Jesse Pujji explains why gratitude journals alone don't work: your brain scans for threats, keeping you below neutral. Sending personal gratitude messages to people on Fridays feels weird at first but actually shifts you into a positive state, not just back to baseline.
I like gratitude journal. I actually prefer what you do beyond the gratitude journal where you will on Friday send gratitude to people directly. And I've been doing that and it, and at first it felt really weird, but that's a way for me to super feel the gratitude. I feel douchey at first, but then I feel great.
I also had that experience in the beginning of like, you feel weird or fake. I think these things do require intention. Like I try to do it on Friday afternoons. Our brains are designed for survival. We're designed to scan for threat. Most people I know, including me for many, many years, would wake up and the first thing I would do would be like, oh, let me look at this dashboard. Let me look at my email, like, what's wrong? What do I need to address? Because I'm— I want to stay alive. And that's not true. If you wake up, actually, you're living in a nice house, sleeping next to a beautiful, wonderful wife. You have like— you're going to eat in the morning. Like, if you don't take that time to intentionally show yourself what is good, you won't even be at neutral. And like, gratitude journal just gets you to neutral. It doesn't even get you— forget about feeling positive. It just— it just— the natural tendency of your survival brain, it, it just curbs it in the other direction.
