The Science of Gratitude & How to Build a Gratitude Practice | Episode 47

The most potent form of gratitude practice is not a gratitude practice where you give gratitude or express gratitude but rather where you receive gratitude, where you receive thanks.

What this paper showed was that women who had a regular gratitude practice... showed reductions in amygdala activity, a brain area associated with threat detection—an intimate part of the fear network in the brain... and large reductions in the production of something called TNF-alpha (tumor necrosis factor alpha) and IL-6 (interleukin-6).

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.

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.

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, with family, and romantic relationships, and even one's relationship to themselves...

Gratitude is a mindset that activates the prefrontal cortex, and in doing so, sets the context of your experience such that you can derive tremendous health benefits.

Theory of mind is the ability to attribute or to understand the experience of another without actually experiencing the thing that they're experiencing.