We often think of gratitude as a response to something good happening. But it’s also a skill we can practice.
In this episode of Dharma Lab, Cortland Dahl and Richie Davidson explore how to notice and savor everyday moments of gratitude, and extend that appreciation to people we find difficult. They discuss research by psychologist Sonja Lyubomirsky and her colleagues on why writing a gratitude letter can be especially powerful, and share small practices they use in their own lives.
Enjoy!
Sources:
Regan, A., Walsh, L. C., & Lyubomirsky, S. (2023). Are Some Ways of Expressing Gratitude More Beneficial Than Others? Results From a Randomized Controlled Experiment. Affective Science, 4(1), 72–81. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42761-022-00160-3
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In This Episode:
00:00 — Gratitude Is a Skill: A Preview
01:12 — Welcome: A Celebration of Richie
03:16 — What It Feels Like to Receive Gratitude
07:56 — How Gratitude Spreads
10:10 — Making Space for Appreciation
11:16 — The Science of Training Gratitude
13:57 — Why Writing a Gratitude Letter Helps
15:12 — How to Practice: Start Where It’s Easy
18:09 — Everyday Gratitude: A Moment with a Stranger
19:54 — Recognizing and Savoring Gratitude
22:22 — What Happens in the Brain?
24:40 — The Insula and Feeling Gratitude in the Body
27:11 — Why Expressing Gratitude Benefits You, Too
28:56 — Intentional Practice: What Science Has Yet to Establish
30:56 — Extending Gratitude Beyond Your Inner Circle
32:19 — Gratitude Toward Difficult People
36:10 — Richie’s Practice: Appreciation, Emails, and Constructive Feedback
40:03 — Cort’s Practice: Finding Appreciation in Ordinary Things
41:53 — Three Things: A Gratitude Ritual Before Bed
43:11 — Closing Gratitude
Written transcript for those who prefer to read:
00:00 — Gratitude Is a Skill: A Preview
Richie: Her work really convincingly shows that gratitude can be trained, that you can improve this by engaging in various intentional exercises to cultivate gratitude. And when you do that, it improves well-being more generally.
Cort: The thing that I’ll always remember is an instruction I got from Mingyur Rinpoche. When he was teaching appreciation as a meditative practice, he was talking about these very mundane things. Like you can even start with yourself, just appreciate the fact that you brush your teeth, appreciate that you got out of bed in the morning. And I thought, “Rinpoche, come on.” It felt so mundane. I wanted some mind-blowing, transcendent experience or something.
Cort: But when I practiced it, I realized actually that is precisely the power of it, because then it is everywhere. If you just get used to noticing that, that is the profundity of it. It’s just that it’s all around you.
01:12 — Welcome: A Celebration of Richie
Cort: Welcome everyone to another episode of Dharma Lab. I am Cortland Dahl, your host, along with my co-host and dear friend and Dharma brother and world-renowned neuroscientist, Dr. Richie Davidson. Today we would talk about appreciation and gratitude, which is a very, very timely topic for us because we just came off a couple days where I would say in my entire life, actually, I’ve never had a few days that were so infused with gratitude. And the cause for that was Richie, actually. Some students of Richie from decades back made a plan actually years ago. I got an email actually two years ago, with a save the date for a celebration of Richie and his career and his life by some people who have been working with him for decades.
Cort: And this culminated in these few days where we really were just sharing both our own lives and our own experience, but especially the many, many ways that we have all had our lives transformed and been benefited by you, Richie. So I’m kind of putting you on the spot here because it was also quite unique for you. You basically had three days or a few days, two or three days of just endlessly receiving the gratitude of others. And it was amazing. I’ve never experienced anything like this. I can’t imagine what it was like for you, Richie. But it was the kind of thing that I think a few of us were talking after the fact.
Cort: Unfortunately, it’s the kind of thing that oftentimes only happens when somebody’s passed away, strangely. We oftentimes don’t say the things until, it’s sort of too late. And this was just a beautiful example where we didn’t wait. We took that opportunity to share the gratitude we all feel for you. And so maybe Richie, I’ll just start with what it was like for you to be on the receiving end of that and what your experience of this was.
03:16 — What It Feels Like to Receive Gratitude
Richie: Yeah, I mean it was humbling and a bit overwhelming at times. There was on Friday a three-and-a-half-hour data blitz where 26 of my former trainees, either graduate students or postdocs or collaborators, each gave seven-minute talks and talked about how their current work was influenced by the time they were in our center or lab. And I was asked to give some remarks. At the end, and I got up there, and I certainly wasn’t planning on this, but I just burst out crying. And really it took a while for me to gain my composure, but I just felt a deep sense of gratitude toward them for all they’re doing and for carrying on.
Richie: This work and a kind of hopefully not an arrogant pride but a quiet pride in the work that they’re doing. I was really proud of them for all they’re doing and many of these people are doing cutting edge science that is really of great benefit to humanity. I have no doubt that the world is much better for their presence. It was so deeply moving to me people came from China, from Europe, from Mexico, from really all over the world I was just so incredibly touched You know, I think that there’s a community that was formed and I think all of us really felt that sense of community and one of the people who was there who was so close to me and I’ve known her for forty years was Roshi Joan Halifax.
Richie: And for those of you who know something about Roshi, you’ll know what I’m talking about. For those of you who don’t, Roshi is someone who brings her practice to the world, to everyday life. And really has a very, very palpable, deep ethical core that you feel. That she brings to the work she’s done with people who are dying, with people who are incarcerated with people who have been living in adversity, who’ve been unfortunate victims of natural disasters, and the list goes on. And she is an embodiment of that and it was so beautiful to share this with her and with so many others.
Richie : So yeah, I’m still feeling very much these ripples and people who weren’t there who couldn’t make it have been sending me videos. I just got one from Angela Duckworth like five minutes ago. Really beautiful. Recounting a very specific instance which I don’t remember honestly of an interaction between us and it was a beautiful interaction you know, from her description I can feel it. So I just truly feel very blessed and I’ll end here. I feel that all of this I think gave each of us a taste of the power of gratitude because we all felt that this was something that contributed to our collective flourishing.
Richie : And I think it’s fair to say that everyone who participated in these three days of events they just their heart was really open and we all were incredibly connected, even those who were meeting each other for the first time. So it was beautiful and, people who knew each other for 50 years were treating people who they just met really in the same way and one of the speakers at one of the events said this actually my program officer from a government funding agency of all people said that really we should name it and it’s love. There was love. And everyone felt it for everyone else.
07:56 — How Gratitude Spreads
Cort : Yeah, I was gonna comment on that. I mean, just being in the room for this, sometimes when you have things that are in the extreme, it helps you see things more clearly. And because this was just like this love fest, gratitude fest for a few days, it helped me see the power of gratitude so clearly. And it’s funny you know, you talked about a data blitz, you know, this is a thing in science where you have these like very short presentations and It sounds like the least loving thing, you know, it doesn’t sound like this would be something filled with gratitude, but it was amazing. Like all of that, because it was all about you, Richie, and just more broadly, it was it was people sharing, not only sharing their work, but sharing it as an expression, kind of saying, “I couldn’t have done this without you.” I think I would say is the message. Like, here’s what I’m doing, and this is because of you, because of the role you had in my life, how you inspired me, how you supported me. And so it really was infused with love from start to finish and from top to bottom.
Cort : And a few things that jumped out to me about this, one was the one of the mantras that you and I mention all the time, which is flourishing is contagious. And this was an incredible example of that. Because being in the room, and just being immersed in this atmosphere where there was so much gratitude and love just bouncing around the walls. I just found myself naturally expressing things to just random people, you know, like your assistant Richie, Jenny, who’s amazing. I just was walking out the door and I just like just went over to her and just kind of thanked her and I passed on a message from somebody else and I’m sure it was like an exponential effect of whatever was expressed in those presentations.
Cort : It probably got amplified with each person going out and doing that for five or ten people. And it really is contagious. It’s like a virus of flourishing that sort of spreads. And I could see that because it was, again, it was sort of an extreme case of that. So one was that, that it really does, you know, it just puts us in the space where you just spontaneously pass it on.
10:10 — Making Space for Appreciation
Cort : The other thing that struck me about this is the importance of intention. This didn’t happen by accident. This was years in the making. And of course, not everything needs to be on this grand scale. But just like it doesn’t always happen without clear intention. We need to make space for these things. We need to be intentional about them. We need to actually tell ourselves: like, I’m really gonna share how I feel, or tell this person how much I appreciate them, or just acknowledge all the ways I’ve been supported. It really takes that mental step of making time and space and being very clear and intentional about it.
Cort : And somehow those two things, it kind of can create a little magic in your life and your experience when you make an intention to sort of send that out into the world. So maybe we could turn our attention to the science, because this is one of the areas in the realm of positive psychology and research on well-being and human flourishing and all these related areas. Gratitude is perhaps one of the most well-studied areas. So does the science kind of back up what we clearly experienced?
11:16 — The Science of Training Gratitude
Richie : So one of the things that those of you who are regular viewers of Dharma Lab know that from the book that Cort and I wrote, Born to Flourish, there are three kind of slogans that we often talk about. One is, you’ve talked about it, Cort, that flourishing is contagious. The other two related slogans are one is that flourishing is a skill. It can be cultivated. And the second is that it’s easier than you think. The science really supports all three of these. And they’re worth digging into a little bit. One of the things that has been so interesting in some of our recent work that we’ve talked about on Dharma Lab is how benefits on hard-nosed measures can be seen from training in the pillars of flourishing with relatively modest amounts of training.
Richie: You know, you don’t have to sit in a special posture for a long time. You don’t have to sit for 45 minutes a day for years on end to see some benefit. Of course, if you do that and you find it’s really beneficial. That’s wonderful. But in order to get started, it’s not necessary. And the science really shows that. And in the area of gratitude, it’s one of the domains where this is really very powerfully demonstrated. And there is a psychologist by the name of Sonja Lyubomirsky. She’s at the University of California Riverside. And she’s a wonderful psychologist. I know her quite well. And she’s been a real champion of these brief interventions in the domain of quote positive psychology. And one of the domains in which she has particularly worked is gratitude. And her work and there’s work besides hers too, but I think hers is really the best in this genre. And her work really convincingly shows that gratitude can be trained, that you can improve this by engaging in various intentional exercises to cultivate gratitude. And when you do that, it improves well-being more generally.
13:57 — Why Writing a Gratitude Letter Helps
Richie : And one of the things that Sonja has specifically explored is whether there are differences among the specific ways of cultivating gratitude. So maybe reading some slogan about gratitude or maybe trying to say thank you more frequently during the day. And she’s explored all those things, but she’s found one thing to be clearly of greater benefit than others, which is kind of interesting. And the one thing that she’s found that’s particularly beneficial is a kind of journaling or writing exercise. And specifically if you are invited to write a letter to a person to express your gratitude for something or ways in which they may have been helpful, and you actually sit and write that letter, that is especially powerful in terms of the various kinds of outcome measures that she has assessed that largely are measures of well being and positive emotion.
15:12 — How to Practice: Start Where It’s Easy
Cort: When I think about Buddhist psychology and Buddhist meditation, actually there’s a ton to say, not only on this topic, but going back to our slogans, the point about this being a skill. We say flourishing is a skill, you could equally say gratitude is a skill. It’s something you can practice. And there’s a really simple formula coming out of the tradition of Buddhist psychology and Buddhist meditation for how to do this, which is you first learn how to evoke it. And here the key note is start where it’s easy. Find a person, a situation, some context, a little spark that’s easy. So it’s kind of you learn to spark it.
Cort : That’s the first step. And then the second is to extend. And maybe I’ll just unpack this a little bit. We might immediately jump to something that’s more challenging. And then of course we can immediately just get stuck because it’s sort of harder to access, you might say. So it’s much more intuitive just to kind of go where we feel it naturally. But there’s also a thing that can happen where we might easily learn to be very caring and grateful, appreciative to the people in our close circle, but there’s just the rest of the world outside of that.
Cort : And in that sense it’s like we haven’t tapped the full potential, both for our own flourishing and for what we’re putting out into the world. And of course, we know that the world is in dire need of a course correction these days with all the divisiveness in our politics and between cultures and countries and religions and you name it. So we need a huge course correction, and this is something that could play a huge role. So when you start, you know, it can be the littlest thing. It can just be you know, a grandparent, it can be your child, it could be your pet, just something you just naturally and spontaneously feel that warm energy of gratitude.
Cort : And you just learn, you just this is where intention comes in. The skill is just being intentional about it, just recalling it. Many times throughout your day. And if you have time, you can sit down and journal. As we can see from Sonja Lyubomirsky’s work, and from other people researching, So gratitude journaling is a great way to do this. But it also could just be a moment. Like even as you were speaking, I was practicing this. I had a moment of gratitude as you were saying that, just thinking everything you know, how generously you share this with others.
Cort: And then I was thinking of the people listening to this. And I was thinking they could be listening to anything. I mean, to you out there listening to this. I felt this moment of gratitude to you. Like this is wonderful. This is this is what energizes our work. You know, Richie and I our work together is because of you and the idea that you’re listening to this and hopefully benefiting from it. I just had this moment of gratitude. So that just took two seconds, five seconds. It doesn’t have to be some big thing. So I think that’s the first step. And maybe I’ll turn it over to you, Richie, and then we can bounce this back and forth a bit.
18:09 — Everyday Gratitude: A Moment with a Stranger
Richie: Yeah, I think that those everyday examples are so important and you know, I think that the intentionality that we’ve talked about is critical and also simply being truly aware of these small moments of everyday gratitude. So yesterday, for example, after all this celebration, I needed to just move my body and I went out on a bike ride with a dear friend of mine. We went out very late in the day. There was a place where we were crossing a road, and so the cars, needed to stop in order for the bikes to cross. And I had a very conscious experience of looking. And I was looking into the eyes of a driver who had stopped his car to allow these two bicycles to go, and I waved you know a kind of thank-you wave to him.
Richie: And he waved back. And it was I’ve you know a stranger. I’ve no idea who this person is. But I think it actually touched both of us. There was a moment of gratitude
Richie: That was incredibly simple and very everyday but simply being aware of it and allowing and savoring it. And when you reflect on it, the world works and is not totally chaotic, in large part because of this kind of interpersonal gratitude and respect. If people didn’t do that, things would really fall apart. And so there’s a lot of that goes on that we’re just not aware of. And simply being aware of it is incredibly beneficial.
19:54 — Recognizing and Savoring Gratitude
Cort: Yeah, you just mentioned two words that I think are the key ingredients of this first part as a skill, like you’re learning to spark gratitude. And the first is recognition, and the second is savoring. And in a way that’s what we’re learning to do and all that with intention. It’s almost as though recognizing it when it happens is an amplifier somehow. And I think that’s the key thing here is that actually there’s these little moments all the time. They’re just like little flickers of gratitude, but usually they’re you know, they just come and go and we don’t really even notice them.
Cort: It’s just like a little moment where somebody does something nice or we recognize that. But once you start tuning into it, it gets easier and those moments it’s as though they’re kind of growing. In a way, they’re just growing more in our conscious experience. A lot of time they’re actually happening. They’re just sort of beneath the surface of our conscious awareness. But then we learn to stay with them. It’s almost like we get a muscle memory. And it actually is a felt experience in the body, I’ve noticed as well. As you learn to savor this, you will feel it in your body.
Cort: You will literally feel almost like this wave of I don’t even know how to say it, like warmth to use a very technical scientific term, the warm fuzzies, will kind of sweep through your body. So it’s kind of amazing, but it is like that’s it. It’s just noticing it when it happens or sparking it, you know. And the world is just filled with opportunities for this. I mean, like right now I’m like there’s a microphone in right in front of me. Like all the little pieces of this microphone, people made that. I couldn’t do what I’m doing right now without people’s hard work and creativity and things being flown and shipped all over the world, all these things. It’s kind of amazing, right? Like we say, sometimes if you’re not in a constant state of awe, you’re not paying attention. And you could say that, if you’re not in a constant state of gratitude, it’s just because we’re not paying attention. I mean, I can look around my room and there’s a thousand things I could be grateful for that other that countless other people contributed to.
22:22 — What Happens in the Brain?
Cort : So I think that’s the key is exactly what you’re saying. Just recognize everything in your life that so many people have contributed to and then say and then learn to savor that. And I think the next step, which we can talk about next, is just sort of you then learn to extend that into more and more challenging areas. And then everything, even the challenging stuff, begins to spark this this feeling. It’s it’s quite extraordinary. So what is what what would you say? I’m I’m curious from a neuroscientific point of view. I mean, a lot of the research in this area is not neuroscientific research, but in the realm of social neuroscience, I’m guessing there’s some hints about what’s going on.
Cort: We’re basically shifting patterns of brain activity and even how our nervous system is activating or deactivating. But do we know much at this point about the biological side of things?
Richie : There’s been a little bit, but not a whole lot. You know, I think one of the challenges in this area is that gratitude may be an emotion that at the point at which it’s well defined as gratitude is relatively brief. It then may extend into other kinds of positive emotion and well being and it may influence our mood. But the kind of coherent state of gratitude, I think my conjecture is that it’s relatively brief. And so the work that’s been done in general has found that circuits in the brain that are associated with positive emotion, specifically the ventral striatum, which is an area rich in dopamine that is involved in both wanting and liking, that general brain region, is activated during periods of gratitude, but again they’re likely periods where there’s a mixture of gratitude and other kinds of positive emotions, so it’s not absolutely pure gratitude. I think there’s gonna be a lot more room for other kinds of research. This is an area where experience sampling to sort of capture moments of gratitude in the real world and look at least at autonomic physiological changes that might be easily captured with wearable sensors, that might be an area that would be interesting to pursue in the future.
24:40 — The Insula and Feeling Gratitude in the Body
Richie: It’s also the case that one of the other areas in the brain that has been found to be activated in some studies of gratitude is an area called the insula. And the insula is an area that has a viscerotopic map of the body. So it actually has representations of different visceral organs. In different parts of the insula. And the insula is a key site for mind-brain-body interaction. And in
Richie: Order to recognize gratitude in the way we were talking about earlier, it may be important. We don’t know yet, but it may be important that a person be able to perceive what is going on in their body.
Richie: And this is an area that we call interoception. And we actually this would be a good topic for another episode of Dharma Lab to have the whole topic focused on interoception. There’s a lot of interesting work in that area, but interoception is the perception of internal bodily cues. That’s what interoception is.
Cort: So when I mentioned the warm fuzzies, there’s one thing of having warm fuzzies and it’s yet another thing to be really aware of how that feels in your body.
Richie: Exactly. And it’s the awareness of how that feels in your body that is interoception. And it turns out that some people seem to be really good at this, and other people are more challenged. Just like some people
Richie: Find it’s very easy to generate visual imagery, other people find it more difficult to generate visual imagery. There are just differences among people in these kinds of abilities. And to some extent, That they can be cultivated and trained. But there are big individual differences, and that may play a role in aspects of gratitude. And for a person who may be less familiar with or less have a more difficult time feeling stuff in their body, there may be other ways of connecting to gratitude that are not directly bodily signals. But they may be other kinds of signals.
27:11 — Why Expressing Gratitude Benefits You, Too
Cort : So I can think of so many benefits of this. So one thing just to pick up on one thread you mentioned with the ventral striatum. So for those of you not familiar with kind of the neuroscience in this area, this is a part of the reward network, which as you kind of mentioned in passing, Richie, whenever you have a burst of Pleasure, for example, you really enjoy something, and that could be anything from a chocolate bar to a warm interaction with something, with another person. You can imagine watching a cat video, you know, online, like anything that just feels activating in a very positive sense.
Cort : It’s you know, this would be a part of that network, that wider reward network. Is that right? I mean, and that just shows that.
Richie : Yes, yes.
Cort : It just feels good. Like obviously it’s good. If I express appreciation or gratitude, obviously that’s nice to be on the receiving end, as you kind of shared earlier, but it feels good to the person as well. Like when you feel gratitude, it feels so nourishing. It feels so good. And the fact that you can train that is kind of amazing. You can learn to kind of switch that on, so to speak. Is that a fairer representation?
Richie: Absolutely and what you’re describing, Cort, is part I think of the mechanism through which the expression of gratitude is beneficial for the well being of the person who’s expressing it. That is it will contribute to a person’s well being to just be more grateful, not just to receive the gratitude, but the generation and expression of the gratitude itself is Well being promoting, no question.
Cort: Yeah, it’s such a win-win.
28:56 — Intentional Practice: What Science Has Yet to Establish
Cort : And the other thing that my guess is there’s no research directly on this, but there’s very related research. Actually our colleague and your former grad student, Helen Wang, who we both know well, did some research in this area, is the difference between a spontaneous moment of gratitude or appreciation, which of course happens, and then when you bring intentionality to it, as we’ve been talking about, when you treat it as a skill and you’re consciously practicing it, you’re consciously recognizing it, you’re Consciously nurturing it and nourishing it, you’re consciously extending it, that you’re also likely activating nodes in the central executive network when you do that.
Cort : And so then you have this other just superpower that you’re activating in the brain, which goes far beyond gratitude, even. You’re strengthening parts of your brain that are just gonna allow you to be more in the driver’s seat of your own thoughts, emotions, and impulses. So we’ve seen this with compassion, you know, work that you did and Helen did under your mentorship, Richie. But I would assume I’m guessing there’s no research specifically on gratitude. Maybe there is, but would that be fair to say as well that when you practice it you get this whole other benefit beyond the more uplifting side of it?
Richie: Yeah, in terms of prefrontal executive function I’m not sure. There may be some stuff we can actually check and report back at a later point in time. But it certainly wouldn’t surprise me if there are, you know, at least a few studies that have looked at that now, but there’s not a very robust literature, let’s put it that way. This is not an area in particular neuroscience that’s very well developed. But there’s one you brought up Helen Wang’s work on compassion, and there is one really important issue that relates to that work as it might apply to gratitude that to the best of my knowledge has not been investigated but just to call it out is something really important.
30:56 — Extending Gratitude Beyond Your Inner Circle
Richie : Many people find it easy to be grateful to those who are close to them. But being grateful to someone you don’t know a total stranger or someone who you know, may actually be a little irritating to you, but may have done something actually that is nice and beneficial, for which gratitude might normally be very appropriate. It may be more difficult for some people to express gratitude in those circumstances. And this is an area particularly where extending gratitude beyond one’s immediate circle may be really especially important. And I can tell You as someone who leads a diverse organization where there are, you know, I mean it’s not huge, but between our nonprofit HuMIN and the Center for Healthy Minds, there’s probably close to a hundred people.
Richie: There are times when someone may be a little irritating. And I’m very aware and I find it really helpful to reflect on being grateful to those people when they do something beneficial and really trying to make a point of doing that as part of widening the circle.
32:19 — Gratitude Toward Difficult People
Cort: And that’s a great segue and maybe we can end on this and maybe share a little bit of our own personal practices, things that we do in our lives. But the extend part of this is really where a lot of the training is, you know, when it comes to the meditative traditions in which you do these kinds of practices. And it’s both for our own well-being, because as you can see, like if it is so promoting of mental health, our ability to flourish and even I think as the science has shown in related areas, likely supporting other brain networks that help us just to function better in the world and manage our lives and emotions better.
Cort: All sorts of benefits to these things, some of which we’ve explored scientifically, some of which we have not. But in any case, the extending of that, if those benefits are there, imagine if you just extend that and extend that so that really everybody is kind of sparking that in you. So obviously, for your own personal point of view. That just means you’re gonna have those positive benefits much more because now it’s not just a few people who you love and care about. It’s, you know, the clerk at the grocery store and the person who picks up your trash and even as you said, even people who you find annoying or frustrating.
Cort: And I think this is where people get hung up, especially when you get to the difficult person side of the equation, because the traditional thing is you start with people you care about. Again, the people for whom it’s easy to feel appreciation and gratitude. And then you go to quote unquote neutral people. Of course they’re not neutral, they’re just neutral in terms of how we regard them, but people you just don’t have strong feelings about one way or another, which is 99.9% of humanity and 99.9% of all other forms of life as well. But then you go into difficult people, which again are not difficult inherently, although some people might seem like that, but we have difficulty with them.
Cort : And then people I think might understandably think, well, why would I do that? There might be people who are not just frustrating us or irritating, but genuinely doing harm in the world. There are people for whom we can say that somewhat objectively. But again, here you could say from your own point of view, us hating people or us being frustrated or us being upset all the time. That’s not good for us. We don’t feel good. So clearly it doesn’t have a good effect on us. But we can also think about does putting out more love in the world, and this doesn’t mean being a doormat, like being loving and caring and grateful and compassionate doesn’t mean you let people walk all over you or you don’t stand up to injustice when you see it.
Cort : But it does mean you can engage that with love, you know, as Gandhi did, as Mother Teresa did, as Martin Luther King Jr. Did. Like we can see these great examples. They were coming to the problems of the world with love. And wisdom, not hatred and irritation. And so you can look at it from both sides of how it affects us and how it affects the world, how it affects even the people we think might be perpetrating the difficult stuff in the world. And it’s just, I think, pretty obvious that putting more great gratitude into the world is going to help the difficult situations.
Cort : And putting more hatred into the world and anger into the world and irritation into the world is not helping these situations. It just puts us all into threat response. So This is the psychology that underlies the practice of extending. It’s a clear benefit to us, but it’s a cause for dealing with a lot of these problems we can face in the world or alleviating those problems. So, Richie, any final thoughts? And maybe we could also just share our personal practice in this area, because I know we both have a lot of things we do daily.
Richie: Yeah. No, I think maybe we should just share our personal little practices.
Cort: Yeah, so what do you do? What are your go-to practices that help with this?
36:10 — Richie’s Practice: Appreciation, Emails, and Constructive Feedback
Richie: Yeah, for gratitude, As many of you know who’ve listened to previous episodes of Dharma Lab, on work days I do a practice after I meditate every morning of looking at my calendar and looking at the people I’m going to see. And you know, it’s a combination of both appreciation and gratitude, appreciating people for just who they are and what they’ve done in the world. And often there’s also gratitude. For what they may have done for me gratitude for some of the work they’ve done. I also have an amazing staff who really allows me to do what I need to do that I really first of all I’m not good at certain administrative kinds of work they’re much better than I am and it would really weigh me down.
Richie: They do it skillfully and gracefully and I just have this daily reflection of gratitude for each of them and I write short emails to them. I did it this morning. It doesn’t have to be more than one sentence. Took me all of, you know, two minutes less than that. But it just first of all it felt good for me to write that and I assume that when they read it will feel good to them to receive it. And it really it takes so little effort to do that. And then there are other times, I’m very aware of this in the course of my everyday work, someone in the center, you know, trainee may have just finished a paper and just saying, you know, thank you for the really outstanding work you’re doing.
Richie: As scientists we’re trained to criticize, to really rip things apart, which is part of our practice of rigor. And I’m really a champion of rigor, but there are ways to be rigorous where we don’t need to be mean. You know, we can still really insist on absolutely the highest standards of rigor, and also say, thank you for all you’ve done. Thank you for the effort that you’ve put in. It’s not there yet, but it’s you’ve done a great job, and I’m confident you’re gonna keep doing a great job. And so you can deliver feedback in a way that is more constructive, and I think will motivate people rather than demoralize them. And in a competitive academic environment, I can’t emphasize enough how important these kinds of simple, everyday expressions of gratitude are.
Cort : Yeah, I couldn’t agree more. And I think that you know, what you just shared about giving constructive feedback is such a good example because it’s easy to hear this stuff on gratitude or kindness and compassion and it kind of feels like, in this harsh world we live in, we’re just gonna be doormats. But actually, I think the key is that you’re infusing this with care. Sometimes in a relationship, you need to set a clear boundary if there’s not a healthy boundary. Sometimes you might need to deliver feedback that’s going to be difficult to hear, or stand up for yourself, or stand up for somebody else.
Cort: And that actually, you know, it can be that can be motivated by fear or anger or all sorts of things, but it can be equally motivated by care and even gratitude or appreciation. And I think that’s the key thing is that it’s the force that energizes what you say or how you interact with somebody is motivated by kindness and care, versus the power being like the reactivity or whatever else it may be.
40:03 — Cort’s Practice: Finding Appreciation in Ordinary Things
Cort: So in my life, yeah, I would say that probably the most powerful thing are these everyday things of just making a habit of just as we’ve talked about here, just recognizing and noticing. And the thing that I’ll always remember, and I think I may have mentioned this in a previous Dharma Lab episode. Is an instruction I got from Mingyur Rinpoche, where when he was teaching appreciation as a meditative practice, he was talking about these very mundane things. Like you can even start with yourself, like just appreciate the fact that you brush your teeth, appreciate, you know, that you know got out of bed in the morning.
Cort: And I thought, “Rinpoche, come on.” It felt so mundane. I wanted some like mind-blowing, transcendent experience or something. But when I practiced it, I realized actually that is precisely the power of it. Cause then it is everywhere. If you just get used to noticing that, you like that is the profundity of it. It’s just that it’s all around you. So there’s just nothing and nowhere and no one who can’t be a source of that feeling of gratitude. So that, and I think more and more, you know, not all the time, there’s sometimes where it’s a little over the top, but just expressing it in simple ways, like you said.
Cort: Like it can just be a quick text. And sometimes what I really love to do is just totally unexpected, like for no reason. It’s kind of my favorite thing. It’s not like in response to somebody did something, but just out of the blue, just telling somebody, you just came to mind and I just love how you brighten the room with your smile when you walk in the room. Or I just love how you always have the best ideas. And just like unprovoked. And I feel like it’s just it comes from such a good place. And I’m sure it feels good to the people who are receiving it. So those little everyday moments are really wonderful.
41:53 — Three Things: A Gratitude Ritual Before Bed
Cort: The other thing I would just mention that I do is my wife and I, at one point in the last few minutes of the day, we were kind of getting into venting about stressful work stuff that was coming up. At a certain point, we realized this is just not how we want to end our day. It’s just like you’re going to bed stressed out with our minds filled with negativity. And so we started doing this practice of Three things and we just pick a topic and then we find three things we’re grateful for or three things we appreciate. And we just find random things.
Cort: It’ll be like, you know, three places you’ve been, or three things you love about your grandma, or three things that we love about each other, or three foods. I mean, we just pick like random things and we just each go take turns, each sharing one at a time. That’s just amazing. Then you go to bed and your mind is just filled and your body is filled with this more positive energy. So that I think having daily rituals, like it doesn’t have to be that, but creating a little ritual that you can bring into your day, either for yourself or even in conversation, like I do with my wife, it’s just amazing.
Cort: It makes such a difference throughout the day. So many many things to pick up on here, but maybe we can call it here.
43:11 — Closing Gratitude
Cort: To end on a note of gratitude, I know I speak for you, Richie. We’re so grateful for you for listening to this and so many of you who’ve been following along and part of this community for so long, and so grateful for what you’re putting out into the world as evidenced by the fact that you’re taking time to spend to listen to things like this. So ending on a note of gratitude, a deep bow of gratitude from both of us for everything you do. We hope you stay tuned and we’ll see you soon for another episode of Dharma Lab.
Richie: Yes, thank you all so much.
