Try this one thing every day to increase your baseline happiness

0:11Grace Beverley: What is up? I'm Grace Beverley and welcome back to Working Hard, the podcast shared guidebook on how to improve your own life and achieve what you actually dreamed of doing, because life's too short for boring podcasts and bad advice. What is up and welcome back to Working hard. Today's episode is about one small daily practice that has a surprisingly large impact on how you feel, not just emotionally, but also neurologically, because it actually directly changes the way your brain processes information, stress and reward, which is very much affecting your everyday. So we're going to be talking about gratitude, but from a neuroscience perspective, rather than a motivational one, I guess, and not just gratitude as a general thing, because yes, Yes, gratitude as a general thing is important, but it's not a specific daily practice.

0:57Grace Beverley: And this is an actionable specific daily practice. So I first want to be honest about my own stance here, because for a long time, I think I saw gratitude as something that I had, but it wasn't something that I did. I would say I was a grateful person. I had gratitude, but it wasn't a something I exercised, I guess. And I understood the general idea of it, but I didn't really see anything of bit more than that. So I just want to quickly differentiate. There's gratitude as an emotion and as a thing, like you are grateful for things, you have gratitude. And then there is conversely gratitude as, I guess, a practice.

1:32Grace Beverley: So something that you do. And I understood the kind of idea of that. And some people call it like doing your gratitudes. And I could see why people liked that, but I didn't fully appreciate how important it was and the psychological and neurological effects of it until I started learning more about what was actually happening inside the brain when we practice it consistently. And that shift really came after my chat with Dr. Tara Swart because once you understand the mechanisms behind practicing gratitude, you can see why so many people swear by doing that every single day. So today I want to explain what practicing gratitude does neurologically, why it increases happiness over time rather than just in the moment and how to actually integrate it into your routine in a way that works with your brain instead of relying on willpower or inspiration.

2:22Grace Beverley: Before we get into it though please make sure you're following the podcast wherever you listen to it on. This podcast is completely free and you following the podcast on whatever you're listening to it on means that we can keep it that way.

2:36Grace Beverley: Okay so one of the most important things to understand before we even talk about practicing gratitude is that your brain is not designed to make you happy, which seems strange because I feel like as children or even when you think about mental health, you think about the fact that your brain is where like happiness comes from or whatever it might be. Like you think that that is part of its role, but its primary job actually is to keep you alive. And from an evolutionary perspective, that means that it is bias towards detecting threat and anticipating problems and remembering negative experiences more strongly than positive ones.

3:10Grace Beverley: So it's not really trying to keep you happy every day. It is trying to make sure that you are staying alive. And so the issue is that in modern life, the majority of us are rarely dealing with consistent physical danger, but our brains are actually constantly responding as if we are. So you know the jokes that's like, oh, my brain doesn't know the difference between getting an email and being chased by a bear. Like that's literally what it is. So chronic stress, comparison, information overload and uncertainty all activate the same neural systems that evolve to protect us from immediate threats like being chased by a bear.

3:44Grace Beverley: And over time this keeps the nervous system in a heightened state of vigilance because we want to stay alive which actually lowers baseline mood. It increases cortisol levels and it makes it harder for positive experiences to fully register. So even when things are going well, the brain is often too busy scanning for what might actually go wrong next to even enjoy the things that are going well. So practicing gratitude becomes very powerful in this context, not because it makes life objectively better. Again, I'm not just talking about like, oh, be grateful, be grateful. Practicing gratitude every day, like specifically writing down what you are grateful for, because it intervenes in how the brain actually allocates attention.

4:24Grace Beverley: From a neuroscience perspective, gratitude works by engaging multiple brain regions involved in emotional regulation, learning and reward processing. What this means is that when you practice gratitude, you actually activate the prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for conscious attention, perspective taking and regulating emotional responses. At the same time, activity in the amygdala, which is the brain's threat detection center, tends to decrease. This shift matters because the amygdala is what keeps the body in a state of stress readiness. So why you constantly feel on edge or why you constantly feel like you are dealing with all of these different things.

4:57Grace Beverley: And when gratitude redirects attention away from threat and towards evaluation and meaning and like looking at your life and seeing what you are grateful for, then the nervous system actually physically begins to downregulate. Gratitude also stimulates the release of dopamine and serotonin, which are neurotransmitters that play a key role in motivation and mood stability and feelings of wellbeing. then dopamine reinforces the behavior which is why gratitude becomes easier with repetition while serotonin contributes to a more stable emotional baseline rather than short bursts of positivity when i was reading about this i was thinking how much to me this links back to the idea of like lucky girl syndrome if you start noticing the good things in your life you start to do that as a habit but it has to be a habit it's not something that we naturally do all the time we are as we've already talked about we look for threats we look for what we can respond with stress to to keep us safe.

5:49Grace Beverley: You have to practice feeling lucky or feeling grateful or whatever it might be. And there are many different ways to do so. We're going to talk through specifically how I like to do it. But once you start to do that, you start to notice all the other good things, like all the continuous good things that are happening in your life and all the things you should be grateful for. That to me is a really clear example of why this is so effective, because it is just a habit that you build into your everyday. And as part of this, Dr. Tara Swart explained that gratitude also drives neuroplasticity, which means that it physically strengthens the neural pathways associated with noticing positive or supportive experiences, which is obviously kind of what I was just mentioning in terms of the lucky girl syndrome type thing, which is, by the way, I didn't really explain that, but lucky girl syndrome was this TikTok trend, but it was basically when you see yourself as a super lucky person, good things happen to you, like things work out for you.

6:40Grace Beverley: And if you go around being like, I'm so lucky, things just work out for me, you will be surprised at how many things start to feel like they work out for you. The more often those types of pathways are activated, the more automatic they become, which is why gratitude and practicing gratitude kind of changes how you experience your life over time rather than just how you feel in the moment. So I'm just going to quickly insert the clip from Tara here as she kind of explains this best. As a scientist, I'm going to say it's not a luxury,

7:06Dr Tara Swart: it's a necessity. Because if we think about what the opposite of it is, which is, so gratitude is related to oxytocin the bonding hormone and the opposite the seesaw hormone to that is cortisol the stress hormone right so if that is isn't lowered by oxytocin if that's running high most of the time all of the time then basically we are causing widespread dehydration of our system we're causing inflammation of our blood vessels our immune system literally killing off neurons in the brain and inflammation is the underlying root of most if not all metabolic diseases so probably shortening our lives and making us more likely to become unwell and gratitude is such a

7:53Grace Beverley: free easy thing to reduce that and the thing i think i found most interesting in my research all around this was about how practicing gratitude improves resilience not just happiness so practicing gratitude does not remove negative emotions, but it increases your capacity to regulate them. And research shows that people who practice gratitude regularly tend to have stronger connectivity between emotional and cognitive regions of the brain, which means that they are better able to process stress without becoming overwhelmed by it. This is one of the reasons that practicing gratitude consistently is associated with lower levels of anxiety and depression.

8:31Grace Beverley: So basically, rather than making life easier, gratitude actually makes you more capable of handling the different things that might happen in your life because your nervous system is no longer constantly operating in survival mode. I just think that this is so important for our generation in the Western world where so many of us are able to live such convenience with so little friction that we do sometimes struggle with resilience. Like we're not building ourselves up to be more and more resilient. A lot of the time, especially as you progress through life and you maybe get more money or whatever it might be, you're kind of doing the opposite.

9:04Grace Beverley: Like you're taking away friction, you're taking away the ability to deal with harder things and gratitude is well placed to help you actually deal with that. So I want to talk about how to actually do this because you talk about gratitude, you talk about practicing gratitude, it's like okay great I'll think I'm grateful and I'll feel grateful like does that change my life? But there are lots of different ways people I guess practice gratitude and it feels very Los Angeles guys it feels very LA um but it really is effective and I really found it helpful but that being said when I first started practicing gratitude I found it quite hard like I was writing down what I was grateful for over and over again and after like 10 days of doing so it would be very similar things and I'd kind of go around in circles and like then I was kind of just writing it down because I was writing it down rather than really thinking like genuinely what I'm what am I grateful for whereas sometimes like the first time I've done it in a while I really do think like no do you know what I am really grateful for that so I want to talk about how to do it properly and I think that most of us kind of struggle to maintain a gratitude practice I feel so I feel very Hollywood but because maybe we're doing it in a way that does not meaningfully engage our brain and you need to meaningfully engage your brain in order to get the effects of it.

10:21Grace Beverley: So vague or super repetitive statements like being grateful for your health or your family are true, but they don't activate emotional memories strongly enough to drive that lasting neural change we've actually talked about. The brain learns through specificity and through emotional relevance. So when gratitude is abstract or it's performative, like you're just writing down the same things over and over again for the sake of it, it loses its impact and starts to just feel repetitive and it just starts to feel like you're writing lines. So the biggest change for me was about moving away from abstract gratitude and towards moment-based gratitude.

11:00Grace Beverley: And instead of focusing on broad concepts, I started paying attention to specific experiences throughout my day, such as a conversation that felt supportive or a moment I was able to be very calm even though it was a stressful situation or a small win like that I would usually rush past like running for the train and actually getting the train like you're stressed about it for five minutes and then afterwards it's like it never happened or nearly missing a Pilates class that will put you on edge and then you get there and then you don't think about it ever again and actually it's about recognizing all of those different things and the amazing things that make up every day of your life what this does is it activates your active memory and it also solves the problem of like running out of things to be grateful for because when you look closely most days are full of little small moments that matter but it's very easy to just be like every day like I am grateful for my health and I am grateful for my family and I am grateful for my partner or like whatever it might be whereas it has to be cemented in reality and all of those things are real it has to be specific for it to actually make a difference that day.

12:05Grace Beverley: So I feel like to make this work, you really need to be able to anchor your gratitude or your gratitude practice to an existing routine because you're not going to remember to do it or you're not going to create this habit and actually come back to this time and time again and reap the rewards of doing this in your wider life if you don't remember to do it. I would really recommend habit stacking for this. So essentially attach it to something that you're already doing. For example, if you plan your day every morning in your planner, do it at that point. Or if you read a little bit before bed, can you have it stack it on before then?

12:39Grace Beverley: Or if you do something in your lunch break, like can you do your gratitudes at that point? I would really, really recommend repeating the same routine over and over to get it into your routine. I would always say that about any habit ever, but particularly something thing that you know is going to be helpful and important and isn't that hard. So you can definitely do this every day, but realistically, are you going to forget about it in a week? Maybe. So make sure you are habit stacking it into your routine, set reminders on your phone, whatever it might be, and just get into the habit of doing it.

13:11Grace Beverley: So for this episode, I spoke to the person that obviously inspired this whole episode, Dr. Taurus Wart, and I spoke to her about how gratitude influences neuroplasticity and why it is one of the most effective tools we have for improving baseline happiness.

13:23Dr Tara Swart: Everything that you're paying attention to and reiterating is getting wired deeper into your brain. If you focus your gratitude on your internal resources, so your strength, your courage, your vulnerability, your creativity, then the more you repeat that, it really wires you from feeling like you can get over adversity and it sort of helps your brain to become more resilient really. It pushes you away from thinking negatively to actually appreciating the things that you've got to be grateful for. And like I said, that completely changes your mindset. It always makes me feel so much better, even at like some of my most low hoids.

14:00Dr Tara Swart: If you're a bit skeptical or you've never tried gratitude practice before, then I suggest writing 10 things that you're grateful for into your journal or onto a piece of paper every day. So later when you're more practiced, you can just do it in your head. But this discipline of actually writing it out means that you're thinking it, you're using your body to physically write it, and then you read over what you've written. So it's actually impressing upon your brain in several different ways. And the reason I say 10, rather than three or five, which is, you know, seems all doable, is because when you have to push yourself to really think of more than three or five, which tends to be quite easy, after five, I have to kind of look around and think, okay, what else can I come up with?

14:43Dr Tara Swart: And it just makes you realize how much more you've got to be grateful for that you either take for granted or you just don't usually acknowledge.

14:49Grace Beverley: If there is one thing I would take from this episode, it is that happiness is not just about what happens to you, but about what your brain has been trained to notice. And of course, there are so many caveats to that. Lots of people will live lives where a lot more sadness occurs. And I'm not trying to deny that fact. But even when Tara was talking about all of this, and she was talking about some of the really horrible things that she's gone through and the horrible grief she's dealt with. She was talking about how this actually helped to get back to a point of happiness and higher baseline happiness and I think that is incredibly important.

15:25Grace Beverley: Gratitude is not about denying reality, it's not about forcing positivity but it's about widening your field of awareness so your nervous system can finally relax and you can concentrate on good things as well as bad things which you naturally will. If you try one tiny thing from this episode, I would try noticing one real moment each day and allowing yourself to fully register like why it mattered and why you felt grateful for it. As I said, it can be a tiny thing, but I feel like that small practice every day can genuinely shape how your life feels and how you feel about your life, which has a huge impact on your overall happiness.

16:01Grace Beverley: As always, I'll put lots of articles I found interesting and other resources in the newsletter for this week. That's a place where we have like further discussion. And essentially the idea is that you can broaden your horizons and read more interesting things that you might not otherwise see on your newsfeed. We'll also obviously be talking about it over on at Working Hard Pod on Instagram. And thank you so much for listening. I will see you as always next week.

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