Essentials: The Science of Gratitude & How to Build a Gratitude Practice

Welcome to Huberman Lab Essentials, where we revisit past episodes for the most potent and actionable science-based tools for mental health, physical health, and performance.

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.

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.

However, in researching this episode, I was completely surprised as to what constitutes an effective gratitude practice.

I, 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.

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

on subjective well-being.

People report feeling happier, more meaning, joy, even awe for their life experience, simply in response to adding a gratitude practice.

But there are additional benefits of a gratitude practice.

There are studies showing that a regular gratitude practice can provide resilience to trauma in two ways.

It can provide a reframing and resilience to prior traumatic experiences, so buffering people against the negative physiological effects and psychological effects of earlier trauma, but also inoculating them in many ways to any traumas that might arrive later in life.

The other thing that a gratitude practice does is it's been shown to benefit social relationships, but not just for the relationship in which you express gratitude, right?

So, on the face of it, you might think, okay, if I express gratitude for somebody over and over and over and over, over and over, then I'm going to feel better about that person.

And indeed, that is one effect of a gratitude practice that's called a pro-social or intersocial gratitude practice.

But

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, in romantic relationships, and even one's relationship to themselves, which is really what the subjective feelings of well-being are.

And for those of you that are coming to this conversation thinking, gratitude practice, oh, that's kind of wishy-washy or woo.

It's going to involve, you know, putting your hand on your heart and feeling into all the amazing things that you happen to have, even when things are really terrible.

That's not where we're going at all.

So, if you are of the mindset that a gratitude practice is kind of weak sauce, buckle up because the data actually point to the fact that a gratitude practice is a very, very potent way in which you can steer your mental and physical health in positive directions and that those effects are very long-lasting.

Before we dive into the tools and mechanisms and scientific studies around gratitude, I'd like to just set the framework for the discussion.

Gratitude is what we call a pro-social behavior or a pro-social mindset.

Pro-social behaviors are basically any behavior or mode of thinking that allow us to be more effective in interactions with other people, including ourselves.

Now, pro-social is not just a name that we give these different tools and practices and mindsets.

They're actually neural circuits in the brain that are specifically wired for pro-social thoughts and behaviors.

So without getting into too much detail just yet, we will later,

we have circuits in the brain that are what we call appetitive.

They are designed to bring us closer to things and to bring us into closer relation to the details of that sensory experience.

Now, that could be a delicious food that you're eating, it could be interacting with a loved one, it could be interacting with a friend or anyone that you happen to like, it could even be in your relation to yourself.

And the neural circuits in the brain that are associated with aversive or defensive behaviors are actually antagonized, meaning they are reduced when the pro-social circuits are more active.

So, the framework here that I'd like to set is that we have this kind of seesaw of neural circuits in the brain, one set that are pro-social and are designed to bring us closer to others, including ourselves, closer to certain sensory experiences, right?

Because a lot of pro-social behaviors can also be geared towards things like pets or food or anything that we find we want to be closer to and want more of.

Whereas the defensive circuits involve areas of the brain, yes, such as areas that are involved in fear, but also areas of the brain and body that are literally associated with freezing or with backing up.

So, the way to think about gratitude is that it falls under this category of pro-social behaviors, which are designed to bring us closer to different types of things and to enhance the level of detail that we extract from those experiences.

The key thing for today's discussion is that gratitude turns out to be one of the most potent wedges by which we can insert our thinking, and as you also see, the physiology of our body, between these two circuits and give a little more levity, if you will, to the side of the seesaw that's associated with positive pro-social feelings.

And if you keep imagining this seesaw imagery, what's really beautiful about gratitude practices is that if they're performed repeatedly, and not even that often, but repeatedly, then one can actually shift their neural circuits such that the seesaw that I'm calling pro-social versus defensive behaviors can actually start to tilt.

What this means is that we now know with certainty that a regular gratitude practice can shift the pro-social circuits so that they dominate our physiology and our mindset in ways that can enhance many, many aspects of our physical and mental health by default.

So we don't always have to constantly be in practice trying to be happy.

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Now I'd like to talk about some of the neurochemistry and neural circuits associated with gratitude and prosocial behaviors.

Numerous times on this podcast, I've talked about so-called neuromodulators.

For those of you that might have forgotten or have never heard of neuromodulators before, neuromodulators are chemicals that are released in the brain and body that change the activity of other neural circuits.

They make certain brain areas more likely to be active and other brain areas less likely to be active.

These neuromodulators have names like dopamine, serotonin, acetylcholine, epinephrine, and so on.

The main neuromodulators associated with gratitude and prosocial behaviors tend to be serotonin.

Serotonin is released from a very small collection of neurons in the brainstem called the Raphae, R-A-P-H-E, the Raphae nucleus, and a few other places in the brain.

And the Raphael neurons send these little wires that we call axons out to numerous places in the brain, and they tend to increase the activity of particular neural circuits that lend themselves to more approach to particular types of experiences.

That makes total sense if you think about it.

Have a chemical that under certain circumstances is released in the brain that triggers the activity of neural circuits that makes the organism, you, more likely to stay in an interaction with something or even lean in and seek a more detailed interaction with that person, place, or thing.

And two main brain areas are activated by these serotonergic systems and when people experience something that makes them feel gratitude.

And the amount of activation scales with how intensely the person experienced the feeling of gratitude.

And those two areas have particular names.

You don't need to know the names, but for those of you that want to know, they are the anterior cingulate cortex and the medial prefrontal cortex.

And of course, these brain areas are connected to a number of other networks in the brain.

In fact, that's how they get you or others to lean into certain experiences, because when these areas are active, certain thought processes get invoked.

Those thought processes probably resemble something like, hmm, I'd like to experience more of this, or hmm, this feels really good.

And then they literally feed onto your muscles via the neurons, making you happy to stay stationary if you're experiencing something you like, or to move closer to something that you find attractive to you, literally.

Many of you have probably heard of the medial prefrontal cortex because this is the area of the brain that is involved in planning and in deep thinking and evaluation of different types of experiences, past, present, or future.

And the reason it can be involved in so many different things, and the reason it's especially important for gratitude is that the medial prefrontal cortex sets context, okay?

It sets context and it literally defines the meaning of your experience.

How is it that medial prefrontal cortex sets the context of everything in your life?

Well, it does it the following way.

You have a number of circuits deeper in your brain that simply create some sensations, or they allow you, I should say, to perceive certain sensations.

Let's use the example of cold exposure, something that we sometimes talk about in this podcast for other reasons.

If you were to deliberately place yourself into an ice bath, it would be uncomfortable, even if you're adapted to cold and so forth.

The discomfort is non-negotiable.

However, if you are doing it because you want to or because you have knowledge that there are particular health benefits,

the

medial prefrontal cortex can then control areas of your deeper brain like the hypothalamus to positively impact the neurochemicals that are released into your system.

Your knowledge that you are making the choice, that it's you that's deciding to put yourself through this discomfort, has been shown to create a very different and positive effect on things like dopamine, on things like anti-inflammatory markers in your immune system, et cetera, compared to if someone pushes you into an ice bath or if you are doing it because someone insists that you do it and you really, really don't want to.

So there's a very subtle distinction here.

It's it's just the distinction of motivation and desire or lack of motivation and being forced into something if you take a mouse for instance and it runs on a running wheel which mice really like to do there are many positive effects on reducing blood pressure improvements in neurochemistry etc in that mouse however if There's a mouse in the cage right next to it that's trapped in the running wheel and it has to run every time the other mouse runs because the wheels are linked, well then the second mouse that's forced to do the exact same running experiences negative shifts in their overall health metrics.

Blood pressure goes up, stress hormones go up, et cetera, because it's not actually making the choice.

Medial prefrontal cortex is the knob, it is, or the switch rather, that can take one experience and allow us to frame it such that it creates positive health effects.

And the exact same experience framed as something we don't want to do or that we are forced to do can create negative health effects.

Now, how exactly the neurons in medial prefrontal cortex do that is rather complicated and, frankly, not completely understood.

But it's somehow able to adjust the activity of other neural circuits that are purely reflexive, as we say in neuroscience, like really dumb neural circuits that are just like switches, and place a context onto it.

So, gratitude is a mindset that activates prefrontal cortex.

And in doing so, sets the context of your experience such that you can derive tremendous health benefits, which leads us to the question: what kind of gratitude practice is going to accomplish this?

You can't simply lie to yourself.

You can't simply say, oh, well, every experience is a learning experience.

Or,

you know, a terrible thing happens.

Oh, good.

I'm just going to say, good.

And that your body will react as if it's good for you.

That's a myth.

And frankly, it's a myth that's fairly pervasive in the self-help and self-actualization literature.

We can't simply lie to ourselves or quote-unquote fake it until we make it.

Neural circuitry is very powerful and very plastic.

It can be modified and it's very context-dependent, but it's not stupid.

And when you lie to yourself about whether or not an experience is actually good for you or not,

your brain knows.

So what does an effective gratitude practice look like?

Well, let's examine what an ineffective what a poor gratitude practice looks like, because therein lies some really important information, including the fact that I and I think millions of other people out there are doing it wrong.

Most gratitude practices that you see online and that people talk about in various talks and so forth involve something like writing down or reciting or thinking about five or ten or three or twenty things that you're especially grateful for.

And then really trying to feel into some of those, really try and think deeply about the emotions, the sensations, the perceptions that are associated with those particular people, places, and things on your list.

Most studies actually point to the fact that

that style of gratitude practice is not particularly effective in shifting your neural circuitry, your neurochemistry, or your somatic circuitry, the circuits in your body, because you literally have organs and neural circuits that are connected, the circuits of your brain and body, body, toward

enhanced activation of prefrontal cortex, enhanced activation of these pro-social neural networks that we were talking about earlier.

Turns out that 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.

And this, to me, was very surprising.

There are a number of studies about this now.

One in particular that I think is interesting is called prefrontal activation while listening to a letter of gratitude read aloud by a coworker face-to-face, a NERS study, NIRS.

I'll explain what all this means.

You now know what the prefrontal activation part is.

This is activation of the prefrontal cortex.

The NERS NIRS study, that's just a technical term.

So in this particular experiment, what they did is they had coworkers write a letter of gratitude, of thanks, to another coworker, unbeknownst to the other coworker.

And then they sat down together and then they imaged brain activity as this letter was being read and as the letter was being heard, received.

And it showed very robust effects on these prefrontal networks that pointed to the fact that receiving gratitude is actually much more potent in terms of the positive shifts that it can create than giving gratitude.

For many people who are want to experience the positive effects of gratitude,

it's probably not the most advantageous approach to just sit around waiting, hoping that someone's going to deliver all these letters or words of gratitude.

How is it that you can create that sense of receiving gratitude for yourself and thereby derive the effects of gratitude as outlined in this particular study?

And there we go to the important work of the great Antonio DiMasio, who explored these neural correlates of gratitude to define the areas of the brain that are associated with prosocial behaviors like the prefrontal cortex.

What they did was interesting.

Rather than have people express gratitude, they had the subjects go into the scanner, so their brains are being imaged, and they watched narratives, stories about other people experiencing positive things in their life.

And in this case, these were powerful stories.

These were stories about survivors of genocide.

So that's what they're watching.

The subjects were subjects that were not survivors of genocide.

So they were watching these videotapes of people that had survived genocide

and

had people help them along the way as part of their story of survival, either psychological and or obviously they survived long enough to make the videos, so, or physical survival.

So within these stories, there was

a conveyance of a lot of struggle.

These people talked about the horrible situations they were in, but also

small but highly significant features of their history that had led to their own feelings of gratitude.

So for instance, you know, it says a woman at the, this is literally from the scientific paper,

you know, somebody had been sick for weeks.

So the woman's describing how she'd been sick for weeks.

And then another prisoner who was a doctor finds a particular medicine somehow, it doesn't describe how, and literally saves her life.

So these sorts of stories.

Now, just hearing this in the context of nothing but a scientific paper and discussion, these probably aren't that impactful.

What's really important about this study and is really important for all of us to know is that these stories of other people receiving things that were powerful for them in their life trajectory is embedded in story.

And the human brain especially is so oriented towards story.

We have neural circuits that like to link together past, present, future, have different characters, protagonists and antagonists, from the time we're very young until the time we're very old.

Story is one of the major ways that we organize information in the brain.

There does seem to be storytelling and story listening circuits in the brain.

So, what's important is not simply that these people survived genocide.

That's obviously important and wonderful, but it's not just that they were helped along the way, it's that the description of their help is embedded in a larger story.

So, the human subject in this scientific study is watching these powerful stories, and the neural circuits associated with pro-social behaviors and with gratitude become robustly active when they start to feel some affiliation with the person telling the story.

So, if you think about the earlier study that receiving gratitude is the most powerful way to activate these circuits for gratitude, the subjects in this study, in many ways, are receiving a sense of gratitude,

but through the narrative of one of these other subjects, which I find fascinating.

You know, I would have thought a great gratitude practice would be to sit down and list out all the things you're grateful for.

That just seems so logical to me.

But it turns out that these neural circuits don't work that way, that to really activate these circuits for gratitude and the serotonin and probably the oxytocin system as well and the prefrontal networks, one has to powerfully associate with the idea of receiving help.

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So let's just take a moment and start to think about how we are going to build out the ultimate gratitude practice, mean the most effective gratitude practice for us to do because of all the many positive effects that an effective gratitude practice can have if it's the proper one.

It's very clear that receiving gratitude is powerful, but it's also very clear that waiting around to receive that gratitude is an impractical approach.

What we know for sure is that there has to be a real experience of somebody else's experience, and that the best way to do that is story.

So, in thinking about how to build out an effective gratitude practice, it's very worthwhile, I believe, to to find someone's narrative that's powerful for you.

In many ways, to think about this is it's got to be a story that inspires you because of the, for lack of a better phrase, the beauty of the human spirit or the ability of humans to help other humans.

And I find this remarkable because what this really means is that the circuits for gratitude are such that we can exchange gratitude.

We can actually observe someone else getting help, someone else giving help.

And that observation of our species doing that for one another allows us to experience the feeling of a genuine chemical and neural circuit activation lift, if you will.

Very, very different than simply writing out the things that you're thankful for, right?

And so...

How would you do this?

Well, people digest story in a number of different ways.

People watch movies.

People listen to podcasts, people read books.

There are a tremendous number of stories out there.

It's clear that an effective gratitude practice has to be repeated from time to time.

So what I would not suggest is that we build a protocol in which you're constantly foraging for inspirational stories over and over again.

Rather, the most effective protocol or tool is going to be

either to think into, and you could write this out if you like, but think into when somebody was thankful for something that you did and really start to think about how you felt in receiving that gratitude or,

and or, I should say, imagining or thinking about deeply the emotional experience of somebody else receiving help.

I want to emphasize that the story that you select does not have to have any semblance to your own life experience.

It's just about what happens to move you.

And so the way that one could do this is to find a story that's particularly meaningful for you and then to just take some short notes, bullet point notes.

Just list out, for instance, you know, what the struggle was,

what the help was,

and something about how that impacts you emotionally.

You've written down a few notes about what that story is, just to remind you.

And then you read those out and you think into the richness of that experience, that receiving of gratitude.

Now, this could be done literally for one minute or two minutes or three minutes.

This is not an extensively long practice.

Now, if you have an experience of receiving gratitude or a story that's very potent for you, it becomes a sort of shortcut into the gratitude network, these pro-social networks, meaning the activation of these circuits becomes almost instantaneous.

And that's very different than a lot of other practices out there.

Now, there's another very clear and positive effect of using this narrative or story-based approach to a gratitude practice, and that's what story does for our physiology.

What this means for your gratitude practice is that having a story that you can return to over and over again, even if it's not the entire story, you're just using the shorthand bullet point version of your story, will create a perceptible and real shift in your heartbeat and in your breathing.

And actually, that's been demonstrated over and over now that an effective gratitude practice is one that can rapidly shift not just the activation of these circuits in your brain for pro-social behaviors, but

activation of particular circuits in your heart and in your lungs and the other organs of your body, such that you can get into a reproducible state of gratitude each time.

The key thing is that you want to use the same story, even if it's your own experience or somebody else's, and keep coming back to it over and over again.

That makes it a very potent tool that you can get a tremendous amount of benefit from with even as short as 60 seconds of practice.

Earlier, I talked about how you can't lie to yourself and say, you know, I'm so grateful for this thing that I actually hate.

There's a really interesting study published in Scientific Reports, which is a nature research journal.

The title of it is Neural Responses to Intention and Benefit Appraisal Are Critical in Distinguishing Gratitude and Joy.

It's a somewhat complicated study, so I'm just going to hit on some of the high points.

But basically what they did is they used functional magnetic resonance imaging.

So they could look at brain circuitry circuitry activation with very high precision.

And they had people receiving money in this in the context of this experiment.

And they had some knowledge as to whether or not the money that they were receiving was given to them wholeheartedly or reluctantly.

They looked at whether or not the sense of gratitude scaled with the amount of money received

and or

the intention of the benefactor, whether or not the person giving the money was doing it wholeheartedly or reluctantly.

And what's remarkable is that while the amount of money given was a strong component in whether or not somebody felt that they had received gratitude, which makes sense, you know, the amount of money is some metric of whether or not somebody feels thanked.

The stronger variable, the bigger impact, came from whether or not the person giving the money was giving it with a wholehearted intention and not a reluctant intention.

This tells us many things that extend way beyond gratitude practices, which is that

genuine thanks are what count.

So this constrains our gratitude practices somewhat, but I think in an interesting and important way, you can't tell yourself that an experience was great or that, you know, I got a lot of money and therefore it justified it, even though, you know, I think that they gave it to me reluctantly or my boss hates me, but they gave me a raise.

And that tells us that if we are the giver, that we better be giving wholeheartedly, or we are undermining the sense of gratitude that someone is going to receive from us.

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So we are gradually building up the ultimate gratitude practice based on the variety of scientific literature that's out there.

And I know that many people are probably interested in developing a gratitude practice that has long-lasting, maybe even permanent positive effects on their neural circuitry.

So with that in mind, I want to turn our attention to a really interesting study.

It's entitled Effects of Gratitude Meditation on Neural Network Functional Connectivity and Brain-Heart Coupling.

And to make a long story short and a lot simpler than that title, repeated

gratitude practice changes the way that your brain circuits work.

And it also changes the way in which your heart and your brain interact.

You're familiar with the fact that your brain controls your heart because you can be stressed about something that's perceived with your brain, and then your heart rate will speed up.

You're probably also familiar with the fact that if your heart rate speeds up for some reason or no reason, you're probably probably thinking well, what's making my heart rate speed up?

And that's because the brain and the heart are reciprocally innervated, as we say.

They're talking to one another in both directions.

It's a two-way highway.

This study looked at changes in so-called functional connectivity within the brain and between the brain and the heart in response to gratitude practices.

To make a long story short, what they found is that a repeated gratitude practice could change the resting state, functional connectivity, in emotion and motivation related brain regions.

If I haven't mentioned a strong enough incentive for doing a regular gratitude practice until now, this is definitely the one to pay attention to.

Because what they found was a regular gratitude practice

could shift the functional connectivity of emotion pathways in ways that made anxiety and fear circuits less likely to be active and circuits for feelings of well-being but also motivation to be much more active.

I find that remarkable remarkable and important because a number of people struggle with issues of motivation.

A lot of people who are highly motivated also have issues with anxiety and fear.

And so this study really points to the fact that it's a twofer.

If you have a good gratitude practice and you repeat it regularly, you reduce the fear anxiety circuits.

You

increase the efficacy of the positive emotion feel-good circuits, and the circuits associated with motivation and pursuit are actually enhanced as well.

Thus far, we've mainly talked about the effects of gratitude on neural circuit activation and changes, a little bit about some of the changes that are happening in terms of the body, heart rate, and breathing and so forth.

But we haven't talked a lot yet about the changes in health metrics, in things like inflammation or reductions in inflammation and immunity and things of that sort.

So with that in mind, I'd like to describe the results of a really interesting recent study that was published in the journal Brain Behavior and Immunity.

This was published 2021.

The title of the study is Exploring Neural Mechanisms of the Health Benefits of Gratitude in Women: A Randomized Control Trial.

The first author is Hazlitt.

And basically, what this paper showed was that

women who had a regular gratitude practice of the sort that we've been talking about up until now showed reductions in amygdala activity, the brain area associated with threat detection, an intimate part of the fear network in the brain.

So reductions in amygdala activation and large reductions in the production of something called TNF-alpha, tumor necrosis factor alpha, and IL-6, interleukin-6.

Now, if you happen to have listened to the episode that I did on activating your immune system and immune function, you heard about TNF-alpha and IL-6.

TNF-alpha and IL-6 are inflammatory cytokines.

These are chemicals that exist in your body and that are released from cells when there is damage or kind of a systemic stress, when your system is in duress.

And in the short term, they can be beneficial.

They can call in signals for wound healing and repair of cells, et cetera.

But you don't want TNF-alpha and IL-6 levels to be too high and you don't want those levels to be up for too long.

And so this study is really nice because they showed significant effects in reducing TNF-alpha and IL-6 in response to a gratitude practice.

And another interesting aspect of this study is that the reductions in amygdala activation and the reductions in TNF-alpha and IL-6 were very rapid.

They occurred almost immediately after the gratitude practice was completed.

And even though that study was performed exclusively on female subjects, based on the biology and circuitry of the amygdala and the biology of TNF-alpha and IL-6 performing this inflammatory role in both men and women, I don't see any reason why the results of that study wouldn't pertain to both men and women.

I'd like to just highlight the key elements of the most effective, at least in my knowledge, gratitude practice.

First of all, that practice has to be grounded in a narrative, meaning a story.

You don't have to recite or hear that story every single time you do the gratitude practice, but you have to know what that story was and what the gratitude practice references back to.

Second of all, that story can be one of you

receiving genuine thanks.

And the key elements there are that you are the one receiving the thanks, the gratitude, and that it's being given to you genuinely, wholeheartedly.

Or it can be a story of you observing someone else receiving thanks or expressing thanks.

And that has to be a genuine interaction as well, both.

between the giver and the receiver.

So those are the first three elements.

What I recommend would be after you've established the story that you want to use for your gratitude practice, that you write down three or four simple bullet points that can serve as salient reminders of that story for you.

It will serve as kind of a cue for that story without having to listen to or

talk out the entire story.

I would recommend writing down something about the state that you or the other person were in before they received the gratitude, the state that you were in or that the person was in after they received the gratitude, and any other elements that lend some sort of emotional weight or tone to the story.

This could be three pages of text if you like, or it could just be a couple of bullet points.

I don't think it really matters.

The important thing is that it's embedded in your memory and that it's really associated with this genuine exchange of thanks and the receival of thanks.

I think those are the key elements.

And then it's very simple.

The entire practice involves reading off these bullet points as as a cue to your nervous system of this sense of gratitude.

And then for about one minute, which is a trivial amount of time if you really think about it, or maybe two minutes, or if you're really ambitious, up to five minutes of just really feeling into that genuine experience of having received gratitude or observed someone else receiving gratitude.

So if we just take a step back from this protocol and compare it to what's typically out there in the literature, which is, you know, make a list of all the things you're thankful for, recite in your mind all the things you're thankful for, count your blessings.

I think everybody should be counting their blessings all the time.

There's always something to be thankful for.

But in terms of a scientifically grounded gratitude practice that is also scientifically demonstrated to shift your physiology at the level of your immune system and your neural circuitry, reducing anxiety, increasing motivation, all these wonderful things that so many of us are chasing all the time as goals, I think a gratitude practice reveals itself to be an immensely powerful tool.

Thank you for your time and attention today learning about the science of gratitude.

And last but certainly not least, thank you for your interest in science.

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