The Power of Gratitude with Dr. Laurie Santos

(logo chiming) Headspace Studios. Hello, it's Dr. Laurie Santos, your guest host for the week. Welcome to Radio Headspace and to Thursday. If you don't know, I'm a psychology professor at Yale and host of The Happiness Lab, a podcast all about the science of happiness. Today, I'm going to talk about how gratitude can genuinely make us feel better and I'll share some tips for how to put it into practice even if we're not feeling all that grateful. I think we can define gratitude as a sort of two part process. First, gratitude is about recognizing the good things in your life. Oh my gosh, this is great, you know? Taste of coffee, the fact that the people I love are alive. But gratitude also has a second part which is a sort of attribution which is to realize like that didn't necessarily have to be the case. The universe is giving you this wonderful gift that that blessing exists. And it's a moment of thankfulness that you have it in the first place. There's evidence that if you regularly engage in a practice of gratitude, if you take time to experience things that you're thankful for, you wind up feeling better. You wind up self-reporting more positive emotions and a deeper satisfaction with life. And this could come even through the act of expressing gratitude to other people. One of my favorite studies by Marty Seligman and his colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania had subjects do what he calls a gratitude visit. He tells his subjects, we want you to write a letter of gratitude to someone who's been especially kind to you but you've never thanked them. And then you have to deliver that letter in person to the person in question and you have to read it to them. Subjects predict this might feel weird or awkward or take too much time. But what ends up happening is the people who receive these letters find them amazing like they self-report, it's one of the happiest moments of their lives. But what I find even more incredible is what happens to the happiness of the subjects. The people who are doing this gratitude visit. And Seligman finds that they not only get a significant boost in happiness after doing this gratitude visit, that boost seems to last for over a month. So you get a significant boost in happiness that lasts for over a month simply through expressing gratitude to other people. When people hear about gratitude practices and the importance of counting your blessings, I think sometimes people confuse it with this idea of toxic positivity. You know which I take to mean this idea that you can't ever experience negative emotions, you have to just, you only experience positive emotions. That's not what gratitude is about. You can recognize that you're experiencing negative emotions, you can recognize that bad things are happening in life but you can still do some work to either...