Speaker 1: Pushkin. Most of the time. I like to think I'm
Speaker 1: a relatively nice person, but if I'm being completely honest,
Speaker 1: there is one person out there that I do tend
Speaker 1: to screw over constantly. Now mind you, I don't intend
Speaker 1: to be a jerk to this person. I mean, I
Speaker 1: actually care about her a lot, so I'm not purposefully
Speaker 1: out to get her, but I do inadvertently wind up
Speaker 1: making her life a lot more difficult. I've wroped her
Speaker 1: into doing all kinds of things she didn't want to
Speaker 1: deal with. I've cheated her out of money, I've made
Speaker 1: her pick up the pieces whenever I miss a work deadline,
Speaker 1: and I've even forced her to eat healthier while I
Speaker 1: get to pick out. This poor girl winds up being
Speaker 1: the collateral damage in nearly every bad decision I've ever made.
Speaker 1: So who is this easy mark that person I'm constantly sabotaging.
Speaker 1: She is future Laurie. She's me just in the future
Speaker 1: tomorrow Laurie or next month Laurie. And let me tell
Speaker 1: you from her perspective, right now, Laurie is a real bitch.
Speaker 1: To be happier in twenty twenty, I need to stop
Speaker 1: screwing over future Laurie, that's the only way I'm going
Speaker 1: to form better habits and meet my new decade goals.
Speaker 1: But how do I stop sabotaging my future self? What
Speaker 1: can we all do to avoid instant gratification and take
Speaker 1: better care of our tomorrow selves? Our lying minds give
Speaker 1: us a quick answer to this question. We need willpower.
Speaker 1: Even if you listen to our last episode, I bet
Speaker 1: you still have the intuition that gritting your teeth is
Speaker 1: the way forward. But that just force yourself kind of
Speaker 1: willpower tends to disappear as soon as times get rough,
Speaker 1: deserting us in the very moment we need it most.
Speaker 1: But what if I told you that science teaches us
Speaker 1: an easier way to kick ourselves into goal mode, one
Speaker 1: that makes delay gratification to protect our future selves a
Speaker 1: total breeze. Sound too good to be true, Well, it
Speaker 1: gets even more shocking because my favorite thing about this
Speaker 1: willpower supercharge strategy is that it doesn't just help you
Speaker 1: achieve your future goals, it can also make you happier
Speaker 1: in the process. So if you're ready to harness some
Speaker 1: self control and feel better, then join me doctor Laurie
Speaker 1: Santo's for the next installment. Of the Happiness Lab twenty twenty.
Speaker 1: I wanted to learn more about this strategy that helps
Speaker 1: you achieve your future goals and feel good. So I
Speaker 1: dropped a line to my friend David Desteno. Are we rolling?
Speaker 1: Here you go? I'm David Desteno, Professor of psychology at
Speaker 1: Northeastern University and author of Emotional Success, The Power of Gratitude,
Speaker 1: Compassion and Pride. So, Dave, one of the things I
Speaker 1: love about your book is that it really discusses in
Speaker 1: a lot of detail the limits of willpower. I think
Speaker 1: in the book you actually call it a handle in
Speaker 1: the wind. So why is willpower so fragile? Well, let
Speaker 1: me give you some examples of why I say that. So,
Speaker 1: we tend to use willpower when we're trying to pursue
Speaker 1: a long term goal, you know, something that has a
Speaker 1: big reward in the future, but might be difficult in
Speaker 1: the moment or require some effort on our part to
Speaker 1: persevere toward. You know, whether you're trying to study to
Speaker 1: do well in school or on an exam, exercising and
Speaker 1: eating right, saving money rather than buying the new iPhone.
Speaker 1: And we tend to try and use willpower to overcome
Speaker 1: our desires for more immediate gratification, and if it's something
Speaker 1: that we consider even more important. You know, this time
Speaker 1: of the year, we can think about New Year's resolutions. Right,
Speaker 1: eight percent of New Year's resolutions are kept till the
Speaker 1: year's end. Twenty five percent are gone in the first
Speaker 1: week or two of January. And so we're doing something
Speaker 1: really wrong, right If pursuing our long term goals we
Speaker 1: all know leads to success, yet our failure rate is
Speaker 1: that high. And there's a lot of reasons why willpower
Speaker 1: is weak. For most of our history here on Earth
Speaker 1: as a human species, the future was very uncertain. I
Speaker 1: didn't know if the food I was looking at was
Speaker 1: going to be here tomorrow. I didn't know if I
Speaker 1: was going to be here in two months. But now
Speaker 1: the world is a lot more certain, and it's just
Speaker 1: that our mental calibration hasn't caught up to that certainty.
Speaker 1: If you're always using willpower to kind of tamp down
Speaker 1: desires for what you want in the moment, then your
Speaker 1: body isn't kind of a perpetual state of stress. You're
Speaker 1: always trying to tamp down one desire to persevere towards
Speaker 1: something in the long term. To not eat something you want,
Speaker 1: but to exercise that is a problem. Work by Greg Miller,
Speaker 1: who's the psychologist at Northwestern University was looking at this
Speaker 1: in terms of students in high school and college who
Speaker 1: were studying for exams. What you found is when you
Speaker 1: train kids in these cognitive strategies to build willpower, to
Speaker 1: build grit, to kind of suppress their desires, yeah they
Speaker 1: performed better, but there was actually premature aging to their
Speaker 1: DNA because of the stress, which, if you extrapolate out,
Speaker 1: means yeah, I'm doing better, but I'm not going to
Speaker 1: be around as long to enjoy the fruits of that success.
Speaker 1: But the other problem is, oftentimes we choose not to
Speaker 1: invoke willpower in the first place because we're really good
Speaker 1: as humans at engaging in rationalization. Right, I deserve the
Speaker 1: extra scoop of Ben and Jerry's I've been good this week.
Speaker 1: I deserve to spend money on myself or whatever it
Speaker 1: might be. And if we go that route, we're not
Speaker 1: going to engage in willpower in the first place. We're
Speaker 1: going to give ourselves the easy way out. This looks
Speaker 1: pretty bad for New Year's resolutions, right, Like this one
Speaker 1: thing we usually rely on willpower is not going to
Speaker 1: save us. So if not willpower, if not pushing ourselves,
Speaker 1: you know, what can we do? You know, economists talk
Speaker 1: about this problem as they's a fancy term which is
Speaker 1: called intertemporal choice, which basically means do I want an
Speaker 1: immediate gratification now or am I willing to forego that
Speaker 1: so that I can have a better gain in the future.
Speaker 1: And if you think about why we as a human
Speaker 1: species have the ability for self con self control didn't
Speaker 1: evolve so that I could save from my four oh onek,
Speaker 1: None of it existed for most of our evolutionary history.
Speaker 1: What mattered for our success was the ability to be
Speaker 1: a little bit selfless as opposed to selfish, That is,
Speaker 1: to cooperate with others, to be fair, to be honest,
Speaker 1: to be generous. Those are the traits that allowed us
Speaker 1: to be good partners and valuable partners to other people.
Speaker 1: And what underlie those abilities are what I call moral emotions,
Speaker 1: things like gratitude, things like compassion, things like authentic pride,
Speaker 1: not arrogance and hubrists. They tend to make us more
Speaker 1: willing to be selfless, to cooperate with others, to engage
Speaker 1: in self sacrifice, to be willing to tap down our
Speaker 1: desires for immediate gratification. And people often ask me, Laurie,
Speaker 1: you know, Dave, if I want to be a success,
Speaker 1: should I be a nice guy or a nice woman,
Speaker 1: or should I be kind of a selfish jerk? That
Speaker 1: I mean, should I cooperate and work fairly with others
Speaker 1: or should I basically exploit others and be very self interested?
Speaker 1: And the answer, what science shows is, you know, I say, well,
Speaker 1: what's your time frame? Right? If you want to be
Speaker 1: a success in the short term, yeah, you can be
Speaker 1: a jerk, you can be selfish, you can exploit others.
Speaker 1: Individuals who are self interested to exploit other people's rise
Speaker 1: very quickly, but over time they begin to fail because
Speaker 1: no one wants to cooperate with them, no one wants
Speaker 1: to work with them. And individuals who are selfless, who
Speaker 1: have the ability to control their desires for immediate gratification
Speaker 1: selfish behaviors do well in the long run. And so
Speaker 1: a lot of what I argue in this book and
Speaker 1: in my work is that we are not using the
Speaker 1: emotional tools that we have in our arsenal to help
Speaker 1: us succeed in the long run. We're relying on these
Speaker 1: weaker tools of kind of tamping down emotional responses via
Speaker 1: willpower that researchers shown are pretty fragile. So let's zoom
Speaker 1: in on one of these tools in particular. You mentioned gratitude, Like,
Speaker 1: what is gratitude? Yeah, so, gratitude is the emotion that
Speaker 1: we feel when someone gives us something of value at
Speaker 1: some cost to themselves, a present or financial assistance. It
Speaker 1: can be you know, a shoulder to cry on. It
Speaker 1: can be someone who's going to help us and mentor us.
Speaker 1: The important thing about it is that we feel that
Speaker 1: the benefit that this person is giving us we couldn't
Speaker 1: achieve very easily on our own, and they're doing it
Speaker 1: not to help themselves, but at some cost. And it's
Speaker 1: not a feeling of indebtedness in the negative sense, but
Speaker 1: a feeling of this person really helped me, and I
Speaker 1: value that and I want to go above and beyond
Speaker 1: and pay them back. That feeling is gratitude. I mean,
Speaker 1: gratitude sounds awesome and it increases happiness. But you know,
Speaker 1: at first, blush, it doesn't seem obvious that this emotion
Speaker 1: has anything to do with willpower. You know that feeling
Speaker 1: grateful isn't going to help me eat healthier or get
Speaker 1: to the gym in the morning. But what's the connection there. Well,
Speaker 1: the beautiful thing about gratitude is, and any emotion really is,
Speaker 1: while we feel it, it kind of sets our expectation
Speaker 1: for what we should value and what we should do next.
Speaker 1: Why would you have an emotion that's only focused on
Speaker 1: the past? Right If you're feeling an emotion that can't
Speaker 1: change anything you do in the future, it's a waste
Speaker 1: even metabolically, Why would the brain want you to waste
Speaker 1: its time feeling something? And so I tell people gratitude
Speaker 1: is really about the future. It makes us value long
Speaker 1: term goals more than immediate gratification. You may still doubt
Speaker 1: the idea that gratitude is more powerful for protecting our
Speaker 1: future selves than good old fashioned willpower, but there's some
Speaker 1: super cool scientific results to back it up, ones that
Speaker 1: we'll hear about right after this break. That Happiness lab
Speaker 1: will be right back. What's the biggest obstacle to being
Speaker 1: kinder to our future selves, to getting more exercise and
Speaker 1: stopping procrastination and saving more money. Turns out it's our
Speaker 1: lying minds. We tell ourselves that all we need is
Speaker 1: a bit more willpower that our self control will save us.
Speaker 1: But as we've seen, when push comes to shove, our
Speaker 1: rationalizing minds will just say it's okay to screw of
Speaker 1: our future selves just this once. But what if we
Speaker 1: tried a different strategy, What if we harnessed an emotion
Speaker 1: like gratitude, one that naturally primes us to protect our
Speaker 1: future selves. This was exactly what researcher David Desteno set
Speaker 1: out to test. He defies an experiment to see whether
Speaker 1: people could be nice to their future selves in the
Speaker 1: face of attempting reward. So in our lab we bring
Speaker 1: people in. We have them answer a bunch of questions
Speaker 1: of the form would you rather have ten dollars now
Speaker 1: or thirty dollars in three weeks? Right? And to make
Speaker 1: it real, we tell them we're going to pick one
Speaker 1: of your answers and honor it. So if you said
Speaker 1: I'd rather have ten dollars now than thirty dollars in
Speaker 1: three weeks, we gave you ten dollars. If you said
Speaker 1: it rather thirty dollars in three weeks, we'd send you
Speaker 1: a check in three weeks. And what we found, right,
Speaker 1: is that most people tend to be pretty impatient. That is,
Speaker 1: they discount the value of future rewards a lot. So
Speaker 1: for example, our average subject said they would take seventeen
Speaker 1: dollars now rather than one hundred dollars in a year.
Speaker 1: Another way of saying that is, they viewed a hundred
Speaker 1: dollars in a year is worth seventeen dollars now. And
Speaker 1: I don't know about you or your listeners, but if
Speaker 1: you don't need that seventeen dollars to survive right now,
Speaker 1: then passing up an opportunity to quintuple your money given
Speaker 1: with the banks or paying is not the greatest decision.
Speaker 1: When we made people feel grateful right suddenly, how much
Speaker 1: they discounted the future, how impatient they were to get
Speaker 1: that money in their hands changed. These folks suddenly viewed
Speaker 1: a hundred dollars in a year not as worth seventeen
Speaker 1: dollars now, but as we're thirty dollars, so we'd have
Speaker 1: to give them at least thirty dollars before they passed
Speaker 1: up the opportunity for one hundred dollars in a year.
Speaker 1: And what that means is they're discounting the value of
Speaker 1: a future reward less. And if you take this and
Speaker 1: you extrapolate it out to the real world to decisions
Speaker 1: that at or you know, other people have found that
Speaker 1: people who experience gratitude are more willing to exercise for
Speaker 1: better health, They're more willing to save their money rather
Speaker 1: than spend it on impulse buys. They're more willing to
Speaker 1: work harder for long term goals. And so what we
Speaker 1: see here is just by changing the emotional state you're in,
Speaker 1: how much you value the future changes. And so that
Speaker 1: raises the question of, you know, how did you, as
Speaker 1: this clever experimentalist, get people to experience gratitude? You know,
Speaker 1: how do you make people more grateful in the lab?
Speaker 1: One way we do this is we have them doing
Speaker 1: this task on the computer that's designed to be god
Speaker 1: awful boring. Psychologists are good at that, yea boring, And
Speaker 1: right as they think they're about to be done, the
Speaker 1: computer is rigged crashed or to look like it crashes
Speaker 1: on them. And then the experimenter comes in and says, oh,
Speaker 1: I'm sorry, you're going to have to do this all
Speaker 1: over again. Let me go get the tech. And of
Speaker 1: course people are not happy. We have somebody else in
Speaker 1: the lab who are our subjects believe is another subject
Speaker 1: taking the study, but it's actually an actor who works
Speaker 1: for us. And this person will get up and walk
Speaker 1: over to them and say, oh, this is terrible. I'm
Speaker 1: pretty good with computers. Let me see if I can
Speaker 1: help you. And so you know, she starts fussing with
Speaker 1: the wires and surrepetitiously hits a key that starts a
Speaker 1: timer and lo and behole bang the computer comes back on.
Speaker 1: And ninety five percent of our subjects are incredibly grateful
Speaker 1: for this. Five percent of them think somehow they fix
Speaker 1: it themselves, but the most part they get excluded. But
Speaker 1: for the most part, if people are very grateful because
Speaker 1: they don't want to do this got awful task over again,
Speaker 1: and then that way, what we can find is that
Speaker 1: the people who are actually experiencing gratitude in the moment
Speaker 1: compared to people who are feeling neutral or people who
Speaker 1: are feeling happy. And that was important because we wanted
Speaker 1: to show it wasn't just that you were feeling positive,
Speaker 1: but that was something really particular about gratitude. What gratitude
Speaker 1: makes you do is engage in self control. And as
Speaker 1: I said, evolutionarily speaking, that's so you're willing to be
Speaker 1: less selfish. But if you think about it, when you
Speaker 1: feel gratitude, there's one person besides strangers or people you
Speaker 1: meet on the street or friends who you can help
Speaker 1: that's important to your own future goals, and that is
Speaker 1: your own future self. And what we find is when
Speaker 1: you're feeling grateful, yes you're willing to sacrifice for other people,
Speaker 1: but you're also willing to sacrifice for your own future self.
Speaker 1: And that's how you can pivot the power of gratitude
Speaker 1: from just being this emotion that has kind of a
Speaker 1: moral cast to do the right thing, to repay debts
Speaker 1: or to behave morally, to actually help your own future
Speaker 1: self achieve her or his own goals. I wanted to
Speaker 1: talk a little bit about some of the specific domains
Speaker 1: in which gratitude helps because I just find these datas
Speaker 1: totally fascinating. So in your book, you show that gratitude
Speaker 1: doesn't just help you on financial decision making, it and
Speaker 1: also help you get your job. Yeah, it just depends
Speaker 1: what your job is. So Adam Grant has this great
Speaker 1: data where he shows that people who are working in
Speaker 1: a call center and talk about a thankless job, you're
Speaker 1: calling people up for fundraising asking people to donate money.
Speaker 1: When gratitude is expressed in those offices, people's productivity goes
Speaker 1: up fifty percent, and not only do they work harder,
Speaker 1: but they're actually happy about it. They feel good about it,
Speaker 1: and so there's no stress there. When you're a doctor, right,
Speaker 1: if you're feeling gratitude, it makes you more willing to
Speaker 1: invest the effort to do the right thing, and you're
Speaker 1: more willing, the data show to engage in greater thought
Speaker 1: in terms of your diagnoses. And so gratitude and whatever
Speaker 1: the realm is that we're talking about. By giving you
Speaker 1: more patients, by giving you and nudging you, is going
Speaker 1: to improve the outcome. And while it's doing it, it's
Speaker 1: going to solve two other problems for United And this
Speaker 1: is something else that I really want to talk about,
Speaker 1: is that it does it in a way that's better
Speaker 1: for your mom mind and your body in terms of
Speaker 1: your physical health and your mental well being. And so
Speaker 1: talk about the mental well being part, because one of
Speaker 1: the things we're trying to do in this mini series
Speaker 1: is to help people find strategies that can allow them
Speaker 1: to achieve their goals, but in doing so, can make
Speaker 1: them happy in the moment too. And that's really the
Speaker 1: amazing thing about gratitude is it doesn't just help you
Speaker 1: exercise more and save more. It feels good, unlike willpower.
Speaker 1: That's right. So David Brooks likes to talk about that.
Speaker 1: There are two types of virtues people have. Resume virtues,
Speaker 1: which are the virtues like being dogged, working hard, having grit,
Speaker 1: trying to get ahead, and eulogy virtues things like being fair,
Speaker 1: being generous, being kind. And the eulogy virtues are the
Speaker 1: ones that ultimately we want to be remembered for. They're
Speaker 1: the ones that draw other people to us, that give
Speaker 1: us the relationships that help our lives. And so if
Speaker 1: we're pursuing our own success and whatever realm it might be,
Speaker 1: you know, as I said, for millennium, the way to
Speaker 1: do that was to have good character, to be fair,
Speaker 1: be generous. It used to be that eulogy virtues and
Speaker 1: resume virtues were the same, there was no difference between them.
Speaker 1: But because of the way we structure our lives now
Speaker 1: we can pursue success in a very atimistic manner. That is,
Speaker 1: you know, we can just be dogged and if we
Speaker 1: earn enough money we can meet all of our needs,
Speaker 1: we don't have to have other people around us as much.
Speaker 1: But that leads to a not very fulfilling life, and
Speaker 1: it's a very stressful existence. When you choose to pursue
Speaker 1: success by cultivating emotions like gratitude, by virtue of what
Speaker 1: you're doing, yes, it's going to give you the self
Speaker 1: control to pursue your goals, to have patience, to persevere
Speaker 1: in the face of difficulty, but it's also going to
Speaker 1: change your relationships. Right when we feel gratitude, not only
Speaker 1: do we work harder, but we show more appreciation to
Speaker 1: others around us. It makes us behave more loyally, It
Speaker 1: makes us behave more compassionately toward other people, and so
Speaker 1: we build that social safety net that are there to
Speaker 1: buttress us. And so you know, when you look at gratitude,
Speaker 1: people who feel more gratitude, yes they exercise more, Yes
Speaker 1: they save more, Yes, they get ahead in life more,
Speaker 1: but they also sleep better at night. They also have
Speaker 1: better blood pressure, they show less stress reactivity than do
Speaker 1: people who don't experience gratitude more often. They even have
Speaker 1: better cholesterol. How and why these things are intertwined is
Speaker 1: an interesting story having to do with the stress and
Speaker 1: do they exercise more because of that gratitude, etc. But
Speaker 1: gratitude really is a buffer. It helps us pursue our
Speaker 1: resume virtues and our eulogy virtues at the same time.
Speaker 1: And what's so striking about this, though, is that I
Speaker 1: think if you asked people, people often think those resume
Speaker 1: virtues and eulogy virtues are in conflict, right, Like you
Speaker 1: to boost up your resume, you got us, you know,
Speaker 1: stop your fellow man, And that's right, but it's just
Speaker 1: the opposite. So so much of this podcast is about
Speaker 1: the idea that our minds are leading us astray. Right,
Speaker 1: we have this bad intuition about what gratitude is going
Speaker 1: to do, Like it makes us weak, you know, it's
Speaker 1: going to make us help others rather than getting out
Speaker 1: of life. Yeah. And part of that, right is, you know,
Speaker 1: I think our resume and our eulogy virtus we think
Speaker 1: of them as distinct, but for most of our evolutionary
Speaker 1: history they weren't. And we're kind of told that, you know,
Speaker 1: the way to succeed is to be self interested, but
Speaker 1: if you actually look at the data, it's not true.
Speaker 1: You know, I think we're being sold a bill of
Speaker 1: goods you know, it is in the short term, right,
Speaker 1: the faster way is to kind of be self interested.
Speaker 1: But in the long run, it is people who experience gratitude,
Speaker 1: who experience compassion and empathy that do really, really well.
Speaker 1: You know, my friend Bob Franks an economist at Cornell,
Speaker 1: and he wrote this great book called Success and Luck,
Speaker 1: and he talks about the illusion that people have that
Speaker 1: the way that any of us succeeded us through our
Speaker 1: own self determination. And I'm not saying that doesn't matter,
Speaker 1: of course it does. But there's a lot of luck
Speaker 1: along the way. And if you think about what a
Speaker 1: lot of luck is, it's not really luck. It's people
Speaker 1: open indoors for us. It's people supporting us in our
Speaker 1: hours of need and helping us out and us doing
Speaker 1: the same for them. Right, that's what a lot of
Speaker 1: luck is, not all. When people do that for us,
Speaker 1: we feel gratitude. And when we feel gratitude, it makes
Speaker 1: us not only want to pay those people back, but
Speaker 1: to pay it forward to other people. So, for example,
Speaker 1: in our studies that we were talking about, when we
Speaker 1: make people feel gratitude in the lab and then they
Speaker 1: leave the lab thinking the experiment is over, and we
Speaker 1: have a stranger approach them who asks for help, they'll
Speaker 1: help the stranger too. And the reason why is when
Speaker 1: you feel gratitude, it makes you want to help someone else. Right,
Speaker 1: the brain is nudging you that way because in the
Speaker 1: long term, that's a successful strategy. And so the beautiful
Speaker 1: thing about gratitude is it makes us pay it forward
Speaker 1: and it creates kind of an ongoing cycle. And so
Speaker 1: I think people often feel that gratitude can be a
Speaker 1: sign of weakness, but really gratitude is an emotion of power.
Speaker 1: And so hopefully listeners are sold on this idea that
Speaker 1: becoming more grateful is a good thing. But then that
Speaker 1: raises the question how do you do that? What can
Speaker 1: listeners do to improve their sense of gratitude. One strategy
Speaker 1: is simply doing daily reflections, thinking for a few minutes
Speaker 1: about what it is that you're grateful for in life.
Speaker 1: Lots of people do gratitude diaries. The trick there, right
Speaker 1: is we all have the two or three things that
Speaker 1: were incredibly grateful for in our lives. But if you
Speaker 1: think about the same things over and over again, they're
Speaker 1: going to lose their power. You're going to habituate to it.
Speaker 1: It's going to become boring. And so think about little things.
Speaker 1: Think about the person who gave you their seat on
Speaker 1: the bus or the subway. Think about the person who
Speaker 1: gave you directions, you let you get on the highway,
Speaker 1: someone who held the door for you. And you might say, Dave,
Speaker 1: really is that going to work? It does. So you
Speaker 1: know I told you earlier about the way we induce
Speaker 1: gratitude in our lab where we have these big shenani
Speaker 1: agains we go through where computers crash on people. But
Speaker 1: when we simply ask people reflect on something in your
Speaker 1: life that you're grateful for, whether it's something somebody did
Speaker 1: for you, your parents, a friend, the universe, if you
Speaker 1: believe in God, God, whatever it might be. Those simple
Speaker 1: reflections produce the same exact effects. And so it may
Speaker 1: sound trite, but it's not cultivating gratitude daily in your life.
Speaker 1: We'll do this through reflections. Another way is to engage
Speaker 1: in something called the reciprocity ring. This is great if
Speaker 1: you have an office and you're trying to create a
Speaker 1: culture of gratitude, or a classroom, or even for families
Speaker 1: at home, have everybody take a post it note and
Speaker 1: write on the post it note something they need help with.
Speaker 1: Then on a board or on the refrigerator or wherever
Speaker 1: it might be, stick up those post it notes in
Speaker 1: kind of a circle. Now, everybody, take a different color
Speaker 1: post note and write your name on it, and go
Speaker 1: up and stick it next to a post it note
Speaker 1: that's up there already where a person's requesting helps that
Speaker 1: you're saying, Ah, John says he needs help with this,
Speaker 1: I dave, I'm going to help him with this, right.
Speaker 1: And then what you do is draw lines or tie
Speaker 1: strings or tape, whatever you might be, and what you'll
Speaker 1: see is connections in this circle. And then most importantly,
Speaker 1: go give that assistance that you said. And what this
Speaker 1: does is a few things. One, it shows that asking
Speaker 1: for help is okay and offering to help is okay.
Speaker 1: And by you actually helping the person who you said
Speaker 1: you were going to help, that person feels gratitude. And
Speaker 1: what our research shows when that person feels gratitude, it
Speaker 1: increases the probability very dramatically that they're just going to
Speaker 1: go and offer help to someone else. And it's a
Speaker 1: way of creating kind of a norm and a culture
Speaker 1: for gratitude in your family or your classroom, or your workplace.
Speaker 1: Have you used this in your lab or in your
Speaker 1: own family? Yeah? I you know, before I started doing
Speaker 1: this research, I wouldn't say I wasn't ungrateful person, but
Speaker 1: I don't think I thought a lot about gratitude in
Speaker 1: my life. But what I realized through doing this work
Speaker 1: is that you can curate your own emotional life. Right.
Speaker 1: Emotions don't just happen to us. We can curate what
Speaker 1: we feel by taking time to think about what we
Speaker 1: want to feel, by paying attention to the people that
Speaker 1: help us as opposed to the people that annoy us.
Speaker 1: And so what I've begun to do in my own
Speaker 1: daily life now is to do that is to focus
Speaker 1: on when somebody does something for me or someone helps me,
Speaker 1: to not say thank you and quickly move by that,
Speaker 1: but to focus on it for a few minutes, to
Speaker 1: curate the emotions that I feel are important and valuable
Speaker 1: in my daily experience as opposed to the ones that aren't.
Speaker 1: And what happens when you do that is it begins
Speaker 1: to change the lens through which you automatically view your life,
Speaker 1: so that suddenly gratitude isn't something that you're trying to curate,
Speaker 1: but it becomes a lens that you pick out things
Speaker 1: with daily in life, and I think it, you know,
Speaker 1: it becomes a habit in some ways. And the beautiful
Speaker 1: thing about gratitude is as opposed to habits is you know,
Speaker 1: if I have a habit to save money that works
Speaker 1: for saving money, if I have a habit study that
Speaker 1: works for studying. But if I have a habit to
Speaker 1: experience gratitude, that's going to bleed over into making me
Speaker 1: better able to pursue my long term goals in any realm.
Speaker 1: And I would encourage your listener to try and create
Speaker 1: gratitude as a habit. After talking to Dave and hearing
Speaker 1: about his work, I've decided on a personal goal for
Speaker 1: this new decade. I'm going to stop sabotaging future, Larie.
Speaker 1: I'm going to stop assuming that willpower will save me. Instead,
Speaker 1: I'm going to harness the power of my moral emotions.
Speaker 1: I'm going to work harder to become a bit more
Speaker 1: grateful starting now. So here goes. I'm so grateful that
Speaker 1: Dave and so many other scientists took time out of
Speaker 1: their busy schedules to share these insights with us. I'm
Speaker 1: so so thankful that we all have a fresh start
Speaker 1: with this new decade to make a bunch of positive
Speaker 1: changes that we want to see in twenty twenty. And
Speaker 1: I'm so so grateful for you. Thanks so much for
Speaker 1: listening to this podcast, and thank you for being a
Speaker 1: part of this journey to use science to live a
Speaker 1: little bit better. And finally, I'd be super grateful if
Speaker 1: you joined Future Laurie for our third bonus episode of
Speaker 1: The Happiness Lab twenty twenty. The Happiness Lab is co
Speaker 1: written and produced by Ryan Dilley. The show was mastered
Speaker 1: by Evan Viola and our original music was composed by
Speaker 1: Zachary Silver. Special thanks to Ben Davis, Mia Lavelle, Julia Barton,
Speaker 1: Carl mcgliori, Heather Fame, Maggie Taylor, Maya Kanig, and Jacob Weisberg.
Speaker 1: The Happiness Lab is brought to you by Pushkin Industries