The Science of Gratitude & How to Build a Gratitude Practice

**Andrew D. Huberman** (0:00)
Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life.
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 think like many of you would have 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 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. Some of them are actually fun. You can do them 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 Report, 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 listen 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, 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. I think these 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 changing in response to the story. But that there is a, what we call a stereotypy, a sort of stereotyped response to a given story. In my mind, there was no reason why the results had to be this way. 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 Athletic Greens. Athletic Greens is an all-in-one vitamin mineral probiotic drink. I've been taking Athletic Greens since 2012, so I'm delighted that they're sponsoring the podcast. The reason I started taking Athletic Greens and the reason I still take Athletic Greens once or twice a day is that it helps me cover all of my basic nutritional needs. It makes up for any deficiencies that I might have. In addition, it has probiotics, which are vital for microbiome health. 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Again, go to athleticgreens.com/huberman to claim the special offer of the five free travel packs and the year supply of vitamin D3 K2. Today's episode is also brought to us by Element. Element is an electrolyte drink that has everything you need and nothing you don't. That means the exact ratios of electrolytes are in Element and those are sodium, magnesium and potassium, but it has no sugar. I've talked many times before on this podcast about the key role of hydration and electrolytes for nerve cell function, neuron function, as well as the function of all the cells and all the tissues and organ systems of the body. If we have sodium, magnesium and potassium present in the proper ratios, all of those cells function properly and all our bodily systems can be optimized. If the electrolytes are not present and if hydration is low, we simply can't think as well as we would otherwise. 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