I recently heard an interesting study that examined the lives of two groups of people,
those who had won the lottery and those who had become paralyzed. Now you might assume
that the group of people who broke their backs would be less happy than the group of instant
millionaires, but that's not what the study showed. One year after their supposed "life-changing" event,
both groups expressed the same levels of happiness. We often assume that our happiness or misery is
directly connected to the things outside of us, our job, the people around us, the things we have or
don't have, but that's simply not true. Abundance does not come from things, abundance comes from
a mindset, feeling rich or poor has very little to do with what we actually have, but rather from
how we think about what we have. Fortunately, we can counteract the
scarcity mindset by developing an abundance mindset through simple practice, gratitude.
Even as I wrote this video I felt a little bit of doubt about what I was saying because
I live in relative ease compared to the lives of many. I have food, I have health, I have a home,
I have a family and I can't tell you that I would find happiness even in a concentration camp, but
I can tell you the story of someone who has. Corey ten Boom was a Dutch watchmaker and one
of my heroes, she and her family hid Jews during the holocaust, but eventually they were caught and
her family was arrested and sent to prison and this led to the death of her father. In her book,
The Hiding Place, she tells the incredible story of being transferred to Ravensbrook,
this is an infamous death camp in Germany and as they walked into their barracks, where they
slept on filthy straw crammed onto wooden planks with hundreds of other prisoners,
they discovered that the place was crawling with fleas. Now I personally haven't lived with fleas,
so I had to look up what these are like, but they're basically like mosquitoes that live
in your bed, these are tiny biting insects that chewed on them day and night. Cory's sister Betsy
in that moment decided to follow a verse from the bible which said 'be grateful in all things' and
Betsy encouraged her and Corey to say a prayer of gratitude in that moment even for the fleas.
Now because of their attitude, their experience in the camp was one of service and of doing good,
they lifted up others through group meetings every evening and later they even learned that the fleas
protected them from the guards who wouldn't come into their barracks so because of the fleas they
were able to hold these group meetings where they were lifting each other up and building positivity
even in the middle of a concentration camp. Now eventually Betsy died while in Ravensbrook
and 12 days later Corey was released due to a clerical error and after she was released
Corey continued to do good, housing and protecting the disabled who were afraid
of extermination during this time and after the war she continued to teach love and forgiveness
and she even found a way to forgive two of the guards at Ravensbrook, one of whom had been
especially cruel to her sister Betsy. So you really should read the whole book, it's a pretty incredible
story. Now Brené Brown said "Without exception, every person I interviewed who described living a joyful
life or who described themselves as joyful, actively practiced gratitude and attributed
their joyfulness to their gratitude practice. And both joy and gratitude were described as spiritual
practices that were bound to a belief in human interconnectedness and a power greater than us."
In my opinion gratitude is one of the most powerful ways to shift into a state of peace
and connect with your inner joy and the research backs this up, the active practice of gratitude is
pretty easy to do but it actually changes brain chemistry and structure. In this video I'm going
to teach you how gratitude changes the brain and some really simple ways to practice gratitude
to be happier and healthier. Now I'm grateful for the sponsor of this video Better Help, they make it
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So first, let's talk about how gratitude makes you happier. Research shows that people who practice
gratitude feel happier and more positive, more awake and aware and more self-satisfied.
gratitude has been shown to help improve mood and combat anxiety and depression. Research shows that
gratitude releases serotonin and dopamine, these are the happiness and reward chemicals in your
brain. When we practice gratitude, we're essentially strengthening the neural pathways of contentment
and happiness and these can build lasting characteristics, lasting structures in your brain.
Gratitude helps with anxiety by interrupting the cycle of constantly scanning for dangers.
When we're in fear or scarcity mode our brain turns on that fight-flight-freeze response,
but when we think of gratitude, research shows that the hippocampus and the amygdala are activated,
these parts of the brain can aid in emotional regulation and they can help turn on that
feeling of safety and contentment and calm, it's that that feeling of abundance. Basically,
gratitude practice is a way to regulate the autonomic nervous system. Gratitude can turn
on that parasympathetic response and it can reduce stress hormones like cortisol. When we regulate the
nervous system, that has a big impact on reducing the symptoms of depression and anxiety. Thanks to
modern imaging, researchers can see other parts of the brain that get activated by gratitude and this
includes the prefrontal cortex which is partially responsible for managing negative emotions like
guilt, shame, and violence. Gratitude can help you be more emotionally stable and resilient. In
general, more grateful people are happier, more satisfied with their lives, less materialistic,
and less likely to suffer from burnout. Gratitude practice is also good for your physical health,
it's connected to better immune health, less aches and pains, better blood pressure, and heart health.
Gratitude's also a painkiller. A 2003 study showed that when a patients in pain thought of gratitude,
they experienced less pain, and a deeper dig into the outcomes found that by regulating the level of
dopamine, gratitude fills us with more vitality and that helps reduce those feelings of pain. Gratitude
can also help you sleep better. Gratitude activates the hypothalamus, which helps regulate sleep
and the simple practice of gratitude can help people get deeper and more restful sleep.
Gratitude also improves relationships. Grateful people have better communication,
more empathy, stronger interpersonal relationships, and they're more likeable. Gratitude practice fires
up the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, this is basically the area of your brain associated with
pure altruism. Your brain craves the experience of giving and people who practice gratitude tend to
feel more and more joy in doing good for others, so basically gratitude makes people nicer and
makes them feel even better about being nicer and studies of couples found that those who expressed
more thanks to each other had more trust, more loyalty, and longer lasting happy relationships.
There is so much good research on the benefits of gratitude practice that I could just go on and on,
it's one of the exercises that I recommend the most and it's one that consistently comes back
with good results. So, how do you do it? It's not that hard and it doesn't take that much time.
One of the easiest ways to practice gratitude is to keep a gratitude journal, so you just choose a
regular time each day to write down a couple of things you're grateful for, you could even use
social media as a way to express gratitude. So I'm going to encourage you to try this little
experiment right now. For seven days, write down or post what you're grateful for on social media, and
then see how that changes how you feel. There's some other ways too, you could write a letter of
gratitude to someone, you could tell a co-worker or a friend something you appreciate about them,
another thing you can do is just sit in a quiet place and think about when something went well,
bring to mind how that felt. If you practice that feeling every day for a week, that helps strengthen
that feeling of gratitude and contentment and that's going to help you foster an abundant
mindset in the long run. Anything you can do to reinforce that feeling of gratitude is helpful,
so that includes you know writing it down, talking about it, reliving it, or meditating
on it. A regular practice of gratitude can change your brain structure by thickening neural pathways.
Hebb's law says that neurons that fire together wire together. So that means that the more you
practice gratitude, the better you get at it and your brain gets better and better at looking for
more of what makes you happy and then it gets easier to feel grateful and to feel happy. So for
example if you consciously notice how beautiful the sky is, you'll be more likely to notice
the beautiful sky again and feel gratitude again, so even though the sky is always there
the focus on gratitude is like a signal to your brain to notice it. You really can change your
brain. Small and simple changes like this add up over time to rewire your brain and make you
healthier and happier. So choose one way today that you're going to start practicing gratitude
and tell me about it in the comments. What are you going to do to start feeling happier today?
I hope you found this video helpful. Thank you for watching. Just wanted to let you know that
this week, the week of Thanksgiving, we're going to be offering some huge black Friday sales
on my six online courses. So if you aren't signed up for my mailing list, hop on over
to therapynutshell.com, fill out that contact form and you'll see an email in your inbox this
week with a bunch of coupons for big savings on my online mental health courses. Again, thank you
for watching and take care. River come sit in my lap. River, what's something you're grateful for?
(River) Candy. (Emma) Anything else you're grateful for? (River) Our tents. (Emma) Our tents?(River) Uh-huh.
(Emma) I like tents too! Can you tell me anything you're grateful for? (Aliya) I'm grateful for my family.
(Emma) Oh we're grateful for you. What else? (Aliya) and I'm grateful for my friends. (Emma) Yeah, you have some
good friends huh. Gracie what are you grateful for? tissues, and beads?
I'm grateful for you too.