What's one of the best ways to be happy? To just appreciate what you have, to notice and appreciate the blessings out there. But we've got to push against this natural negativity bias to do this. So how do we do that? Well, it turns out that this is a spot where harnessing attention in the way we were just talking about can be really helpful.

Just taking time to notice the blessings, notice kind of all the good stuff. It's often talked about in terms of a gratitude practice, although gratitude sounds kind of cheesy. I don't know. My friend, Catherine Price, who I mentioned earlier, she has this practice that she calls a delight practice.

We just notice delights in the world. I love the word delight. You know, I walked in your studio, you had a picture of your bulldog, and I was like, that's a delight. That's so cute. Thank you for delighting him. I delight in him too, even though he's dead several years now.

Delight is a wonderful word. Yeah. And we can train our brain to notice them, right? You can literally have a practice where, you know, put in your notes app on your phone, like a list of delights, or even better, pick a friend like I have with Catherine where you can just, like, text them delight.

You know, at the end of this, I'll, you know, text like, saw a really cute dog, delight, or heard this really funny song, delight. Then you get the social connection and the gratitude. But what that does is, if you have this practice where you got to write down the delights, your brain starts to automatically be on the lookout for them.

It becomes rewarding because you get to write this thing down. Now all of a sudden, it can be a practice that you're sort of shifting your negativity bias to notice more of the good things that are out there. And there's so much evidence suggesting that people who naturally notice the blessings in the world are happier.

If you do one of these kind of gratitude or delight practices, you wind up happier. Sonia Lubomirsky has this lovely study where you scribble down three to five things you're grateful for, three to five delights, in as little as two weeks, you significantly improve your overall satisfaction with life, right?

It's super free. I love that. So much so that, and because I accidentally interrupted, the comments always tell me I interrupt too much. It's out of interest. It's out of interest. I promise. If I could interrupt myself, I would. And I probably do from time to time. Could you repeat what the, it's three to five things?

Yeah. Three to five things you're grateful for. I'm not sure if the number really matters, but it's committing to kind of noticing the good things in life and really trying to take a moment to notice how they felt, right? You know, so if I look at, I do delight practices sometimes or gratitude practices and it's things like my husband, you know, these big things in life.

But then sometimes it's like my morning coffee or like probably, you know, seeing your cute dog. Like, it's funny to see the picture of the, for folks that don't know Andrew's studio, it's a picture of his dog on a microphone. It's just very funny. It's a giant microphone. Giant, high quality photo.

Yeah. And he's standing on the table that I do my solo podcast from at the microphone. And his tag just happened to rotate a few degrees toward the camera just at that moment. So you could see his name, Costello, you know? And I invite listeners to pause right now and notice what's happening to their face as you hear Andrew say that.

Probably you're just smiling, right? You didn't even see this really cute photo, but you're also smiling. That's the power of delights, right? Not just noticing them yourself, but potentially sharing them too. And so this is another thought pattern practice that we can engage in, which is like, just train your brain to find these things.

And what you'll find is that, you know, there's a limited ratio of the stuff we can focus our attention on. If we start shifting towards the delights from the hassles and the yucky stuff in life, now we're just kind of filling our brain with stuff that gives us a little more positive emotion.

What I love about this conversation about gratitude is that, I must say, I do like the word delight more than gratitude. Gratitude sounds cheesy. It sounds a little hippy dippy, I gotta say, yeah. Well, I'm from Northern California, so I'm cool with hippy dippy, even though I'm not a hippy.

Punk rocker, not a hippy. You're Berkeley roots, sir. Yeah. I'm from the other end of the peninsula. I love the East Bay, but anyway, this is getting... But the point is, it's not that the word feels soft. I need to think about this a little bit more. It's that maybe it's just that delight is such a powerful, unselfish word.

Like it's not taking anything from anybody. It's not requiring a shift away from one's sort of intrinsic self. I feel like gratitude requires this like, "Okay, I'm gonna now be grateful." It's like kind of like pulling... If you're not already in a state of gratitude, I feel like there's more effort involved.

And we've been saying effort that precedes reward is good. But with delight, it feels like it's just very much in concert with almost like who one is. Yeah. And like I delight in Costello. I don't expect everyone to delight in Costello. People who did, I delighted in their delight.

So it was just amplifying all the delight. But the thing that really strikes me about delight is that every example you gave, it's very rapid timescale. I will say I normally drink yerba mate during these things, which I delight in. But today I decided I haven't had coffee in a while, took a little break from it for no particular reason.

And I had a single shot of espresso and I was thinking to myself, "This is really good." This is delightful. Yeah. So this is a fast timescale. Maybe it was the fact that I haven't had it in a little while. And it's just really fast. No one suffers. It's all gain.

Yeah. And so it runs a little bit counter-current to what we were talking about before, which is the requirement for effort to precede the reward. Delight feels like a very smooth road to a reward that's all net positive. And as you said, these delights are available throughout the day.

And it doesn't... It requires just noticing something inside and outside. Whereas I feel like with gratitude, I love gratitude practices. The data are incredible. Yeah. It is anything but squishy. It is like a real power tool for shifting one's state of mind. That's clear from the literature. But the gratitude thing, I feel like requires an almost like a formalization, like, "Okay, I'm going to be grateful now." Whereas delight, you're just kind of on the lookout for things that spark you and make you reflexively smile.

Yeah. And I think it's... And the few things are better than that. Yeah. And I think it's really sensory, you know, in the way we were talking about before, right? It gets you back into being present. Most of these delights are something you taste or you experience or you see that's funny.

There's a really lovely book by the author Ross Gay called "The Book of Delights." And he used a delight practice where every day, he not only had to find a delight, but write a short essay about it because he's an author. And it's just hilarious. It's like one of my favorite books.

And you just kind of go with... And it's really strange things. It's like, one is he, you know, noticed the flower as he noticed his lilacs. And he has this whole idea of... One delight is purple flowers. Why are there so many purple flowers? There's purple flowers everywhere. He also has a delight in music.

He really likes the '80s band El DeBarge, you know, from the "Beat of the Rhythm" and all that. Yeah. Am I vaguely familiar with it? So it's like... So you have this connection with other people's delights. And it's silly. They're just silly things. But the fact that we've noticed them...

I mean, again, as a listener is probably experiencing right now, if you pay attention, a little bit of positive emotion, right? If you're driving around your car, feeling a little stressed out in traffic, you can kind of take a breath. And so that's the power of the practice. You're shifting your emotions because you're noticing these good things.

You're noticing the good things, which is great because you're sort of training your attention to get there, and you're sort of forming this habit to shift that negativity bias that's sort of built in, but isn't really making you as happy as you could be. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. you