067 Taken For Borrowed

This is Dr. Torrey. Welcome to the Influence Every Day show, where we make every day better and we influence for good.

Every morning, I have this gratitude practice where I write down five things that I'm grateful for. Typically five, sometimes many more. It depends on if I'm in a flow, thinking about them and reflecting on them. But what I do is I basically pick something that I'm grateful for, I reflect on it, and then I just jot it down. Now, I used to do journaling, but that just wasn't for me. It just didn't work for me. I found myself self editing, and then I would only rarely do it. So I found that if I just list five things, I put literally, sometimes it's one word and then another word and then another word. Now, today, though, I was reflecting on the conversation that I had a few days ago. I was speaking to a member of my family who described what it was like when she first put on a hearing aid. So she was navigating the world like normal. She's going to work, she's taking care of people, whatever her job is. And at one point, somebody who was an audiologist said, have you ever had your hearing examined? Because it might just be worth it. Just do it. Just get it checked out. And she went, she got her hearing examined, and it turns out that she needed hearing aids. So she described the feeling of putting on the hearing aid for the first time, and she heard birds chirping, and she didn't realize that she was missing it. Now, taking something for granted is like that. To take something for granted is to take it as if it's a given, as if it's stable, as if it doesn't require maintenance, as if, you know what? I don't need to question it. I don't need to take care of it. It's gonna be there. So it got me reflecting on some of these things that I should be grateful for that are right there, right in front of me. But I haven't seen them, I haven't appreciated them. I haven't reflected on them enough. So one might be background sounds, right? The fact that we can hear background sounds, the hum of the car, the birds chirping in the background, kids playing off in the distance, the wind blowing through the trees, Right? That even just the sound of your home sort of settling, there's a certain baseline sound that, you know, that we kind of know everything's okay, right? What about our peripheral vision? Have we reflected on that? Are we taking our peripheral vision for granted? Do you realize what Would life be like if all you could see was through a pinhole? What would your experience of life be like then? How often do we appreciate our peripheral vision? Probably not often. What about the experience of micro textures? Like you're writing with a pen on paper and you hear the scratching and you feel the subtle vibration of the movement across the paper. That feedback matters. In fact, when people are designing things, when they design, like, buttons, for example, the feedback of a click really matters to our experience with the button. But we don't appreciate it because we're typing on our laptops, we're tapping on our screens, we're getting this tactile feedback, and we're not even realizing it. But that was designed in there so that you could have a better experience. And part of the beauty of it is that it's so well designed, by definition, you take it for granted the moment it's absent. Have you ever tried to push on a button and then the click isn't there, or the sensation or the sound isn't there, and then you're not sure if you clicked it and you do it again and then you made an error and you have to go back? Like, it's the subtle things in the background that we take for granted. What about the fact that you experience balance? I'm standing here recording this podcast for you. I can stand up. If you took away my sense of balance, everything would change. My entire world would change. But right now, we have it. We typically take it for granted. It's given, it's stable, it was there before, it's probably going to be there ongoing. I don't really have to maintain it. Or do you? Because it might be taken away as you get older. Your core strength, your proximal muscles, all these things, you might start to weaken there and your balance may diminish. Are we taking it for granted now? What about, like, other uninterrupted physiology that's ongoing, like your heart beating? How many times has your heart been beating since you were in the womb and it's still beating? Isn't that remarkable? The moment it stops, everything changes. There's nothing more important at that point. What about your breathing? You've been breathing, ongoing, uninterrupted since you were born, and. But what happens, you're not gasping, you're not choking, you're not drowning. I know this because you're able to listen to a podcast, but have you ever reflected on the fact that your uninterrupted breathing has been going on for a lifetime? That is amazing. Things like recognizing faces or voices. Could you imagine if every time we saw a loved one, we would have to relearn their face or their voice or experience it for the first time every time. When people have advanced dementia, some of this stuff starts to occur. When that is taken away, it changes the relationship entirely. What about depth perception? Your ability to perceive depth? Every time you pour your coffee, you pour your tea, your water, you're driving, you're doing like. All of these things require depth perception. But do we appreciate it like it's here now? Do we appreciate it? There's other things. Your ability, when you walk into a room to get a feel for what the room is, get a pulse. How should I be right now in this context? This stuff is happening automatically, and we tend to take it for granted. Now let's just look at what happens when we take something for granted. Generally, the things we take for granted take for granted. The things that we take for granted are typically things that we view to be given. They're stable. The underlying assumptions are these. We assume that it will continue or that it will remain accessible. At least we have it, it's available. We assume that it will not require maintenance. We assume that it won't be taken away. These are three main assumptions that we have when we take something for granted. And here's the thing about it that is really powerful from neuroscience. We are hardwired to notice when something changes. We're hardwired to track threat. We're also hardwired to optimize for cognitive efficiency. Our brain seeks an easier way. These are three things that we are absolutely hardwired for that we notice change, we track threats, and we're looking for cognitive ease. If you think about those three things, by definition, once something like takes care of all these, in other words, it's not a change, it's not a threat, and it's easy. The moment those are fulfilled, it becomes predictable, it becomes reliable, and it's not threatening. So what does it do? It drops below our conscious awareness. It drops below our awareness. And if we're not aware of something, will we be in awe of it? Will we give it its due reverence? Will we give it its due appreciation? Probably not. So what if instead of taking, let's take people for example. What if instead of taking our relationships for granted, those ones that are predictable, that are reliable and non threatening, the ones that are actually like the most important in your life, what if we recognized that those are actually fragile, they're not givens, what if we took them as Fragile. What then? Take a moment and imagine the most important person in your life. Pick someone. It might be a spouse, it might be a child, it might be a close friend. Imagine now that person is taken away, or that person has a severe stroke, or that person moves away, or the relationship ends in some other way, or their life is taken. It's not a given. Their presence in your life is not a given. It's fragile. If something is fragile, then the fact that it was predictable, reliable, and not threatening, all of a sudden, we might maintain it a little better. We might pay a little more attention to it. We might give it its due. When you take something for granted, we're not giving it its due. What if we treated those relationships or any of those things that I mentioned earlier? The background sounds and peripheral vision and depth perception, all those things. What if we took those as only borrowed? Would we appreciate them? We may be taking these things for granted now. It's not a reason to beat yourself up. It's just every once in a while, it might be worth actively looking into being grateful for them and not leaving it at gratitude. Because gratitude is not enough. Gratitude is not enough. I can experience gratitude all by myself. I can be grateful for my wife and my relationship with my wife, or my relationship with my kids or whatever. I. I can be grateful for that without taking any action. I can just experience gratitude. The next level might be expressing gratitude, saying thank you. But there's another level. The other level is to actively appreciate it, to actively maintain it, to actively improve it, to see it for what it is, to hear it, to experience it, to be with it in the moment. Think about someone in your life right now, someone that you may be taking for granted. And rather than taking them for granted, take them for borrowed. I'll see you in the next episode.

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