 | It occurs during wakefulness,

01:16:13.700 | it's consolidated during sleep and so forth.

01:16:15.900 | Taking a substance that increases a neurochemical

01:16:19.700 | in your brain will likely, provided it's the right substance

01:16:24.320 | and it's the right practice, will likely enhance

01:16:27.980 | the amplitude or the intensity of that practice

01:16:31.260 | and make it a more potent form of inducing neuroplasticity.

01:16:34.500 | Meaning it will create longer lasting

01:16:37.460 | or more robust brain changes than if one hadn't increased

01:16:41.320 | their chemistry in this way, this way of taking something.

01:16:45.540 | But that doesn't necessarily mean that you couldn't get

01:16:47.340 | to the very same place without it

01:16:48.960 | by simply doing a slightly longer gratitude practice

01:16:52.040 | or putting a little bit more mental effort into it.

01:16:54.700 | That said, I think the future of neuroplasticity

01:16:58.960 | really resides in not just one approach,

01:17:01.540 | not just neurochemistry and taking substances

01:17:04.280 | to increase neuroplasticity, not just behavioral practices

01:17:07.460 | to try and increase neuroplasticity,

01:17:09.440 | not just brain machine interfaces

01:17:11.700 | or devices to increase neuroplasticity,

01:17:14.500 | but rather the convergence of multiple tools.

01:17:17.260 | So you could imagine enhancing serotonergic transmission,

01:17:20.760 | as we say, in the brain using something like Kana

01:17:22.960 | combined with a gratitude practice

01:17:25.260 | in the not too distant future.

01:17:26.560 | This will probably also be combined

01:17:27.920 | with some sort of noninvasive device

01:17:30.360 | to stimulate the prefrontal cortex at the same time.

01:17:32.980 | Please don't do that recreationally.

01:17:34.320 | Those devices are for clinical use only currently.

01:17:36.820 | But I think you start to get the idea.

01:17:39.560 | So for those of you that are a little bit more exploratory

01:17:41.920 | and you want to go and do some reading on this,

01:17:44.100 | I thought you might find a Kana interesting.

01:17:45.980 | I certainly did.

01:17:47.080 | There are a number of studies that will pop up on PubMed.

01:17:49.100 | I recommend using examine.com as your jumping off point.

01:17:53.080 | There are some decent studies that they describe

01:17:55.460 | in their so-called human effect matrix.

01:17:57.100 | So those are studies done on humans.

01:17:58.760 | And the main effects that have been documented

01:18:01.120 | in the scientific literature are minor

01:18:03.920 | but significant increases in cognition,

01:18:05.940 | executive function.

01:18:07.180 | Executive function is something that's also associated

01:18:09.500 | with prefrontal cortex and reductions in anxiety.

01:18:12.040 | And that seems to be a common theme

01:18:13.640 | that we're seeing again and again.

01:18:15.360 | You saw this in the study, the trial,

01:18:18.480 | where we saw reductions in TNF alpha

01:18:20.100 | and reductions in amygdala activation.

01:18:22.440 | So which would ostensibly lead to reductions in anxiety.

01:18:26.920 | You're seeing increases in activity and brain networks

01:18:29.760 | that are associated with feelings of wellbeing.

01:18:31.480 | So again, back to that kind of push-pull

01:18:33.840 | of defensive anxiety and fear-like circuitry in the brain,

01:18:37.200 | being antagonistic, as we say,

01:18:39.840 | to the circuits that are associated

01:18:41.000 | with prosocial feeling good,

01:18:42.780 | receiving good feelings type circuitry and events in life.

01:18:47.040 | So as you now know, there is a lot of science

01:18:49.340 | about how gratitude can positively impact neural circuits

01:18:52.600 | in the brain, anti-inflammatory markers in the body,

01:18:56.060 | brain-heart breathing coordination, and on and on and on.

01:19:00.040 | I'd like to just highlight the key elements

01:19:03.220 | of the most effective, at least to my knowledge,

01:19:06.060 | gratitude practice.

01:19:07.540 | And when I say the most effective,

01:19:09.140 | what I'm doing is I'm gleaning from the scientific studies

01:19:11.860 | I was able to find and combining the various findings

01:19:15.200 | of those studies into what I think is a very practical

01:19:18.700 | and what should certainly be

01:19:20.040 | a very effective gratitude practice

01:19:22.480 | for all the positive effects that we described.

01:19:25.140 | First of all, that gratitude practice has to be grounded

01:19:28.620 | in a narrative, meaning a story.

01:19:31.320 | You don't have to recite or hear that story

01:19:33.860 | every single time you do the gratitude practice,

01:19:37.000 | but you have to know what that story was

01:19:39.200 | and what the gratitude practice references back to.

01:19:42.920 | Second of all, that story can be one

01:19:45.800 | of you receiving genuine thanks.

01:19:50.040 | And the key elements there are that you are the one

01:19:52.560 | receiving the thanks, the gratitude,

01:19:54.560 | and that it's being given to you genuinely, wholeheartedly.

01:19:59.480 | Or it can be a story of you observing someone else

01:20:05.440 | receiving thanks or expressing thanks.

01:20:08.840 | And that has to be a genuine interaction as well,

01:20:11.720 | both between the giver and the receiver.

01:20:14.800 | So those are the first three elements.

01:20:18.380 | What I recommend would be after you've established

01:20:21.600 | the story that you want to use for your gratitude practice,

01:20:24.920 | that you write down three or four simple bullet points

01:20:28.120 | that can serve as salient reminders of that story for you.

01:20:31.760 | It will serve as kind of a cue for that story

01:20:34.200 | without having to listen to or talk out the entire story.

01:20:39.200 | I would recommend writing down something about the state

01:20:43.040 | that you or the other person were in

01:20:44.720 | before they received the gratitude,

01:20:47.020 | the state that you were in or that the person was in

01:20:50.080 | after they received the gratitude,

01:20:52.000 | and any other elements that lend

01:20:54.480 | some sort of emotional weight or tone to the story.

01:20:57.380 | This could be three pages of text if you like,

01:20:59.840 | or it could just be a couple of bullet points.

01:21:02.280 | I don't think it really matters.

01:21:03.360 | The important thing is that it's embedded in your memory

01:21:05.440 | and that it's really associated

01:21:06.560 | with this genuine exchange of thanks

01:21:09.040 | and the receival of thanks.

01:21:10.920 | I think those are the key elements.

01:21:12.640 | And then it's very simple.

01:21:13.600 | The entire practice involves reading off these bullet points

01:21:17.520 | as a cue to your nervous system of the sense of gratitude.

01:21:22.520 | And then for about one minute,

01:21:25.280 | which is a trivial amount of time

01:21:26.820 | if you really think about it, or maybe two minutes,

01:21:29.580 | or if you're really ambitious up to five minutes

01:21:31.640 | of just really feeling into that genuine experience

01:21:35.400 | of having received gratitude

01:21:36.760 | or observed someone else receiving gratitude.

01:21:40.960 | And then in terms of frequency,

01:21:43.320 | I think a good rule of thumb would be to do that

01:21:46.000 | about three times a week.

01:21:47.340 | And the time of day doesn't really matter.

01:21:49.760 | I can't see why there would be

01:21:51.280 | any so-called circadian effects of this.

01:21:53.160 | I know some people like to do a gratitude practice

01:21:55.000 | before they go to sleep at night.

01:21:56.720 | I don't see any problem with doing this

01:21:58.480 | before you go to sleep at night.

01:21:59.500 | I also don't see any problem with you doing this

01:22:01.320 | on your lunch break or mid-morning

01:22:03.360 | or first thing in the morning.

01:22:04.420 | I can't see any logic for placing it

01:22:07.040 | any one time of day and not another.

01:22:09.660 | So I think the most important thing

01:22:10.680 | is that you do it at least three times a week.

01:22:13.400 | And as mentioned before, it's very, very brief.

01:22:15.760 | So there are very few barriers to entry for doing this.

01:22:19.340 | So if we just take a step back from this protocol

01:22:22.000 | and compare it to what's typically out there

01:22:24.120 | in the literature, which is,

01:22:26.520 | make a list of all the things you're thankful for,

01:22:28.400 | recite in your mind all the things you're thankful for,

01:22:31.000 | count your blessings.

01:22:31.840 | So I think everybody should be

01:22:32.840 | counting their blessings all the time.

01:22:34.000 | There's always something to be thankful for.

01:22:35.880 | But in terms of a scientifically grounded

01:22:38.800 | gratitude practice that is also scientifically demonstrated

01:22:43.040 | to shift your physiology at the level of your immune system

01:22:47.000 | and your neural circuitry, reducing anxiety,

01:22:49.580 | increasing motivation, all these wonderful things

01:22:52.180 | that so many of us are chasing all the time as goals,

01:22:55.860 | I think a gratitude practice reveals itself

01:22:58.400 | to be an immensely powerful tool

01:23:01.000 | for any and all of us to use.

01:23:02.800 | And that should come as no surprise

01:23:04.500 | because these pro-social circuits,

01:23:05.940 | these circuits for gratitude are not a recent phenomenon.

01:23:09.760 | Discussions about gratitude date back hundreds,

01:23:12.480 | if not thousands of years.

01:23:14.040 | What we've done today is to take the modern science

01:23:16.160 | right up until 2021 and to really distill from that

01:23:20.360 | the neuroimaging data, the neurochemistry,

01:23:22.880 | the various aspects of brain-body connectivity,

01:23:25.360 | look at the protocols, take various subject groups,

01:23:27.920 | some were done in women,

01:23:28.880 | some were done in between two individuals,

01:23:30.700 | some were done with brain imaging,

01:23:32.080 | all the various changes on a theme

01:23:36.140 | that allow us to point to a simple

01:23:39.680 | but very effective protocol that certainly we could all use

01:23:42.920 | around Thanksgiving.

01:23:44.060 | But Thanksgiving is just but one day

01:23:47.440 | throughout the entire year, of course.

01:23:49.400 | I personally have been using a gratitude protocol

01:23:51.840 | for the last several years,

01:23:53.740 | but that protocol was based on my ignorance really

01:23:57.240 | about the scientific literature

01:23:59.280 | and was mainly based on what I'd heard out there

01:24:02.120 | on the internet, which is that I should list out

01:24:05.240 | or think about or verbally recite the things

01:24:08.640 | that I'm grateful for.

01:24:09.760 | The sort of protocol that we arrived at today

01:24:12.700 | based on the scientific literature

01:24:14.480 | is distinctly different from that.

01:24:16.420 | And as a consequence, I've started to script out

01:24:19.720 | a protocol identical to the one I just described,

01:24:22.700 | and I intend to use that going forward.

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01:24:52.840 | at any level that you like.

01:24:54.400 | During today's episode and in many previous episodes,

01:24:56.840 | I mentioned supplements.

01:24:58.080 | Supplements aren't for everybody,

01:24:59.300 | but if you are going to use supplements,

01:25:00.900 | it's imperative that those supplements

01:25:02.380 | be of the very highest quality.

01:25:03.920 | For that reason, we partnered with Thorne.

01:25:05.920 | That's T-H-O-R-I-N-E because Thorne supplements

01:25:08.800 | have the highest levels of stringency

01:25:10.720 | in terms of the quality of the ingredients they include

01:25:13.440 | and the precision of the amounts of the ingredients

01:25:15.600 | they include in their products.

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01:25:19.420 | as well as the Mayo Clinic,

01:25:20.500 | so we're delighted to be partnered with them as well.

01:25:22.660 | If you want to see the supplements that I take,

01:25:24.300 | you can go to thorne.com/u/huberman.

01:25:29.000 | And there you can see all the supplements that I take,

01:25:31.400 | and you can get 20% off any of those supplements.

01:25:34.040 | Or if you navigate into the site through that portal,

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01:25:41.720 | any of the other supplements that Thorne makes.

01:25:44.160 | Thank you for your time and attention today,

01:25:45.940 | learning about the science of gratitude.

01:25:48.160 | And last, but certainly not least,

01:25:50.080 | thank you for your interest in science.

01:25:52.000 | (upbeat music)

01:25:54.580 | (upbeat music)

The Science of Gratitude & How to Build a Gratitude Practice | Huberman Lab Podcast #47

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