How to Use Gratitude to Feel Happier & Improve Your Relationships

(00:59):

Hey, it's your friend Mel, and welcome to the Mel Robbins podcast. It's always such an honor to be together and to spend this time with you. And if you're a new listener or you're here because somebody shared this episode with you, I just wanted to take a moment and personally welcome you to the Mel Robbins podcast family. I'm so glad that you're here. I should probably say that I'm grateful that you're here. I know you don't have a lot of time, but you made the time to listen and I'm especially glad that you chose this episode because you need this and so do I.

(01:45):

So it's not just even the settings in your mind. This has a shift from the top down on you at a biological level. I almost didn't want to talk about gratitude right now. And the reason why is because the world feels so dark and so negative and there's very real problems that you may be facing that people in your life may be facing and to try to say, oh, well just be grateful that seems like crazy naive until you stop and really look at what gratitude is. Gratitude is how you intentionally rewire your mind. And the cool thing about the tools that I'm going to give you is you already know how to do this. We're going to go through these three ways that you can take on gratitude as an intentional act to change the way that you feel and to change the way that your mind works.

 

(02:53):

But you don't need to do all three. I don't want you to do more. I just want to give you some options. Practical, easy to try options. You don't have to buy anything. I also love it that you can take what I'm about to share with you, start exactly where you are and begin to shift your mental state and how you experience your life in real time, even as you're listening to our conversation today or watching it here on YouTube. And what the research is going to show you is that it only takes a slight shift from what you're already doing, slight little mental adjustments to lead to noticeable benefits to your physical health, your mental health to your relationships. The power of gratitude is your way to fight back and to regain control of your mind and of how you feel in your day-to-day life.

 

(03:48):

And that's the first act of defiance. It's the first thing that you need to take control of because you may not even realize how much you've handed your brain and the way that you feel to the world outside you. And gratitude is the first step of how you're going to start to take your power back. And what I mean by that is you can take your power back by training yourself to choose what you want to notice throughout the day rather than mindlessly allowing the world outside of you to just pour a bunch of garbage into your brain. And this reminds me of a conversation I had before on this podcast with one of your favorite guests that we've ever had. She's a regular on the show. Dr. Aditi Nerurkar is a medical doctor, researcher, and world renowned expert in stress and public health. She's a lecturer at Harvard Medical School and was the medical director of Harvard Beth Israel's Deaconess Hospital's integrative medicine program where she practiced and developed this enormous clinical practice in stress management using evidence-based integrative approaches to help her patients feel better. She's also one of the 57 world-renowned experts that I spoke to and that is featured in the Let Them Theory book. I love her research on resetting your stress response, and she spoke on this show about how powerful intentional gratitude journaling can be for your brain. Check this out.

 

Dr. Aditi Nerurkar (05:23):

The reason gratitude is so important from a scientific perspective is because when you are doing a gratitude, daily gratitude practice, it takes 60 seconds. You are rewiring your brain because what you are doing, it's a scientific, again, a fancy scientific name called cognitive reframing. What you focus on grows. So Rick Hanson talks about this idea of when you're going through stress, he's a psychologist. In California, negative experiences become sticky in the brain like Velcro, you hold onto them because it's this feeling of survival and self preservation.

 

(05:56):

And so when you start practicing gratitude on an everyday basis, it's cognitive reframing. What you focus on grows. So you shift your perspective. So even if negative and positive are happening at the same rate, good and bad things are happening in your life. At the same rate, when you are feeling a sense of stress, you are focused primarily on the negative because you are thinking danger, danger, danger, right? Red alert. And so how do you decrease that stickiness of negative experiences in your brain when you're feeling a sense of stress by practicing gratitude? So the negative experiences may happen, but it slides off how does it happen through gratitude. So you write down those things every single day and studies have demonstrated that 30, 60 and 90 days there's improved mood, decreased stress and burnout, better sleep. There are so many benefits to what everyday gratitude practice. It also silences your inner critic because it dials down the volume of the amygdala in the background.

 

Mel Robbins (06:46):

So you're ready for tool number one because I think I've convinced you world get out of my brain.

(07:58):

And so because that negativity and the way it's reprogramming your mind and making you discouraged and stressed out and overwhelmed, it makes you snap at people. It makes you mad at people, it makes you have a bad tone of voice with people. It makes you withdraw. I want to start here because even though I didn't want to do the unsent letter exercise, I sat down anyway and I forced myself to write a letter to my husband Chris. Again, not a love letter, a gratitude letter because it's so easy to be mad at people. Oh, they didn't do the dishes, they didn't do this. Why did they always do that?

 

(08:35):

But the moment I started writing about what Chris has done for me in this season of our life, something softened, it's like all that negativity and the pressure from the outside world was like visit it. And I didn't even give him the letter. What I experienced in writing the letter was more for me to help me recenter myself, to help me tap into what I value to help me be able to be in the moment and not so stressed out and taken it out on him all the time. And so I like to call this the unsent letter. And let me tell you about the research. So these researchers at Indiana University led by psychologists, Dr. Joel Wong, ran this randomized controlled trial with nearly 300 people, and these are 300 people who were in therapy and they split the people into three groups. So one of the groups, they just got therapy.

 

(09:36):

The second group did expressive journaling about stress. So they wrote all about their stress, and the third group wrote one gratitude letter a week. That's it. Okay, so one's in therapy, one is just talking and journaling about stress. The other just wrote one gratitude letter a week. That's it. Guess what happened? The group that wrote the one letter about gratitude a week showed significantly better mental health reductions and depression and anxiety, not just during the four week writing period, but 12 weeks later, this had an afterburner effect and they never even had to send the letters. So here's your first tool. Once a week, I want you to sit down and write a one page letter to someone you're grateful for. You don't even have to send it, just write it. Now, here's how I want you to do it. Be specific and you can answer these questions to help you get started.

 

(10:38):

What did they do? Why did it matter? How did it affect you? I'm going to say it again. What did they do? Why did it matter? How did it affect you? I love this so much because the people in your life, you're feeling just as beaten down and negative as you are, and you're probably because your mind is so programmed by the outside world and the stress that you're feeling, you don't notice all the good things. You just kind of pick up on the things that irritate you. It's so easy, isn't it, to get into this routine with people that you care about where you feel like roommates and you don't appreciate each other. Gratitude and the unsent letter, it's how you find your way back to each other. I've been doing this for a couple of weeks. I got to think about who this week's person is going to be, and I have the perfect person in mind.

 

(11:33):

In fact, she's sitting in this room, our amazing senior producer, Amy. She and I have produced this show together since we started it three years ago. She's probably going to kill me for saying this, but I want to write the unsent letter for Amy. In fact, I can just tell her because she's sitting here and this is the greatest thing about these tools. You can make 'em their own. You could actually write the letter and send it. You could be with somebody and you could share them this episode and in the text say, Hey, I just want you to know I'm grateful for X, Y, and Z, and this episode made me think of you. I think you'll love listening to it. I'm just grateful for our friendship. Here's the thing that I am so grateful about, Amy. She's constantly, and she may not even realize this, she steps in behind the scenes right when everybody needs it most.

 

(12:21):

We have this super collaborative process with all of our producers where they all work together and they're reviewing each other's work. Amy led that. You want to know what else Amy does? Amy texted me when my dad had back surgery. Amy's thinking about those kinds of things. She's also really fun. Amy is throwing a wear your pajamas to our house breakfast party. Who does that? Amy? How does it make me feel like I have a really fun friend that makes life fun and that's always thinking about how to make things better? I mean, she's the definition of a team player, the kind of person you need if you want to have a successful show. And if you want to have fun in life, this is just who she is and I've never forgotten it. It may not always be front of mind, but being able to write it down helps you remember all the ways someone as important as Amy comes through for you.

 

(13:14):

And it also helps you realize how important everyone is. Well, for me, just speaking for me, who works on this show, that's why this so powerful. I mean, you can get so caught up in day-to-day life. You can get so busy, you can get so stressed out and life can feel like such a pressure cooker that you don't even see the beautiful people around you. And I'll tell you something, if you actually take the time to write a letter like that and send it to somebody, do you know how much that's going to help somebody else? That's why this tool is so powerful. So let's go back to the Indiana University study. What happened to the folks in the study is that they shifted their mental framework to talking about changing the settings in our mind from the way we usually think over our lives, just scanning for threats and all the worry and anxiety and all the stuff that's not going wrong, and oh my God, oh my God, to intentionally seeking connection.

 

(14:14):

So here's what I'm going to ask you to do, and this is the way you implement the tool. Just pick one person. You may already have that person in mind right now and write one full page about why you're thankful for them. It doesn't have to be some fancy thing. Any piece of paper will do it. Or maybe you want to type it or maybe you want to text it, or maybe you want to send them this podcast episode, say, I was thinking about you, and then write it in the text and share this episode and tell them how grateful you are for them and why. What did they do? Why does that make you grateful? How did it make you feel? Just one full page on paper. Be specific. Write out the moment what it meant to you. Every detail you have. And remember, this doesn't need to be sent to the person.

 

(15:00):

That's why I call it the unsent letter. Just simply sitting down and writing it shifts something inside you and wires you for connection and makes you more present and appreciate what's right in front of you. And I'm going to leave it up to you to possibly take it one step further and send it. If you want to send it to 'em, it will absolutely brighten their day. But this is more about your perspective and it works wonders. I was absolutely shocked at how it shifted something so quickly inside me. And I was also a little sad, I'll be honest, because it makes you realize how often you're going through that sticky negative state where the world is seeped into you. But this letter and practicing intentional gratitude just removes all that gunk and gets your mind wired for connection and positivity again. And if you do this once a week and you write a letter once a week, oh my gosh, now you're going to have positive momentum.

 

(16:01):

Now there's no negative stickiness. All that cognitive reframing that Dr. Aditi was talking about, you're doing it. I love doing this on Sunday. It's a slower day for me than the rest of the days, but fit it in whenever you can. Maybe it's on a Friday or Saturday for you. Alright, well that brings me to,

(16:55):

It's never because you're physically uncomfortable, right? Isn't it always? It's because your brain, it's racing. It's replaying something that you said worried about something that's coming up. You're beating yourself up for something that you forgot. And there's this pattern for myself, just speaking for myself personally, that I started to notice the nights I was most wired and awake and restless, where the nights where I hadn't slowed down at all during the day, it was like, go, go, go, go, go, go, go. Okay, try to get to sleep. No check-in, no pause, no moment of reflection. Just go until you collapse and then just expect your mind to magically shut off. And lo and behold, that's not how your brain works. So there's something that you can do that may feel a little silly at first, but it works. Keep a notebook by your bed and you want the notebook by your bed because then it's right there.

 

(17:48):

You don't even have to think about it. You've been going, going all day. And what's the notebook for simple? Every night when you climb into bed, even when you're tired, write down three small things from the day that you're grateful for. I'm not talking deep stuff, I'm talking your kids really made you laugh. Today, you found a great parking spot at the grocery store. Chris made me a cup of tea this morning without me even asking. It's just three minutes. But here's what it does. It pulls your focus out of the chaos and puts it on what's actually okay. And what happens when you do that small shift? Well, I'll tell you, it helps your mind settle. It helps your body exhale. And you know what? There's a lot of science that backs this up in a huge way. The first person that ever taught me about this type of practice was Dr. Daniel Amen.

 

(18:44):

Dr. Daniel Amen is a world renowned expert on the brain. He's got brain clinics all over the place, and he himself as a brain doctor and a neuroscientist, has a practice every single night when he climbs into bed of just looking backwards through the day and scanning his day and going, what went well? What went well? And it's a simple example of how to focus your mind on the things that you value, how to get what Dr. Aditi, remember she called it, the sticky negativity, all that stuff that can clinging to your brain on those go go go days. And then that stickiness of negativity keeps you up at night. We're just going to take the cognitive reframing zamboni of gratitude. We're going to wipe all that out by directing our mind to just reflect back on what went well. And this is something that I have done for a very long time, this intentional act of gratitude, and I can just scan the day.

 

(19:44):

I never, ever, ever go to bed without doing this. But how did I begin doing it? I began doing it by tool number two, and this is called the Three Minute Night Journal, and it comes from a study done by Dr. Laura Redwine and the University of California San Diego. And so let me tell you about this study because this is how I have cultivated this mindset in my life. And here's what they wanted to know in this study. Can keeping a gratitude journal truly change your body, not just your mood? Does it change your biologically? I think you are accepting the truth that it can change the settings in your mind, but what about your body? And the folks that they studied in this research were all experiencing early stage heart failure. Now, these are people who had heart muscle dysfunction but no symptoms yet, which makes them very high risk for progressing to serious heart disease.

 

(20:39):

And so here's what they did in the study, 70 participants were assigned to one of two groups, a gratitude journaling group that was asked to write about the things that they were grateful for most days of the week and just really reflect deeply. So you're talking to somebody that could be progressing to serious heart disease or sitting there in their bed every night just like you sit in your bed, they've got their journal and they're not going to write a list of generic items. They're going to reflect deeply on what they're grateful for. So that's one group. Then there was the control group that just got the standard care. They were never told to journal nothing. And at the start and end of an eight week period for both groups, they were tested for three things. They were tested for signs of stress. They were tested for inflammation in the body and heart rate variability.

 

(21:30):

Now, an important fact here is a lower heart rate variability is associated with higher risks of cardiovascular disease, metabolic disorders, and even mental health issues like depression and anxiety. Okay, so lower HRV not a good thing. Higher HRV generally correlates with better overall health and longevity. So you're probably wondering, okay, you got these two groups, they're both in bed at night. One is journaling deeply about gratitude, the other's doing nada. Lemme tell you what happened. The gratitude journaling group showed significant improvements compared to the group that didn't journal at all. They also noticed that the journaling group had better quality sleep, just like I said. Now, this was just 70 people, but the results were the results for a free and low effort tool. I mean, this is amazing, using your mind to create a better you all just from a journaling practice. Now, I want to bring one more angle to this because again, I'm offering tools.

 

(22:31):

I said in the beginning, you don't have to do all three. I want you to make them your own because the best tools are the ones that you actually use. So if keeping the writing journal next to your bed is not going to be your thing, if scanning at the end of the day is not your thing, I want to offer up

Dr. Tara Swart Bieber (23:49):

As soon as I am aware that I'm awake, I snuggle my face against my silk pillowcase and I say, I love my silk pillowcase. And then I say, and I love my side sleeping pillow, and I love my wool mattress topper, and I love, I've created a bit of a haven in my bedroom. I'm grateful for my mattress, I'm grateful for my bedding. Usually that's the minimum. I might do the temperature in the room or how quiet it is. Then I just do some deep breathing in kind of every direction of my chest. It's a barrel. And just have a feel for if there's any areas of tension. Then to actually get out of bed. I start thinking about how much I'm going to save on my cup of tea, and then I go downstairs and I take my probiotic. I have to wait 10 minutes until I have my cup of tea. I do my oil pulling, and then I make my cup of English breakfast tea or matcha a complete ritual and sit and really savor it and enjoy it. And then I pick up my phone and look at my messages.

 

Mel Robbins (25:00):

How does this help you, and how does this help your brain?

Mel Robbins (25:20):

I just love listening to her. I mean, I don't know about you, but as I was listening to her, like, oh, she snuggled in her sheets, her pillow, and oh my God, as I'm thinking, I'm like, this morning it's like, beep, beep, get off. Oh my God, here we go. You can feel the difference. Don't you want a morning like that? You want a morning where your eyes open and you feel the sheets and you are noticing the pillow and you're kind of waking up in your body before that sticky negative stuff takes over. Holy cow, I love that this is available to us. And I love knowing the health benefits that just three minutes. That's all this takes, whether you're writing it in a gratitude journal at night or you're reflecting as I do, and Dr. Amen does, because I did a gratitude journal for a long time and you just train your brain to default to it or you wake up in the morning, I'm going to take on this morning practice.

 

(26:19):

That's what I'm going to do. I'm taking this one with me. I love this and I just want you to pick the one that you're going to do and keep it simple. You can keep it fun. I didn't lose it, my husband today. I took a warm shower and allowed myself to linger there. Another one that happened for me that I'm thinking about is as I woke up an hour later, Chris's office is next to our bedroom and I yelled, Hey, good morning, honey. And he goes, Hey, look out the window. There's a deer. And sure enough, right out there, there was a deer standing right in our yard munching on the hosta that are dying off in the fall. And I just took a moment and I just really watched the deer for a minute. That's a moment of gratitude. Now, here's what I can tell you.

 

(27:01):

If you pick the one that works for you and you do it consistently, your body is going to start to relax. The stress is going to lower. You're going to help yourself heal and reset and feel better, and you deserve that. And whether you prefer to do it in the morning like Dr. Tara or you prefer to do it at night like me and Dr. Amen and Dr. Aditi, who cares, just do whatever works for you. And that brings me to tool number three. Tool number three is a way to use your phone for something great instead of all that doom scrolling and time wasting that you and I can get caught up in. And here's something I know that you have time to do. It's called the gratitude text chain, and it comes from the super cool study that was done by psychologist Shelly Kerr at the School of Applied Psychology at Griffith University in Australia.

 

(27:54):

So let me explain how they did this study. There were 122 people in the study and everybody in the study, they were waiting to get into therapy. So they're in high distress, high need. If you've ever tried to get into therapy, it can be very challenging to get that first appointment. So you're waiting around. And so they take these 122 people that are on edge waiting to get in to get the help that they need. And they were divided into three groups randomly assigned.

 

(28:21):

A third of the people were assigned to a gratitude group. Another group was assigned to a kindness group, and then there was the third group who became the control group.