How to Live a Happier Life: Do THIS Gratitude Practice Today

(dramatic music plays) The world feels so dark and so negative. Make no mistake, the world is reprogramming your mind right now. The power of gratitude is your way to fight back and to regain control of your mind and of how you feel in your day-to-day life. Gratitude is an act of defiance in a world that's trying to gaslight you into thinking you have no power. It lifts you up, it builds you up, it changes your brain, it changes your body, it changes your stress response, it changes your outlook. Gratitude is how you intentionally rewire your mind. This is why you need to do this now, because the simple truth about life is that what you focus on will expand. We need you, and you need you, to start to fight back, and gratitude is where we begin. So let's start with tool number one. (screen whooshes) Hey, it's your friend Mel, and welcome to the Mel Robbins Podcast. It's always such an honor to be together and to spend this time with you. And if you're a new listener, or you're here because somebody shared this episode with you, I just wanted to take a moment and personally welcome you to the Mel Robbins Podcast family. I'm so glad that you're here. I should probably say that I'm grateful that you're here, 'cause I know you don't have a lot of time, but you made the time to listen. And I'm especially glad that you chose this episode, because you need this and so do I. Today, you and I are talking about the surprising power of gratitude, and three tools that will change your mind and body. I'm talking, you're gonna sleep better at night, the markers for stress and inflammation lower. There's such fascinating research here. So it's not just even the settings in your mind. This has a shift from the top down on you at a biological level. I almost didn't want to talk about gratitude right now, and the reason why is because the world feels so dark and so negative, and there's very real problems that you may be facing, that people in your life may be facing. And to try to say, "Oh, well, just be grateful," that seems like crazy naive, until you stop and really look at what gratitude is. Gratitude is how you intentionally rewire your mind. And the cool thing about the tools that I'm gonna give you is, you already know how to do this. Like, we're gonna go through these three ways that you can take on gratitude as an intentional act to change the way that you feel and to change the way that your mind works, but you don't need to do all three. I don't want you to do more. I just wanna give you some options, practical, easy-to-try options. You don't have to buy anything. I also love it that you can take what I'm about to share with you, start exactly where you are, and begin to shift your mental state and how you experience your life in real time, even as you're listening to our conversation today or watching it here on YouTube. And what the research is gonna show you is that it only takes a slight shift from what you're already doing, slight little mental adjustments to lead to noticeable benefits to your physical health, your mental health, to your relationships. The power of gratitude is your way to fight back and to regain control of your mind and of how you feel in your day-to-day life. And that's the first act of defiance. It's the first thing that you need to take control of, because you may not even realize how much you've handed your brain and the way that you feel to the world outside you. And gratitude is the first step of how you're gonna start to take your power back. And what I mean by that is, you can take your power back by training yourself to choose what you wanna notice throughout the day rather than mindlessly allowing the world outside of you to just pour a bunch of garbage into your brain. And this reminds me of a conversation I had before on this podcast with one of your favorite guests that we've ever had. She's a regular on the show. Dr. Aditi Narukar is a medical doctor, researcher, and world-renowned expert in stress and public health. She's a lecturer at Harvard Medical School and was the medical director of Harvard Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital's integrative medicine program, where she practiced and developed this enormous clinical practice in stress management using evidence-based integrative approaches to help her patients feel better. She's also one of the 57 world-renowned experts that I spoke to and that is featured in the Let Them Theory book. I love her research on resetting your stress response, and she spoke on this show about how powerful intentional gratitude journaling can be for your brain. Check this out. (screen whooshes)