#0001 — Gratitude
How to re-wire your brain.
🛑 Problem:
Our brains evolved with a bias for the negative.
Imagine two pre-historic humans who hear an animal roar from the inside of a cave. One human is fearful and doesn’t want to enter the cave. The other human is curious and confidently wanders into the cave. This brave human is eaten by a tiger, and the fearful human goes on to live a healthy life and reproduce.
This negativity bias was valuable 50,000 years ago, but isn’t always helpful in 2021. It can harm our health, our relationships, and even cost us money.
✅ Solution:
We can do mental health exercises to reduce this negativity bias, and even create a positivity bias.
Practicing gratitude is the exercise we will use for this because:
It’s easy
It’s proven to make us healthier, foster deeper relationships, and make us more likely to achieve our goals.
🔎 How it works:
Practicing gratitude improves our brain’s ability to pattern match for seeing the good in life. It makes us better at spotting opportunities.
The Mindfulness Awareness Research Center of UCLA states that gratitude changes the neural structures in the brain, in a way that helps us feel happier and more content.
✍️ Try now:
Write down 3 good things that happened today. This practice is more effective if you use a pen and paper or CBT app to actually write these things down.
The act of scanning your day for good things/events will eventually train your brain to see things differently.
📈 Some stats:
Keeping a gratitude journal for two weeks produced sustained reductions in stress (28 percent) and depression (16 percent) in health-care practitioners. — UC Davis Health
Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania demonstrated that study participants who practiced gratitude were 50% more productive than those who did not. — Wharton
Researchers at UC Berkeley demonstrated that there was correlation between how grateful a couple was, and how likely they were to still be in their relationships 9 months later. — Berkley
Gratitude has also been shown to raise people’s optimism and self-esteem. Study participants who referred to themselves as "very happy" ended up with incomes 10% higher than the average of people in the study. — Wharton
📖 Read more
How gratitude changes your brain: https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/how_gratitude_changes_you_and_your_brain
Giving thanks can make you happier: https://www.health.harvard.edu/healthbeat/giving-thanks-can-make-you-happier
Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negativity_bias
📱 Practice more
Download Bold CBT. It’s an iOS app that I made which makes it easier to do mental health exercises like this one.
🙏 Thank you
I’m grateful that you read this far! Please send me an email to tell me what you think. Your feedback makes the newsletter better for everyone.
john@boldCBT.com
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