Nicole Vignola and Dave Asprey discuss how gratitude rewires your brain. They explain negativity bias, why your brain defaults to the negative, and how practicing gratitude creates new neural pathways that stick.
So you can rewire essentially the synapses, or the connections that your memory centers have made with the emotional centers to diminish that friction and the impact that it has on you.
If you. Then, if you get rid of the traumatic pattern in your synapses, does boosting the positive, the way you talk about in your book, does that regrow them? And given that we're so focused, focused on fear and. And over emphasizing the negative, I'm assuming our synaptogenesis is the same way. How would you kind of trick the brain into growing new synapses that are positive more quickly?
Yes. So the synapses are not positive or negative, but it's your perception of how they are connecting. So, you know, you spoke about gratitude. And being able to see the positive in your life is hugely important because if you don't keep that in check, you will focus on the negative. If I say to you right now, Dave, how many blue things are in your environment? You start looking around. And I said, okay, how many red things were there? You're going to say, well, I don't know. I was only looking for the blue stuff. And if I. And that's kind of how the negativity bias works. And gratitude, if you are only looking for the negative things in your life, you're going to overlook all the wonderful things that are happening to you all of the time.
The exercise that's worked best for me is when I've written about, in at least one of the books, is sitting down at the end of the day and writing down a list of things you're grateful for. And I remember one time I did this list, I can only come up with nine things for the day, which is not that many. Most people have a hard time just with three when you start. But over time, you realize you could be grateful for dozens of things because they're small things.
Yes.
So I'm racking my brain, and that was the day that I got the phone call that said my book hit the New York Times bestseller list. And I totally blanked that one out. So I'm like, I don't have anything to be grateful for today. And you just realize the power of the ego at making you forget all the good stuff because it's so negativity biased.
Exactly.
And so the practice of just over the course of months making a list.
Yes.
Develops, I think, a new, maybe new neural pathways.
Yes.
That allow you to just recognize gratitude without. Or at least feel gratitude without as much resistance as you used to feel. I used to feel does that seem rational?
Yes, 100%. And I'll add another layer to it. You've got this reticular activating system that filters out unimportant information. So it could very well be that it's also become accustomed to filtering out positive information because it's so used to only filtering through the negative stuff. And there may be some synaptogenesis in those communication areas, the particular activating system, which is the system that communicates just your senses and what's important to your conscious brain. So it could very well be that over time. And that's a really interesting topic conversation that I'm now going to go and research after this. But it could very well be that over time, you're, you're learning to filter out the positive more because, as you said, you can be really grateful for little things. I'm really grateful that the span is on me right now because it's scorching in Madeira right now.
