The Science of Gratitude & How to Build a Gratitude Practice

(peaceful music) Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life. (music) I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. Today, we are talking all about the science of gratitude. In part, we're doing this because of the upcoming Thanksgiving holiday, which of course is all about giving thanks, gratitude, but also because there's now a wealth of data showing that having an effective gratitude practice can impact a huge number of health variables, both mental health and physical health in positive ways. Things like cardiovascular health, things like relationships, things like mental health, things like physical and cognitive performance. And these are not small effects. These are very large, positive effects. However, in researching this episode, I was completely surprised as to what constitutes an effective gratitude practice. I, I think like many of you, would've thought that an effective gratitude practice simply involves writing down a few things or many things that we're grateful for, or thinking about those, or really making an effort to somaticize or feel some of the elements of gratitude while writing out that list or thinking about that list. It turns out that an effective gratitude practice doesn't resemble that at all. The neuroimaging data, the physiological data looking at things like inflammatory markers, other studies purely looking at the psychology and the long and short-term effects of a, an effective gratitude practice point to a completely different approach to using gratitude to positively impact health metrics. Fortunately, these are things that we can all do very easily. Uh, some of them are actually, uh, fun. Uh, you can do them ar- in a variety of contexts. So today we're going to talk about the science of effective gratitude practices, and we're going to describe what those are and how you can incorporate them into your life. Before we dive into today's topic, I just want to highlight a particularly interesting set of findings from the literature. This is a study that came out in the journal Cell Reports, Cell Press Journal, excellent journal. It's very relevant to today's topic. In fact, we're going to spend more time with this paper a little bit later in the episode. The study involved having subjects listen to a story. The subjects are all listening to the same story, but those subjects are not listening to it together. They're not rounded up in a circle or all in a room. They're in separate rooms or entirely separate locations on the planet, or they are actually brought into the laboratory on separate days. What this study found is that different subjects listening to the same story undergo the same variation in heart rate. In other words, the gaps between their heartbeats start to resemble one another in response to the same story. Now, this is very interesting. This is a coordination of the physiology of the body in response to a narrative, a story, in different people, and yet when they line up the heart rates of these different people who listened to the story at completely different times, they find that those heart rates map onto one another almost identically. It's really remarkable. We're going to talk about what this means in terms of coordination of neural circuits in the brain and neural circuits in the body and the organs such as the heart, but also the lungs and other organs of the body, and what this means for changing one's overall state. A key theme that's going to come up today again and again is the distinction between traits, which are pervasive aspects of who we are and how we tend to react to different types of circumstances, and states, which are more transient. They tend to, uh, you know, you can invoke a state in somebody, a state of fear or a state of relaxation. But what this study really starts to point to is that there are specific approaches that any of us can take in order to really rewire our nervous system such that we are calmer if we want to be calmer in certain circumstances, that we are more responsive in certain circumstances, if that's our goal. So we'll return to how one would go about doing that, but I think these, um, results are just beautiful in the sense that they really show that our brain and our body are highly coordinated because people are listening to the story and the heart rate is, um, changing in response to the story. But that there is a, uh, what we call a stereotopy, a- a sort of stereotyped response to a given story. In my mind, there was no reason why the results had to be this way. You know, two people listen to the same story, why should their heart rates be almost identical to the same story? Very, very interesting and points to the power of narrative and story in coordinating our physiology, and this is something powerful that we can leverage. Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science-related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is ROKA. ROKA makes eyeglasses and sunglasses that are of the absolute highest quality. I've spent a lifetime working on the visual system and I can tell you that the visual system has a number of important features that allow you to see things with crystal clarity no matter what environment you're in. So that means if you're in bright sunlight or you go into shadows, you should be able to see everything clearly. 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You can get $200 off their ultimate package, 25% off any other package, and you'll get the Inner Age Test for free. Again, just go to insidetracker.com/huberman. Today's episode is also brought to us by Magic Spoon. Magic Spoon is a zero sugar, grain-free, keto-friendly cereal. Now, I'm not following a ketogenic nutrition plan. What works best for me is to fast until about 11:00 AM or noon most days, and then to eat a low carbohydrate lunch, a low carbohydrate snack in the afternoon, and in the evening is when I eat my starches. That's what allows me to be alert throughout the day for work, for exercise and so forth, and then to sleep really well at night. That's just what works for me, but it does require that throughout the day I'm eating fewer carbohydrates than I am at night, and oftentimes I want a snack, and the snack I want is usually Magic Spoon. Magic Spoon has zero grams of sugar, 13 to 14 grams of protein, and only four net grams of carbohydrates in each serving. It's absolutely delicious. I particularly like the, uh, frosted flavor 'cause it tastes like donuts and then I try not to eat donuts. Um, no vendetta against donuts, but it's not really compatible with my, my eating plan. They also have flavors like cocoa, fruity, peanut butter. They're really delicious. Any ideas you have about keto-friendly cereals and foods not being delicious, you have to try Magic Spoon. It'll change your mind. In fact, I'm getting hungry just thinking about it (laughs) right now. If you want to try Magic Spoon, you can go to magicspoon.com/huberman to get a variety pack. Just use the promo code Huberman at checkout to get $5 off your order. Again, that's magicspoon.com/huberman and use the code Huberman to get $5 off. Let's talk about gratitude. And to begin, I'd like to emphasize the various aspects of mental and physical health that have been shown to benefit from a regular gratitude practice. There are studies showing that performing a gratitude practice twice or three times or even just once a week can lead to a pervasive, a long-lasting impact on subjective well-being. People report feeling happier, more meaning, joy, even awe for their life experience, simply in response to adding a gratitude practice. The key thing is it has to be the right gratitude practice, and we're going to talk about what the right gratitude practice looks like in just a little bit. But there are additional benefits of a gratitude practice. There are studies showing that a regular gratitude practice can provide resilience to trauma in two ways. It can provide a reframing and resilience to prior traumatic experiences, so buffering people against the negative, uh, physiological effects and psychological effects of earlier trauma, but also inoculating them in many ways to any traumas that might arrive later in life. So that's a powerful thing. And today what we will talk about how that's actually accomplished. It's actually accomplished by shifting the way that the fear and defense networks in the brain actually function. We'll get right down into the details of that. The other thing that a gratitude practice does is it's been shown to benefit social relationships, but not just for the relationship in which you express gratitude, right? So on the face of it you might think, okay, if I express gratitude for somebody over and over and over and over, over and over, then I'm going to feel better about that person. And indeed that is one effect of a gratitude practice that's called a pro-social or inter-social gratitude practice, but there are now several studies, recent studies in good journals pointing to the fact that a regular gratitude practice can also enhance one's social relationships across the board, in the workplace, at school, at, with family, in romantic relationships, and even one's relationship to themselves, which is really what the subjective feelings of well-being are. So it's clear to me that an effective gratitude practice has an outsized effect on many, many aspects of mental and physical health. And for those of you that are coming to this conversation thinking, gratitude practice, oh, that's kind of wishy-washy or woo, it's going to involve, you know, putting your hand on your heart and feeling into all the amazing things that you happen to have even when things are really terrible, that's not where we're going at all. And equally important is to understand that the neurochemical, the anti-inflammatory, and the neural circuit mechanisms that gratitude can invoke are equally on par with some of the effects of pharmacology, of things like high intensity interval training and exercise and other things that we think of as kind of more potent forms of self-intervention. So if you are of the mindset that a gratitude practice is kind of weak sauce, um, buckle up because the data actually point to the fact that a gratitude practice is a very, very potent way in which you can steer your mental and physical health in positive directions, and that those effects are very long lasting.Before we dive into the tools and mechanisms and scientific studies around gratitude, I'd like to just set the framework for the discussion. Gratitude is what we call a pro-social behavior or a pro-social mindset. Now you can be grateful for something without it involving anybody else. So the social part isn't meant to convey anything about interpersonal relations, although it can. And today we're going to talk a lot about how interpersonal relations can be incorporated into a gratitude practice in really powerful ways. But pro-social behaviors are basically any behavior or mode of thinking that allow us to be more effective in interactions with other people, including ourselves. Now pro-social is not just a name that we give these different tools and practices and mindsets. There are actually neural circuits in the brain that are specifically wired for pro-social thoughts and behaviors. And these are distinctly different from the circuits in the brain that are involved in defensive behaviors. So without getting into too much detail just yet, we will later, we have circuits in the brain that are what we call appetitive. They are designed to bring us closer to things, and to bring us into closer relation to the details of that sensory experience. Now that could be a delicious food that you're eating, it could be interacting with a loved one, it could be interacting with a friend, or anyone that you happen to like. It could even be in r- relation to yourself. These circuits that we're calling pro-social circuits light up in the brain if, in neuroimaging, meaning the neurons are firing more actively, more electrically, um, robustly. Uh, sort of like turning up the, the volume on these neural circuits in the brain. And the neural circuits in the brain that are associated with aversive or defensive behaviors, things like backing up, things like covering up the vital organs of the body, things like a quaking of the voice, all of the things that are associated with defensive behaviors are actually antagonized, meaning they are reduced when the pro-social circuits are more active. So the framework here that I'd like to set is that we have this kind of seesaw of neural circuits in the brain, one set that are pro-social and are designed to bring us closer to others, including ourselves, closer to certain sensory experiences, right? Because a lot of pro-social behaviors can also be geared towards things like pets or food or anything that we find we want to be closer to and want more of. Whereas the defensive circuits involve areas of the brain, yes, such as areas that are involved in fear, but also areas of the brain and body that are literally associated with freezing or with backing up. So the way to think about gratitude is it falls under this category of pro-social behaviors, which are designed to bring us closer to different types of things and to enhance the level of detail that we extract from those experiences. Now the existence of these two neural circuits that I've g- placed on this, uh, sort of a metaphorical seesaw, if you will, runs counter to a lot of the messaging or the ideas that were put forth in the last century about the psychology of happiness and gratitude versus, uh, the, the psychology of depression and struggle and concern about the future. In fact, I'd like to read a quote from the great, and we should ca- we really should call him the great Sigmund Freud, because, um, despite, uh, having, uh, certain, uh, traits that people, uh, criticize him of, uh, Freud was indeed a genius about many aspects of psychology. But I just want to, uh, read you Freud's stance on happiness, and this invokes elements of gratitude as well, and then you can, uh, gauge for yourself. Quote, "Our possibilities of happiness are already restricted by our constitution." So he's saying that we're basically wired to not have happiness easily. "Unhappiness is much less difficult to experience. We are threatened with suffering from three directions, one, from our own body, which is doomed to decay and dissolution, and which cannot even do without pain and anxiety as warning signals. Two, from the external world, which may rage against us with overwhelming and merciless forces of destruction. And three, and finally, from our relations with others, the suffering of which from this last source is perhaps more painful to us than any other." That's Sigmund Freud, and not all of his writings were, uh, that pessimistic, if you will. What Freud is referring to there are those defensive circuits, and of course he talked about psychological defensives, and in full disclosure, I am a huge fan of much of the psychological literature and psychoanalysis of Sigmund Freud and his descendants, uh, Jung and others. I think there are strong elements of truth there. But it gives you a sense of the kind of mindset of psychology early in the last century. And then, of course, was the emergence of the positive psychology movement, which was really about invoking the understanding and eventually the, um, elucidation of the neural circuits for things like happiness and awe and affiliation, and things that we are calling pro-social circuits. So the field of psychology has a dark and light, uh, if you will, and the field of neuroscience has a dark and light. You have these, what we call parallel pathways in the brain, and we have parallel pathways in the mind that set us up for feeling good about things or for feeling less good about things. I think what's really salient from the quote from Freud is that what he's saying is our default is to be concerned about the future, to be, uh, r- wrapped in our defenses, and to some extent that's true. And the reason we can say that's true is because most of us need a gratitude practice. We need to do certain things in order to feel good and to feel happy. We actually have to put work into it. It is quite possible that there's an asymmetry in the way that these pro-social versus defensive circuits are set up such that-... because defensive circuits are designed to keep us safe, psychologically and physically safe, that they have more robustness, or they can actually drive our behavior more easily. I'll give you an analogy in the system that I'm most familiar with as a neuroscientist, which is the visual system. In the visual system, we have parallel pathways. We have neurons in our eye that respond when things in our environment get brighter. Literally, when the lights go up, these neurons start firing like crazy. And we have neurons in our eye that respond when things get darker, when things start dimming or go from white to black. The circuits for detecting darkening are much more robust and much more numerous (laughs) than are the circuits for brightness. And that is probably related, probably, to the fact that dark objects or experiencing looming, meaning incoming objects and being able to perceive them, is something that's vital to our survival. Whereas being able to perceive the brightening of things might be important to survival in certain contexts, you know, car lights coming at you at night or something of that sort, but not as often in a kind of a evolutionary or ethological context as the darkening of things. So, I think Freud's quote and the field of psychology now point to the fact that sh- indeed we have the capacity for happiness and we have the capacity for great worry and concern, and depression, and unhappiness. And the neural circuit literature also supports that. The key thing for today's discussion is that gratitude turns out to be one of the most potent wedges by which we can insert our thinking, and as you also see, our f- the physiology of our body, between these two circuits and give a little more levity, if you will, to the side of the seesaw that's associated with positive pro-social feelings. And if you keep imagining this seesaw imagery, what's really beautiful about gratitude practices is that if they're performed repeatedly, and not even that often, but repeatedly, then one can actually shift their neural circuits such that the seesaw that I'm calling pro-social versus defensive behaviors can actually start to tilt. And the little hinge, if you will, on the seesaw in the middle, can be adjusted in a little tighter when the side for gratitude and for well-being and for feelings of happiness is a little bit higher. What this means is that whether or not Freud was right or wrong, whether or not, uh, the neuroscientists on o- in one camp or another are right or wrong, we now know with certainty that a regular gratitude practice can shift the pro-social circuit so that they dominate our physiology and our mindset in ways that can enhance many, many aspects of our physical and mental health by default. So, we don't always have to constantly be in practice trying to be happy. So, the succinct way of saying all this is, yes, indeed, we might be wired or in such that we have a greater propensity for unhappiness than happiness, but gratitude practices, provided they are the effective ones and they are performed regularly, can shift those circuits such that we are happier on average, even when we are not performing those practices. Now I'd like to talk about some of the neurochemistry and neural circuits associated with gratitude and pro-social behaviors. Numerous times on this podcast, I've talked about so-called neuromodulators. For those of you that might have forgotten or have never heard of neuromodulators before, neuromodulators are chemicals that are released in the brain and body that change the activity of other neural circuits. They make certain brain areas more likely to be active and other brain areas less likely to be active. These neuromodulators have names like dopamine, serotonin, acetylcholine, epinephrine, and so on. The main neuromodulators associated with gratitude and pro-social behaviors tends to be serotonin. Serotonin is released from a s- very small collection of neurons in the brain stem called the raphe, R-A-P-H-E, the raphe nucleus, and a few other places in the brain. And the raphe neurons send these little wires that we call axons out to numerous pr- places in the brain, and they tend to increase the activity of particular neural circuits that lend themselves to more approach to particular types of experiences. That makes total sense if you think about it. Have a chemical that under certain circumstances is released in the brain that triggers the activity of neural circuits that makes the organism, you, more likely to stay in an interaction with something or even lean in and seek a more detailed interaction with that person, place, or thing. Beautiful work from a cognitive neuropsychologist, his name is Antonio Damasio, he's a, uh, world-class, uh, neuroscientist, he's been in the game a very long time, has explored the so-called neural correlates of gratitude. And two main brain areas are activated by these serotonergic systems and when people experience something that makes them feel gratitude, even if it's shallow gratitude or deep, e- and if it's all the way to deep gratitude, they see activation of these particular brain circuits I'll mention in a moment, and the amount of activation scales with how intensely the person experienced the feeling of gratitude. And those two areas have particular names. You don't need to know the names, but for those of you that want to know, they are the anterior cingulate cortex and the medial prefrontal cortex. And of course, these brain areas are connected to a number of other networks in the brain. In fact, that's how they get you or others to lean into certain experi- experiences because when these areas are active, certain thought processes get invoked. Those thought processes probably resemble something like, "Hmm, I'd like to experience more of this," or, "Hmm, this feels really good," and then they literally feed onto your muscles via the neurons, making you happy to stay stationary if you're experiencing something you like or to move closer to something that you find attractive to you, literally.So, these are powerful circuits. Of these two brain areas, the one I'd like to focus on the most is the medial prefrontal cortex. Many of you have probably heard of the medial prefrontal cortex because this is the area of the brain that is involved in planning and in deep thinking and evaluation of different types of experiences, past, present or future. It seems actually (laughs) that pretty much every study of a human anything seems to involve the medial prefrontal cortex, or at least one could get that impression, uh, just by looking at scientific abstracts and, and papers these days. So, I think it's worth us taking a step back and asking, what does the medial prefrontal cortex really do, right? How could this one piece of neural real estate that we all have, right behind our forehead, how could that be involved in so many different things? And the reason it can be involved in so many different things, and the reason it's especially important for gratitude, is that medial prefrontal cortex sets context, okay? It sets context and it literally defines the meaning of your experience. Now, this is not at all an abstract phenomenon. I'm going to give a very physiological example of this, and then we're going to translate it to gratitude. But I really want everyone to understand, how is it that medial prefrontal cortex sets the context of everything in your life? Well, it does it the following way. You have a number of circuits deeper in your brain that simply create s-sensations, or they allow you, I should say, to perceive certain sensations. Let's use the example of cold exposure, something that we sometimes talk about on this podcast for other reasons. If you were to deliberately place yourself into an ice bath, it would be uncomfortable, even if you're adapted to cold and so forth. The discomfort is non-negotiable. However, if you are doing it because you want to or because you have knowledge that there are particular health benefits, the medial prefrontal cortex can then control areas of your deeper brain, like the hypothalamus, to positively impact the neurochemicals that are released into your system. You'll still get a lot of adrenaline by getting into the ice bath, but the fact that you are doing this deliberately and your knowledge that you are making the choice, that it's you that's deciding to put yourself through this discomfort, has been shown to create a very different and positive effect on things like dopamine, on things like anti-inflammatory markers, uh, in your immune system, et cetera, compared to if someone pushes you into an ice bath, or if you are doing it because someone insists that you do it and you really, really don't want to. So, there's a very subtle distinction here. It's just as, it's just the distinction of motivation and desire or lack of motivation and being forced into something. And there are a number of other effects of this that have been, uh, described. In the episode with Robert Sapolsky, uh, that I did earlier, uh, this last year, he talked about a, a study in animals which has also been shown in humans. If you take a mouse, for instance, and it runs on a running wheel, which mice really like to do, there are many positive effects on reducing blood pressure, improvements in neurochemistry, et cetera, in that mouse. However, if there's a mouse in the cage right next to it that's trapped in the running wheel and it has to run every time the other mouse runs because the wheels are linked, well then the second mouse that's forced to do the exact same running experiences negative shifts in their overall health metrics. Blood pressure goes up, stress hormones go up, et cetera, because it's not actually making the choice. Medial prefrontal cortex is the knob, it is... Or the switch rather, that can take one experience and allow us to frame it such that it creates positive health effects, and the exact same experience framed as something we don't want to do or that we are forced to do can create negative health effects. Now, how exactly the neurons in medial prefrontal cortex do that is rather complicated, and frankly, not completely understood. But it's somehow able to adjust the activity of other neural circuits that are purely reflexive. As we say in neuroscience, like really dumb neural circuits, they're just like switches, and place a context onto it. So, gratitude is a mindset that activates prefrontal cortex, and in doing so sets the context of your experience such that you can derive tremendous health benefits, which leads us to the question, what kind of gratitude practice is going to accomplish this, right? Because it is not simply the case that I could take a knife. Don't, please don't do this experiment, and cut my hand and say, "Oh, you know, I'm do, I'm going to enjoy this. I'm doing this 'cause it, this is good for me and it won't hurt." Of course it'll hurt, just like the ice bath is cold no matter what. But I can't lie to myself, right? If I kno- if I have some knowledge that cutting myself is bad for me, that's very hard to override. And so the medial prefrontal cortex has a tremendous capacity to set context, and it does that beautifully with respect to gratitude, but you can't simply lie to yourself. You can't simply say, "Oh, well, every experience is a learning experience." Or, um, you know, a terrible thing happens, "Oh, good. I'm just going to say good," and that your body will react as if it's good for you. That's a myth, and frankly it's a myth that's fairly pervasive in the self-help and self-actualization literature. We have the opportunity to reframe and set context on our experiences, but that requires a very specific set of practices. We can't simply lie to ourselves or quote unquote fake it until we make it. Neural circuitry is very powerful and very plastic. It can be modified and it's very context dependent, but it's not stupid. And when you lie to yourself about whether or not an experience is actually good for you or not, your brain knows. So, what does an effective gratitude practice look like? Well, let's examine what an ineffective...... what a poor gratitude practice looks like, because therein lies some really important information, including the fact that I, and I think millions of other people out there, are doing it wrong. Most gratitude practices that you see online and that people talk about in various talks and so forth involve something like writing down or reciting or thinking about 5 or 10 or 3 or 20 things that you're especially grateful for, and then really trying to feel into some of those, really trying to think deeply about the emotions, the sensations, the perceptions that are associated with those particular people, places, and things on your list. Most studies actually point to the fact that that style of gratitude practice is not particularly effective in shifting your neural circuitry, your neurochemistry, or your somatic circuitry, the s- the circuits in your body, 'cause you literally have organs and neural circuits that are connected, the circuits of your brain and body toward enhanced activation of prefrontal cortex, enhanced activation of these prosocial neural networks that we were talking about earlier. Now that may come as a surprise to many of you, and certainly came as a surprise to me. There is some evidence that if there's a shift in so-called autonomic arousal during these gratitude practices, these ones that I'm calling ineffective, that they can be made slightly more effective. So what do I mean by a shift in autonomic arousal? Well, very briefly, we have a aspect to our nervous system, both within our brain and body that we call the autonomic nervous system. It's a little bit of a misnomer because autonomic means automatic, and in fact, we can, can take control of the autonomic nervous system. It has one branch, meaning one set of connections and circuits that are associated with making us more alert, the so-called sympathetic nervous system, or I should say sympathetic arm of the autonomic nervous system, but that's really a mouthful. It's really associated with enhanced alertness of any kind, for excitement or fear, and it has nothing to do with sympathy. It's just about enhanced alertness. And then the other arm of the autonomic nervous system is the so-called parasympathetic arm of the autonomic nervous system, but that's also a mouthful. So let's just say it's the calming aspect of the autonomic nervous system. So it's associated with decreased heart rate, decreased breathing rate, et cetera. So we have these two aspects to our autonomic nervous system, and it has been shown that if people are brought into a state of heightened sympathetic tone, meaning more alertness, then the intensity of the emotions that they experience in their gratitude practice is enhanced and the effectiveness of that gratitude practice can be enhanced. This is seen nowadays, uh, somewhat commonly as having people, for instance, um, cyclic hyperventilated breathing, as we call it in my laboratory, uh, breathing that's very intense. So they inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale very deeply for 25 or 30 breaths, then people will sit in a meditative stance or they'll focus on their, um, on their notepad and paper and they'll, they'll write out the things that they're grateful for, and then they'll really try and feel into those things or they'll think about those things. And it makes perfect sense as to why enhancing autonomic arousal toward more alertness would create more robust feelings or more ro- robust impact of these gratitude practices, because in that state, you are more alert and therefore you are able to bring more detail, more richness to the perception and the understanding of what those things on your list happen to be. But a- and I should say that there are, uh, numerous other approaches to this, e- you know, sort of self-help type stuff-