thankful

Happiness for Cynics podcast – season 1, episode 3

Who knew? Practicing gratitude can actually make you happier. We take a look at some of the latest research into why gratitude makes you happy and how you can bring more gratitude into your life.  

Want more on gratitude? Check out our article on Why and How You Should Practice Gratitude or download our gratitude infographic.

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Transcription

M: You’re listening to the podcast happiness for cynics. I’m Marie Skelton, a writer and change and transformation specialist, and my co-host is Peter Furness. Peter.

P: Hi there. I’m Peter Furness, and I’m a remedial therapist, ex professional dancer and happiness aficionado. Each week we will bring to you the latest news of research in the world of positive psychology, otherwise known as happiness. Now, Marie, you’ve also got a blog on this topic, right?

M: Yes, and you can find me at MarieSkelton.com. And it’s a site about major life changes and transitions and how to cope with them. The site uses a lot of the same research we talk about here on the podcast and has some really practical tips for bringing joy and happiness into your life. You can also find me on Twitter at Marie Skelton. So on to today’s episode, which is all about gratitude.

[Happy intro music]

M: So, Peter, why gratitude?

P: Gratitude make us more in tune to our social groups. Gratitude encourages us to be more happy. It covets more feelings of wanting to engage and be generous and all those lovely feel good fuzzies that you should be getting and if we can focus on gratitude it brings about the other elements that end up making us more happy.

M: For me in particular, I had a pretty bad accident a few years ago, as you know, and I’ve found myself being more grateful for what I do have. Maybe that’s growing up a little bit as well [Laughter], I’m out of my terror teenage years. But being more grateful has allowed me to find a bit more inner peace and is just a far more healthy mental state to be in/

P: it brings your focus in as well. It narrows your focus when you can identify the things that you’re grateful about. You realise how much you have, as opposed to looking at the things that you don’t have. You know, it’s about that, that shift in mentality that makes you go ‘Oh, I’ve got some good stuff going on here.’

M: Absolutely. And let’s be honest, we live in Sydney which, you know, is one of the top 10 most liveable cities in the world. Year after year after year, always better than Melbourne, by the way. [Laughter]

P: I apologise to our Victoria listeners.

M: I don’t [Laugh]

P: I am an ex Melbourne-ite, and I always get a little bridled when someone mentions that, so go Melbourne.

M: You chose Sydney, just saying.

[Laughter]

M: but you know, and we’re both very blessed with the careers that we have and the income that they provide us, our ability to even partake in the careers that we’ve chosen. Then there’s so many things to be grateful for in our lives. I guess the question is, so many other people are in similar situations to us, and yet they’re not feeling grateful and they’re not practicing gratefulness. So maybe we start with what is gratitude.

P: What is gratitude?

M: I think you had an Oxford dictionary quote for us Pete.

P: I do, we’re amazingly in sync here because I’ve been doing some writing and reading on this for myself towards the end of last year. So according to the Oxford Dictionary, gratitude is with the quality of being thankful, readiness to show appreciation for and to return kindness. And I guess something that’s worth pointing out is that polite.. gratitude is often mistaken as a sign of politeness. Sorry, for everyone listening at home.

[Laughter]

P: There’s a cat crawling over Marie’s shoulder.

M: I wish you could see [Laugh] we are sitting in my lounge room which is doubling as our sound studio and the cat has decided to sit on my shoulder.

P: She was doing a very good job there remaining poised as a cat perched on her head.

M: I’m grateful for my cat, I’m grateful for my cat..

OK. So gratitude, thank you for that excellent Oxford Dictionary quote there, Peter. But it’s also worth noting that gratitude can be mistaken as being polite, something that parents teach their kids in order to be better respected in society. And we’re not talking about that.

P: No, we’re talking about conscious gratitude. So actually spending time being grateful for the things that you do have and investing in that this is something that ah, a lot of religious doctrines have done and being someone who’s more interested in Buddhism in the eastern forms of religion it’s something that is very much in the practice of religion and that is identifying the things that you can be grateful for no matter how small that creates a sense of thankfulness, which then leads into kindness and compassion and all those other lovely elements that lead to a happiness state.

M: And I’m not religious by any means, but it is also similar to Christian praying.

P: Yes, definitely.

M: So at night you spend time thanking God for what you have and for people

P: and it’s a focus thing and you’re drawing focus to the things and you’re recognising. And this is what some of the research talks about is actively recognising, either by writing it down or saying it out loud. What am I grateful for? What are the good things in my life? Just by making that switch? Sometimes that can create a good generator of happiness is a good word to use?

M: Yeah, I’ll give it to you.

[Laughter]

I’m just not allowed to say begets apparently.

[Laughter]

M: It’s pompous

P: It’s Stephen Fry!

M: OK, he’s got a lovely English accent so he can get away with it.

All right, so let’s maybe talk about some of the benefits and some of the studies and stuff. So, what are the benefits of being grateful?

P: Well, studies show that practicing gratitude leads to being more honest, patient, having more self-control and that then helps you to achieve goals, achieve the things that you’re aiming to get out of life.

M: I think you mentioned this before. One of the other important things is that particularly for perfectionists there is a tendency to concentrate on learning from mistakes and that’s a really noble and valid thing to do. Don’t get me wrong, but sometimes it can make us focus too much on what goes wrong and not enough on what’s going right in our lives.

P: Definitely, there’s some stuff out there from… [Laugh] I can’t remember the guy’s name [Laughter] I’ll have to come back to that one.

M: It doesn’t exist if you can’t reference it.

[Laughter]

P: Yes, it is great to learn from mistakes. It is great to learn what you’ve done wrong, but it is also brilliant to hone your focus on the things that you do right and that is to… Ahh it was Matthew McConaughey. It was Matthew McConaughey’s speech at ah… I think it was the University of Texas [actually University of Houston]. One of the 13 rules he made for a simple life and he talks about are honing your successes. So breaking down your successes and going this is why it worked. Because in the same way that it’s good to learn from the mistakes. If you know what works, you can implement that again the next time.

M: Yep, so it’s about paying attention to the good things so that we don’t take them for granted. And in that way it makes us more attuned to the sources of pleasure and good people and things in our lives.

P: Yes, which we will then seek out further and use more in the future.

M: Yep. Okay, so give me the proof.

P: [Laugh] It’s always about proof, this is the science in you.

M: [Laugh] This all sounds really nice. Gratitude makes you rich and smart and beautiful and all the rest of it.

P: It does make you beautiful there is a link that gratitude defies age. I’m going to go to my book here [Laugh].

M: Alright well, while you’re looking through your book.

P: Flipping through my book posthumously ‘Kindness slows ageing.’ There we go.

And there’s also study and I’m going to apologise to these wonderful researchers but I’m about to butcher your names. There’s a study by Mϋce Idili, Erdil, Akgϋn and Keskin in 2015 which, from the cultivating gratitude towards the workplace, can help alleviate negative emotions and attitudes at work. So really worth focusing in on this if you’re in HR or if you’re a manager of people. So it found that employees with high levels of gratitude towards work are more likely to excel by going above and beyond in their job tasks. So there’s a real productivity benefit. To cultivating a grateful workplace that will impact your bottom line. That’s stats for me Pete. ROI can’t beat that.

I’ll also talk about U. C Berkeley’s Summer Allen, Ph.D. She writes in ‘The Science of Gratitude’, which is a white paper that she published, that grateful people are happier, more satisfied, less materialistic and have better mental and physical health. And, we’ll talk about that in the context of what we can actually do for gratitude later on.

M: That’s fascinating, isn’t it? There’s so much research coming out now that links mental habits and mental health to physical health.

P: It’s the new what they call the wellness perspective. People are becoming much more conscious about what can they do in their daily life to create lasting change.

M: Yep. Okay, so we’ve got studies, and that’s, that’s just four that we’ve mentioned plus Peter’s scribble, So five.

[Laughter]

M: and look all you have to do is Google gratitude and gratitude studies, gratitude research. There is so much out there that shows that practicing gratefulness has huge repercussions for your life.

P: Definitely, I’m going to say this, although I’m not sure if Marie’s going to let me do it. It’s a compounding interest of influence.

M: [Laughter]

P: Gratitude creates things that have their own energy and it brings about things like kindness and positivity. So it’s a real key to unlocking barriers that we might have that we don’t even know that we’ve got and I’ll reference a personal story here, that when I was a young Arts University student down in Melbourne, the world was so bleak and dark and difficult, dancing my little heart out and putting all my emotion into these dark pieces and it wasn’t until I actually left Australia about 10 years later and I moved to London and I made a conscious decision to stop being so bloody miserable. Life is okay. You know, I was earning a career and so forth in my chosen profession and again coming back to that point, you were saying earlier about the opportunity that we’ve got to pursue careers that we choose and to actually make a living out of them. So I turned my mental focus around and started concentrating more on what I had as opposed to what I didn’t have or what was good as opposed to what was negative about the day and living in London as those of you who have lived in London in the middle of winter, it’s a desperate place to live

M: Yeah, I lived in D. C.

P: It’s hard. Yeah, that lack of sunlight. It’s the constant drizzle. It’s the greyness.

M: It’s the cold! Everything’s cold!

P: It’s hard yakka, so to turn your focus around in that perspective, during that time, I found that to be very empowering and it made me appreciate so much more of what was going on and actually got me more active in my own life and going out there and seeking things and finding things so that when I woke up and didn’t have work, I’d be ‘that’s okay. I’ve got this this, this and this and this to do and I’d be very forthright in going out and going into the city and doing more classes or going and meeting people and seeing what opportunities were out there.

M: So that’s a great Segway into the next question I have for you. How do you practice gratitude? So what did you do to shift your mindset?

P: Well, it was interesting because one of the things that Summer Allen talks about from UC Berkeley is journaling. And for me, this came about in the form of a journal. I managed to get one of my old journals from when I was a student and looked at it at went ‘Oh my God, this is a book of sadness.’ [Laugh]

M: But actually, you were journaling the bad stuff.

P: Yeah, completely.

M: And so when you decided you’re going to shift to your mindset to being more grateful, did you start journaling about that? Or did you just stop the negative journaling?

P: No. I consciously started journaling about positive. So at the end of every entry, I made it commitment to myself that I was going to find one positive thing in the day on that was what I would end on and I found myself doing that generally throughout the entries, there’s no longer was I writing about the negative, the negative washed off. I let it go, whereas it was the positive stuff that I was focusing on.

M: Well, that actually aligns with what the research shows. So the research suggests that translating your thoughts into concrete language can make us more aware of them, and it deepens there emotional impact. So, it also shows you don’t need to journal every day but journaling two or three times per week using that time to reflect, particularly on the smaller, more frequent things. So, someone holding the door open for you or stopping the lift from going when you get into work in the morning.

You know those people who press the buttons?

[Laughter]

M: We can see you!

P: Waiting at the traffic light and continuously hitting that button. Yes I’m sure the computer chip received your information. Pushing it harder won’t make a difference.

M: [Laugh] Yes, anyway, so we ah focus on the good, not the bad. [Laugh look at us focusing on the bad] but people who hold the lift for you or hold a door opened for you, or who offer you some of this snack at lunch or say thank you in an email or those little things they’re worth taking time to notice.

P: Definitely.

M: Writing them down, again only two or three times a week. Is all it actually takes. And then there’s a whole lot of other stuff you can do to take it further. Things like writing an email to a colleague to say thank you or writing a letter to someone. Oh penmanship it’s a lost art.

P: E mail or pen. It doesn’t matter. This is something that Allen also talks about. It’s one of her primary two gratitude interventions, and whilst journaling is one. It’s this identification of people that have helped you to achieve that is the other and writing that down or physically putting that into practise. So saying this person did this for me and acknowledging it. You don’t necessarily have to send the email or the letter, but writing it down helps you to identify it and that again becomes a good feeling vibration that permeates everything else because you start identifying more positive things.

M: Send the bloody letter [Laughter] if you’ve written the letter, send the letter.

P: [Laugh] It comes back to, you know, people sending little gifts. Or you sending something to your client because they’ve been good to you for the year. Having just had Christmas, that’s something that a lot of people may have forgotten. I remember as a kid Mom used to always give the garbage man a six pack. She would, she would wait out there at six o’clock in the morning for these garbage-men to make sure that they got their six pack of beer and she gave one to the Post[-man]. She would give one to the Milk man. It’s those little things that matter.

M: You know what I think that, having lived in the States for eight years, it’s something I noticed over there. Americans have got gratefulness and gratitude down pat. They’ve got Thanksgiving, which is a four day holiday centred around thanking people for what you have and they have a tipping culture, which has a whole raft of other issues that we don’t need to go into. But a culture of saying thanks above and beyond and..

P: identifying it.

M: exactly. So you always send your kids off with a Christmas present for the teachers at the end of the year, we never really did that in Australia at my school, and some kids might have had a different experience. Thanking the garbage-man or the, the people that provides services to you on a regular basis for their time and their commitment it’s such a powerful thing that is really not part of our culture in Australia as much as it was over in the States, and I think that’s what made it stand out to me. But it’s such a beautiful thing that it’s one of those things that is such a selfish thing. Be grateful people because the benefits to you

P: come back

M: absolutely. And the best part about all of this stuff is when your doctor sits you down and says you need to quit smoking. You need to stop drinking. You’ve got to go exercise three times a week, if he says ‘Go be grateful.’ It’s the easiest bloody thing in the world, and it’s cheap as well, it’s pretty much free. If you do it certain ways.

P: You can buy in. [Laughter] Go on Marie, buy in, buy in.

M: I’m buying this one because it’s such a no brainer. It’s simple and easy. It is so easy. You don’t have to journal. You have to write it down. That’s just what the research says really solidifies it for you. But you could just take time every evening before you go to bed to think about the good things that have happened that day and be grateful for them.

P: It’s a wonderful way to get yourself a good night’s sleep as well.

M: Yeah. There you go. All right. So that’s all we had time for today, Peter.

P: Awe, so quick.

M: So if you were listening to us I want to thank you for joining us again today. If you want to hear more, please remember to subscribe. And like this podcast.

P: And there are a range of additional resource is on your site aren’t there Marie.

M: Why, thank you, Peter. Yes, there are. [Laugh] Yeah there are. So there’s a whole lot of articles and links to a lot of the research that we talk about. Again you can visit Marieskelton.com for more articles and research on happiness.

Meet besties Marie and Pete