PNTV: Gratitude Works! by Robert Emmons, Ph.D. (#402)

Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to Philosopher's Notes tv. Today we've got another great book which I do not have because it's in one of our boxes. We're still recreating, unpacking our library, but gratitude works. Gratitude Works by Robert Emmons, the leading authority on the science of gratitude. We featured his first book called thanks. This one takes it a step further and really gives us practical exercises to help us tap into the amazing science of gratitude. So, as always, we've got a philosopher's note, six page PDF go to optimize me. You can get access to 600 notes, six page PDFs, 20 minute MP3s, along with 50 optimal living 101 classes, blah, blah, blah. And I got a big stack of stuff we're going to reference in a moment as it relates to gratitude. But for now, let's jump in gratitudeworks again, Robert Emmons, leading scientist at UC Davis, studying gratitude. Thank you, Professor Emmons. We should start there. We appreciate you dedicating your life to your craft and living heroically and serving us profoundly. So thank you. And also thank you, Optimize Community. Thank you for being part of my life and our life and making it possible for me to do this. I don't take that for granted. We're going to talk about that as an obstacle. I know that this is a gift, that your time is valuable. I try to make every minute count. And I deeply appreciate your support in making it possible for me to do what I do and our team to do what we do here at Optimize Enterprises Public Benefit Corporation. So thank you. So gratitude is huge. Professor Emmons again did the first research on this and then it's just the field has exploded. But we know, and he says these stats are eye popping, eye popping. He's like, this is so profound, what gratitude does for our well being. The initial research he did was something like this. Imagine people coming into a lab, split into two groups. One group is told, hey, keep a gratitude journal. Once a week, write down five things for which you're grateful and do that for 10 weeks. We're going to check in. The other group just wrote about things that were happening in their lives, but they didn't think about things for which they were grateful. Fast forward, end of the study. The gratitude group, simply keeping a journal once a week. Five things, 10 weeks, 25% happier than the other group. That's crazy. Those grateful people also slept for 30 minutes more a day. He says, count your blessings, not your sheep. If you want to have A good night of sleep, Right? And they exercise 33% more than people who are ungrateful. And the reality is you can't hold two emotions simultaneously. Your mind can only focus on one thing. Right? And if you are grateful, you make it very challenging to be depressed because you're focusing on the things that are working in your life versus the things that aren't. Shift. And then we need to train our minds to focus on what's working, what we can be grateful for, rather than thinking everything should be perfect and entitled. And then that leads to some spirals we don't want. So gratitude is super big. And I playfully say in the note that positive psychologists arm wrestle about the top virtues. Right. So again, I'm going to keep on drawing this compass. If you're following along, you should be able to fill it in at this point. I will do so today. Briefly, the four cardinal virtues of ancient wisdom and modern science adapted to optimize are wisdom, self mastery, courage, and love. Now, science then worked on that positive psychologist, and they extrapolated it to 24. They added two virtues, and then they extrapolated it to 24. Now, Robert tells us that gratitude is actually, according to his research, even more powerful than hope. Now, we talked about hope being so powerful, and then gratitude, Professor Emmons tells us, is even more powerful. Hope, again, is the belief that your future will be better than your present because you have agency and a willingness to go do whatever it takes to make it awesome. He tells us gratitude is even better. Right now we'll let the psychologists arm wrestle one another. It's in the top three. The other top thing most highly correlated with our well being is zest, energy, which is why we spend so much time talking about eating, moving, sleeping, etc. And then the final two virtues actually that make up the top five scientific virtues, we have hope, gratitude, zest, curiosity, being open to life, seeing what's working, seeing what's not, and then love, which we count in that cardinal thing. But I want to make that point. And every morning I draw this compass in my journaling. I quickly sketch that. It takes me a minute, right? I write that down. And then I'll often write, God, thank you for blessing me with the gifts of because. And we'll talk about the practices. Professor Emmons tells us grateful people use words like blessings and gifts and they don't take things for granted, they take them as granted. And then for curious souls, I go like this for curiosity, which is my representation of spiraling up. I want to be curious, see what's working? What needs working? Get better. Today I draw a heart by courage and I draw a heart by love. Because courage comes from the Latin word for heart. It's the virtue that vitalizes and why we have courage is to be as loving as possible. And then I draw a little boom, lightning bolt. And then I draw a little target in the fact that I'm going to go after it. Hope wise. It's our virtue compass. We're actually having a compass made from a custom compass maker. I am so excited to get one. We're midway through the design process that I'll share more on that when we have it. 25% boost in your happiness by simply keeping track of things you're grateful for. So how do we cultivate gratitude? Well, Professor Emmons tells us you need to realize that gratitude is a virtue and virtues require hard work effort to cultivate them. It's the paradox of gratitude. It does your mind and body and soul good, but you need to work at it to get good at gratitude. He tells us it's like a garden. You need to plant the seeds and tend them. Appreciate things in your life and then good news, it becomes easier to appreciate it. You spiral up on that as you rewire your brain and incline it to see the things that are working. Now, the practices, we'll talk about one of the most powerful ones next, the ladder exercise. The simple practice of journaling things for which you're grateful is huge. There's a ton of ways you can do it. The way that we coach our coaches in our optimized coach program is we have them do it daily. So rather than wait for the week, we have them. Reflect energy, work, love wise. We have identity, virtues and behaviors as we've discussed. And then what's one little thing that's awesome? Energy, work, love wise. So this morning I'm celebrating some distinctions I'm making with my heart rate variability. It's climbing radically and I'm very grateful for that. And the company that created this little tool that I use that seems to be working work wise. I literally just briefly reflected, I feel really blessed to do this. I get paid to read books. That's amazing. I don't take that for granted. Pinch me. This is awesome. I. I've worked hard for it, but without your support and without the blessings I've received, I wouldn't be able to do that. And then, love wise, our kids just got two new chickens to add to the four they had and they're so happy about them. And the simplest things Give them so much joy. Boom, boom, boom. I'm grateful. Energy, work and love wise. That simple practice on a daily basis makes it really hard to feel really bad because again, you can't feel simultaneously really grateful, really depressed. Try it. I challenge you. There's another practice, and again we have our coaches do it daily. Little incremental bits. That's how you grow a good garden. You weed it daily, you water it daily. You tend to it frequently, not intensely, once in a while, but consistently. Professor Emmons talks about something called gratitude fatigue. You don't want to write the same thing down every single day. Then you have gratitude fatigue. You want to be specific, go deep into something. Again, the little chickens. That's not a big deal. I'm not going to write about that ever again. Probably right. But it was sweet to appreciate my kids and their joyful, youthful exuberance of something like that and watch them take care of them, etc. So you want to keep your gratitude fresh in your mind and as you journal it. Then, another practice that I love, that we talk about here and in our Mastery series, a lot is grateful flow. So my coach, Phil Stutz, says that when you feel a cloud of ick kind of coming over your soul, pierce through it with grateful flow. Just look around you right now and find things for which you can be grateful. I'm looking around. I'm in our studio, in our barn. I'm appreciating our film genius, Ben, who created the lights that created the environment for me to be able to communicate with you here. The fact that I can speak into a camera and record it on a tiny little card, then FedEx it to our film genius who will take it and do its thing. And you'll be able to Watch this on YouTube or Facebook or via our email or app. Like, these are amazing miracles. And when I focus on that and have a grateful flow for that and for all the people that were part of every single thing in here, the threads on the sound blankets, we have to dampen any echoes and stuff. Someone had to weave that, or someone had to make the machines that weave that and take it off of the press and put it into a box and someone had to ship it to me, I can go on my entire day and not even come close to accounting for all the things for which I can be grateful. Grateful flow, very powerful practice. And I'm going to talk about what gets in the way of that in a moment. But first I want to go to what science says and what my own personal experience has revealed to be one of the most powerful practices, period, which is the gratitude letter. So two parts to this. The letters that I have received. And this is just a stack of some of them. The kind words I've received from you and other subscribers and Optymyze community members and Optymyze coaches, you know, of how our work has transformed their lives. Well, I print them out oftentimes. I have a collection in my office, and I got this current collection on the stack. I'll pick it up. And I feel so blessed to receive that kindness from other people. But the more powerful thing is for us to write the letter to someone. So when I was reading this book a couple of years ago, I don't know when I read the book a year ago, maybe. Hmm. Sense of time is just totally warped right now. Six, eight months ago, I read it, and he's talking about the exercises in this particular exercise of a gratitude letter, where basically you think of someone in your life who maybe you haven't thanked properly or maybe you could just afford to take some time and write them a letter and truly express all the things for which you're grateful. And then you write the letter and you actually write it, or you type it or whatever, you print it out, and then you go take it to them, and you read it to them in person, is what the recommended process is. You take it and you read it to them and then go experience what that is like. Now, Robert makes the very clear point that you may or may not be well received. You don't have control over that, but you want to be mindful about it and kind of think about whether you want to deliver it or read it or even hold onto it. But to the extent you can go read it, it's a powerful thing. Now, when I read this, I knew immediately for whom I was going to write a gratitude letter, which was my brother. My brother at the time was in the final stages of stage four pancreatic cancer. And he was literally on his deathbed at the time. He was a week or two before he passed away. And it was just unbelievable lightning strike. Well, my God, I got to write him a letter and thank him for all the. Everything he's done for me. He's 13 years older than I was. He waited through three sisters to have a little brother. And I wrote a letter. I said, you know, all of these things, and I don't know who taught me how to. I said ball was my first word. My brother was really into sports, right? And I just shared little Memories of. I don't know if you taught me how to say the word ball, but I'm pretty sure you taught me how to throw a baseball, right? Then I walked through from my childhood to all the other things that he did, small things that he may not even think were a big deal, up to his support of me with our businesses, and just everything he did for me, I wrote it down in a letter, went down with Alexandra, and we sat there at what wind up literally being my brother's deathbed. He was actually tired, you know, and at first, he wasn't sure he wanted to listen to it, and there was a little bit of resistance, and I said, okay, buddy, but I totally get it. I just love to read it. And he's like, yeah, okay, let's do it, you know? And then he started laughing, and he said, I don't know if I taught you how to. How to throw a ball, but I definitely taught you how to throw it straight. You know, we're laughing. And the sweetest, most beautiful opportunity for us to really connect and for him to know how much I appreciated him, how much I loved him. And our relationship wasn't without challenges, as all relationships are. And it was a beautiful way for me to express my love for him, unattached to how it might be received, but for it to be a dynamic, that was just a very, very, very, very special, beautiful thing. So my encouragement to you, to the extent you feel inspired, is to think about someone who has blessed you in ways that perhaps you have not properly thanked them for. Consider writing a letter or two or three or four or five or 10, or start with one. And it's one of the most powerful things I have done. Science says this has unbelievable, lasting, positive benefits for the writer of it. And then again, the letters that I have received, I received. We encourage our coaches to do this in the optimized coach program. And so one of our coaches wrote me a letter, right? And I got it printed out here, and it's just. It's the most amazing thing. And he thanks me for a lot of different things, including he's a devout Muslim, right? And he thanked me for my openness and for the fact that I often talk about following your faith, and I include Islam in there in a climate, he says it isn't always open to that, but he's a devout Muslim, and he sees so many of the things we talk about running through his faith. And I've helped him become a better husband and father and human being. And he felt called to write Me, this letter. Now, this letter means a ton to me. I have this on the top of my stack that I often come back to. So the letters that we write for other people, we don't know the ripples that they're going to have in our lives. But I personally cherish every single little note that I get. And it gives me the fuel. As David Goggins says in can't touch me, Navy seal, can't hurt me. Rather, Navy seal, he's got his cookie jar. He goes into his cookie jar and eats a cookie when he's feeling a little down. He's not feeling as inspired because nobody feels inspired all day, every day. We all need to get our hero bars, our cookie jars filled. And one of the notes I have is actually from the guy, one of the top ranked Navy SEALs in the world. He and one of his colleagues invited me down to do a talk or a virtual talk. It wound up being with COVID for a mental performance working group they have. And I thanked him afterwards for the honor to be there. And he sent me an amazing note back. That screen grab print, boom, put it on the top. Thank you, Mags. This is what it's all about. Gratitude works. There are a number of ways to express it. Gratitude, journaling, grateful flow. The letter again. Who can you write a letter to? Number one obstacle that gets in the way of gratitude. This is a really powerful idea that Professor Emmons goes off on. Entitlement. Entitled people tend not to feel gratitude because they think everything is the world owes them something. Well, of course my wife should act this way or my spouse should act this way, or my kids should do this, or my car should work, or the Internet should be fast, or I should be able to go shopping without a mask on, or whatever it is I'm entitled. Come on, world, you owe me something. No, all wisdom traditions say have a little humility. It's the antidote to the obstacle. The obstacle to gratitude is entitlement. The antidote is humility. Grateful people are humble. They don't take things for granted, whether it's their spouse or the technology they use to go through their life or the cashier that's checking them out of the grocery store or the car that they're driving or the Internet that might be a little bit sluggish. These things aren't taken for granted. They're taken as granted. And that distinction has been huge for me. For granted, not grateful, not happy as granted. Humble, grateful. Thank you, God, for blessing me with the gifts of everything. I don't take it for granted. I take it as granted. And I'm going to show up with humility and try to give myself back to the world. That's our number one obstacle and the antidote. Then the final idea here is bad to good. Professor Emmons talks about one of. We're speaking of death today. My brother's passing away. I actually don't have my coin with me. I left it on my desk. I usually have the Memento Mori coin. Remember death. I frequently, just for a flicker. As William B. Irvine says, do a negative visualization. Imagine things not being in your life, including your own life, your own life force and breath. Research has been done scientifically on thinking of your death. They call it a death reflection. They say, hey, bring people into a lab, split them up. One group gets a death reflection. Where? And Professor Emin says, don't try this at a dinner party. The individual is encouraged to imagine they're in a building. Tall floor, you know, high floor. There's a fire. They can't get out. They die. Then they check in on their gratitude levels. As it turns out, when we reflect again briefly on things like our mortality and the fact that our children could be gone, a child that's annoying you or your spouse that might be annoying or whatever, well, they could be gone tomorrow. Let's not take them for granted. Let's take them as granted. Let's work through it. Embrace imperfection of reality. But this death reflection exercise, Memento Mori style, increases your appreciation for life. The big idea in the note, I called it memento privilege. He quotes someone who says that life is an eccentric privilege. This gift that we have of this life, let's be grateful for it. Let's remember, gratitude works 25% boost. You're going to sleep more, you're going to move more. Practice your gratitude. It's a virtue, which means you need to cultivate it. And my job fundamentally, and I joke in the note, is I'm a virtue salesman. That's what I'm doing here. I'm selling virtue. It's hard work. Plant your garden. Tend it on a daily basis. Practice it. The letter I'm telling you, if you do this, let me know how it goes. It's going to be powerful. I believe the obstacle is entitlement. The way is humility, as granted versus for granted. And then remember, bad to good. Reflecting on immortality is always a wise thing to do so we can appreciate that nothing is guaranteed other than this moment right now. That is today's episode. Once again, Professor Emmons thank you. And thank you all for being here. I hope you got something out of that. And what is that? What's the one thing that you can take and operationalize? Go from theory to practice to mastery on. Get on that. Let's make today another awesome day. See you tomorrow. Hey guys, this is Bry. Hope you enjoyed that video. We have a lot of people ask us what Optymyze is all about. 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