Brian Johnson presents a short YouTube vlog on using gratitude to boost happiness. He summarizes Robert Emmons’ experiment (three groups: gratitude, hassles, neutral; 10-week intervention of once-weekly lists of five items) and reports the gratitude group was ~25% happier. Johnson recommends keeping a gratitude journal (brief weekly practice) and practicing a moment-to-moment technique called “Grateful Flow” (credited to the book The Tools) to shift out of stress and into connection with one’s best self. He illustrates with everyday examples (shower, traffic) and closes with personal gratitude.
Questions this video answers
10 weeks
Once a week
Five items
Approximately 25% happier (by the study’s measures)
The Tools
Chapters
Hey guys, this is Brian. I am back with a big idea on gratitude. Yesterday's take got interrupted when the little philosopher Emerson decided to wake up from his nap. So I decided to get a head start. This morning mommy and baby are still sleeping and I just meditated and wrote a 5k and figured I'd get this little video done again. I'm loving doing these on a daily basis. Can't wait to share more. And thanks for all of your ideas about videos you'd like to see. So today, gratitude, one of the biggest, most powerful and easiest to implement ways to boost our happiness. Now, I want to start by talking about an experiment done by a guy named Robert Emmons, who's the leading researcher on gratitude and its power on our well being, immune system, et cetera, et cetera. So he did a study where he brought people in, randomly assigned them to three different groups, and he wanted to test and see if keeping a gratitude journal would boost people's happiness. Three different groups. One group, once a week they wrote a sentence on five things they were grateful for. Right? That's the gratitude group. Another group wrote once a week, five things they found annoying hassles. And the other group just kind of wrote neutral things, right? Just described five things that happened. So three different groups. And what he found was the gratitude journal group, after 10 weeks, was 25% happier by their measures than the other two groups, the neutral group and the hassles group. That's extraordinary. Ten weeks of once a week writing down five things you're grateful for boosts your happiness 25%. That's amazing. That takes a total of about five minutes a week to significantly boost your happiness. Again, this is one of the most powerful, easy, easiest to implement ways to boost your happiness. So I strongly encourage you to consider keeping a gratitude journal. And even right now, at the end of this video or right now, press pause and think about five things that you're grateful for. And what this does is you start training your mind to look for things that are going right. You look for things that you can be grateful for so you can keep track of them at the end of the week or the end of the day or whenever. It is really, really powerful stuff, gratitude journaling, something that I've done for a number of years, not every single day or every single week, but what I like to do is to integrate this journaling with a more kind of moment to moment to moment process and something called grateful Flow. So Grateful Flow is an idea from a great book called the Tools, which is one of my favorite books that I mentioned in a video the other day. And we're going to do a full philosopher's Notes TV episode on it. But they basically have five tools that help you connect to the highest within yourself and transform your life. Live with more courage, creativity, etc. Happiness, etc. And they have a great way of describing the power of gratitude when you're feeling stressed. So let's say that this is you. You got a little sad face. You've got a cloud of kind of like eek. This is the eek sauce cloud. So you get a cloud of eek over your head, right? Not feeling good, it's raining on you and you don't have an umbrella and life isn't very good. Bummer, right? Your highest self, the light of what you're capable of isn't coming through this exhaust cloud, right? You're thinking about things that you're stressed or anxious or overwhelmed about, and you're just not feeling too rosy, right? Well, they say the way to deal with that is to tap into the tool of grateful flow. Whenever you feel this, whenever you feel stressed or anxious or overwhelmed, think about all the things you're grateful for. Flip on your grateful flow and just start thinking about what do you have in your life that's going right that you can be grateful for? You're alive, you're watching this video, you have whatever it is that you feel blessed about in your life, right? Think about those things and, and allow this process of just coming from a place of deep gratitude to allow you to move into joy and tap into connect to your highest self where it can truly shine through and you can shine up to it and life is good. So the way that you bust through this cloud of anxiety and stress and overwhelm is you turn on your gratitude flow. You turn on the gratitude switch in your life and you start thinking about all the things that are going on, right? Versus anytime we're stressed or anxious, it's just because we're focusing all the things that aren't going the way we want. Well, there's an easy way to get out of that that's through grateful flow. Tapping into gratitude and really, really just feeling into all the things that are going right in our lives. And then we want to make this a practice in our lives. Don't wait until the eeksauce cloud shows up. Think about in your silent moments when you're going through your day. Just think about the amazing things in your life. When I take a shower, I often imagine and Just how amazing is it? I'm sitting there in a shower, hot water is coming out, and all the people who were involved in that process of bringing that water to me, inventing all of the different engineering and mechanical things that have to happen for that water to show up every single time that I flip the switch and turn on the water faucet, that's an amazing thing. It's a miracle that we can take for granted. And there are so many opportunities like that. Every single moment gives us an opportunity. We're sitting in traffic, we can complain about that. We can realize that a hundred years ago, we would have been on a horse. And I'm pretty sure horses didn't have air conditioning. So think about the things you're grateful for more and more and more and more, and you will boost your happiness at least that 25% that Robert Emmons found in his research work. And you'll have the tools to move from feelings of ickiness to feelings of empowerment and joy as you come from and center your place from this place of gratitude more and more consistently. So there you go. Gratitude, grateful flow. Huge way to boost your happiness. What are you grateful for today? Think about that often. I'm grateful for you. In all the fun that we have talking about these ideas, I'm definitely grateful for my little baby boy, my beautiful wife, life in general, and as I press end on this iPhone, thank you, iPhone, for helping me make this possible. All right, have an awesome day. Look forward to sharing more with you soon. As always, let me know if you have some ideas you want me to cover. And have a great one. See you.
