1.18 (V) Try This At Home - Building the Skill of Gratitude
[MUSIC] So, here is one I'd like each of you to do. It has robust effects. I started doing it 15 years ago and I'm still doing it. It's very good for nimbus clouds. Here's the assignment: Tonight and every night for the next seven days, before you go to sleep, write down three things that went well today and why they went well. They don't have to be big things. They could be things like you had a terrific Caesar salad at dinner or you saw a beautiful sunset or you listened to a good lecture. So, write down three of those things that went well today and why they went well. That's all there is to it. Now, it turns out that a couple of remarkable things happened with this exercise. First, six months later when you measure people, people who start this exercise have more life satisfaction and markedly less depression. So that's the first part. The second part, very important, it's addictive. One of the problems about psychology as usual, about dieting, about cognitive therapy and the like, is it's just no fun to diet. So, after you lose the first 10 or 15 pounds which anyone can do by following any diet on the best seller list- I did the watermelon diet and I lost 20 pounds in three weeks, I had diarrhea for three weeks,- But, the problem is you stop eating watermelon. You stop doing it because it's no fun. Now, the interesting thing about the three blessings exercise is, it's fun to do. Turns out, it's fun before you go to sleep. Rather than thinking about the argument you had with the dean, or thinking about where you're going to put the rosebush you just got in the mail, it takes you into a nicer sleep, and importantly, it's so addictive that people keep doing it. Unlike dieting, it's continual fun to do. And so, 15 years later, before I go to sleep, I go out of my way to think of the best things that happened to me to crowd out all the little aversive stuff that our toothache of a mind wants us to do. So importantly, positive psychology interventions are addictive and they've been through a gold standard, that is, random assignment, placebo, control testing. So, if I ask you to remember three childhood memories before you go to sleep, that has no affect compared to remembering three things that went well. So, that's one intervention that is easy to do and remarkably effective.