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Here's a surprisingly effective, easy-to-do longevity and mental health practice the won't cost a cent: Wisdom Wednesdays · Hardiness with Dr Paul Taylor

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  Speaker 1: Hey, everybody, welcome to another edition of Wisdom Wednesdays. Now,
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  Speaker 1: if I asked you to name some of the things
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  Speaker 1: that are associated with living a longer and healthier life,
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  Speaker 1: you'd probably rattle off a few usual suspects exercise, good nutrition, sleep,
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  Speaker 1: maintaining your muscle, not smoking, keeping your blood pressure under control,
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  Speaker 1: and staying socially connected. And you'd be right about all
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  Speaker 1: of those things. But today I want to talk about
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  Speaker 1: something that costs absolutely nothing, requires no horrible, no supplements,
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  Speaker 1: not a cold plan, it's not red light therapy, and
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  Speaker 1: you don't even have to buy any powders. Right, and
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  Speaker 1: this is gratitude. Now, before you switch off and think
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  Speaker 1: I've gone all woo woo, and just hang in there,
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  Speaker 1: because there's some surprisingly interesting science behind gratitude and how
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  Speaker 1: it may influence sleep, inflammation or anomic nervous system health behaviors,
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  Speaker 1: and perhaps even longevity itself. And if you have ever
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  Speaker 1: seen me do a corporate talk, you'll know I'm a
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  Speaker 1: massive fan of gratitude. I've done a gratitude ritual for
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  Speaker 1: thirty years since I met a beggar in India who
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  Speaker 1: had both leprosy and elephantiitis. But Anyway, let's get back
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  Speaker 1: to the story of the science around gratitude. So what
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  Speaker 1: do we actually mean now. Gratitude is not walking around
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  Speaker 1: pretending everything in your life is rosy and wonderful, because
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  Speaker 1: clearly that's not always the case. He can be worried
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  Speaker 1: about your health, for example, and still be grateful for
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  Speaker 1: your family. You can have problems at work and appreciate
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  Speaker 1: the friend who rang to check on you or went
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  Speaker 1: out with you for a coffee. You can be grieving
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  Speaker 1: about something you've lost and still notice something beautiful happening
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  Speaker 1: around you. Now they aren't mutually exclusive events. And that's
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  Speaker 1: an important point because gratitude is sometimes presented as though
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  Speaker 1: you have to override or replace the difficult stuff with
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  Speaker 1: positive thinking, and you don't. Gratitude isn't the denial of
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  Speaker 1: a difficulty. It's about where you deliberately place some of
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  Speaker 1: your attention alongside that difficulty. You've heard me talk about
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  Speaker 1: attention before. If you listen to Cardio moojium mundays, she's
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  Speaker 1: always talking about attention and it is an extraordinarily valuable
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  Speaker 1: biological resource because your brain and actually commits sales to
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  Speaker 1: what you pay attention to. It is constantly filtering a
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  Speaker 1: huge amount of information. It's deciding on what deserves your
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  Speaker 1: attention and what can safely be ignored. Now, if you
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  Speaker 1: repeatedly train your attention towards threat, irritation, what's missing in
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  Speaker 1: your life, what someone did wrong, what's going wrong with
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  Speaker 1: your body, what's happening, the bad shit that's happening in
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  Speaker 1: the new and everything that might go wrong tomorrow, you
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  Speaker 1: become extremely good at finding those things. It will probably
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  Speaker 1: increase your anxiety. Now. Gratitude trains the attentional system in
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  Speaker 1: another direction, not away from reality, but towards a broader
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  Speaker 1: version of reality. Carli often talks about widening the lens,
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  Speaker 1: and this has actually been scientifically tested. So one of
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  Speaker 1: the classic studies that I talk about a reference in
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  Speaker 1: my talks was conducted by psychologists Robert Emons and Michael
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  Speaker 1: McCulloch back in two thousand and three, where people were
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  Speaker 1: randomly allocated to different writing exercises. One group wrote about
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  Speaker 1: things they were grateful for, and another group wrote about
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  Speaker 1: hassles and irritations, and then there was a third group
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  Speaker 1: that wrote about fairly neutral events. In other words, they
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  Speaker 1: were living in the same world dealing with the same
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  Speaker 1: sort of everyday problems, but they were asked to direct
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  Speaker 1: their attention towards different things. Now, after ten weeks, the
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  Speaker 1: people who were practicing gratitude reported greater optimism, They felt
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  Speaker 1: better about their lives. But what I found particularly interesting
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  Speaker 1: is they also reported exercising more and experiencing fewer physical symptoms.
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  Speaker 1: And in one of these studies, there were also differences
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  Speaker 1: in the amount of times they went to see a
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  Speaker 1: doctor or other healthcare professionals. Now, obviously I don't want
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  Speaker 1: you to interpret this is right down three things you're
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  Speaker 1: grateful for and you'll never need a doctor a game,
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  Speaker 1: because that's not what we're talking about here. But it
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  Speaker 1: does raise an interesting possibility, which is that our mental
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  Speaker 1: habits influence our behavior, and our behavior then influences our biology.
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  Speaker 1: And really, for me, what gratitude is doing it is
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  Speaker 1: priming your brain to look for positivity. And the English
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  Speaker 1: psychologist Richard Wiseman has done a heaper research on priming
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  Speaker 1: your brain. But if we get to this research, and
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  Speaker 1: what we see is that perhaps somebody who's more grateful
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  Speaker 1: sleeps a little better, maybe they're more likely to exercise,
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  Speaker 1: they're more likely to stay connected to other people or
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  Speaker 1: slightly better looking after themselves. And that's what the research
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  Speaker 1: is saying. Now, none of those differences aren't particularly dramatic
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  Speaker 1: on their own, but when you start accumulating them over
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  Speaker 1: ten twenty thirty years, they really become meaningful. It's the
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  Speaker 1: stuff that you do consistently. Then that's all about the heart.
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  Speaker 1: So researchers have also looked at gratitude and people with
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  Speaker 1: heart failure, and in one study, people who were naturally
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  Speaker 1: reported greater levels of gratitude also reported better sleep, less fatigue,
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  Speaker 1: and greater confidence in looking after their health. They also
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  Speaker 1: tended to have lower inflammatory markers. So again this is
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  Speaker 1: about attitude influencing your behavior, which influences your biology association.
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  Speaker 1: So we can't one hundred percent say that gratitude caused
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  Speaker 1: those differences, but research is then when a step further
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  Speaker 1: and conducted a small randomized pilot study in which patients
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  Speaker 1: with heart failure kept gratitude journals for eight weeks and
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  Speaker 1: compared with usual care in the control group. The gratitude group,
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  Speaker 1: so changes in a combination of inflammatory by markers and
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  Speaker 1: improvements in heart rate variability, which you have heard me
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  Speaker 1: talk about. It's interesting because it gives us some information
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  Speaker 1: about the autonomic nervous system regulation, essentially how flexibly your
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  Speaker 1: nervous system can shift between activation and recovery. Again, this
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  Speaker 1: is a small pilot trial, so we're not saying that
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  Speaker 1: gratitude is a replacement for cardiologists. But an intervention that
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  Speaker 1: involves little more in a pen and a notebook, I
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  Speaker 1: think it's certainly worth our attention. So now let's talk
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  Speaker 1: about gratitude and sleep, because this one's really really practical.
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  Speaker 1: A study involved in more than four hundred adults looked
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  Speaker 1: at gratitude and sleep, and people who reported higher levels
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  Speaker 1: of gratitude tended to have better sleep quality, They fell
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  Speaker 1: asleep more easily, they slept for longer, and experienced less
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  Speaker 1: dysfunction during the day. Now, what was particularly interesting was
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  Speaker 1: that the relationships seem to be partly explained by what
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  Speaker 1: people were thinking about before they went to sleep. And
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  Speaker 1: that makes intuitive sense because when you think about the
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  Speaker 1: average person's brand at around eleven o'clock at night, it'll
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  Speaker 1: be what did I do in that meeting today? I fuck,
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  Speaker 1: I forgot to do this stuff. Oh shit, I've got
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  Speaker 1: to do this tomorrow. Worried about their kids, this and
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  Speaker 1: sorts of things, and then suddenly it's after midnight, and
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  Speaker 1: then you're starting to stress because you're not you're going
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  Speaker 1: to have a bad sleep, and that makes it even
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  Speaker 1: harder to get to sleep. And this is an interesting
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  Speaker 1: one to sleep one because I've got a little ritual
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  Speaker 1: and I have maybe talked before about combat survival and
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  Speaker 1: Resistance to interrogation training in the UK for ten days
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  Speaker 1: when we were out in the middle of winter with
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  Speaker 1: no sleeping bags and just we're trying to get to
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  Speaker 1: sleep and it was freezing, freezing cold on a hard
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  Speaker 1: cold grind, and I actually forced myself to remember that,
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  Speaker 1: and every night when I lie down in bed, I
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  Speaker 1: remember combat survival training. This is nearly thirty years later,
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  Speaker 1: and I actually say to myself, Hi, frigging awesome is
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  Speaker 1: a mattress and a pillow. And I actually lie down
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  Speaker 1: with a big shit eating grin on my face because
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  Speaker 1: I've got a mattress and a pillow and a dinner.
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  Speaker 1: For those non Australians, that's a quilt. So doing something
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  Speaker 1: like that gives your brain something else to focus its
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  Speaker 1: attention on, and again it's a positive thing. So you
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  Speaker 1: could actually just go through what went well today, Who
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  Speaker 1: helped me today? What did I enjoy today? And what
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  Speaker 1: did I have nigh that at one point in my
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  Speaker 1: life I desperately wanted. So actually, that positive psychological priming
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  Speaker 1: just before you're going to sleep, I think is hugely,
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  Speaker 1: hugely important. Now let's jump to the longevity part of
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  Speaker 1: the story. So in twenty twenty four, researchers published a
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  Speaker 1: study in jama Psychiatry using data from older women in
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  Speaker 1: the big famous Nurses Health Study, which has been going
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  Speaker 1: on for decades, and they find that the women with
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  Speaker 1: the highest levels of gratitude had around a nine percent
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  Speaker 1: lower risk of dying from any cause during the follow
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  Speaker 1: up period compared with women who reported the lowest levels
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  Speaker 1: of gratitude. And the researchers adjusted for a long list
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  Speaker 1: of factors including physical health, lifestyle, social participation, and even
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  Speaker 1: their mental health. Now, this is really important that and
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  Speaker 1: it doesn't prove that gratitude makes you live longer. It's
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  Speaker 1: an observational study, and even though they controlled for it,
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  Speaker 1: there may be other characteristics of grateful people that contribute
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  Speaker 1: to the difference. But when you put that study alongside
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  Speaker 1: experimental research on well being, health, behavior, sleep, inflammation, and
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  Speaker 1: autonomic function. You start to get a really interesting picture.
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  Speaker 1: And it's not that gratitude is some kind of magic
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  Speaker 1: longevity intervention, because it isn't. But gratitude may influence a
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  Speaker 1: collection of pathways that matter for health, and it may
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  Speaker 1: be a lot more important than a lot of expensive
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  Speaker 1: supplements that are out there. And this is how your
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  Speaker 1: biology usually works, right. We are these complex pathways, and
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  Speaker 1: one affects others within those pathways, for example, the sleep,
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  Speaker 1: on inflammation, on what you eat the next day, on
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  Speaker 1: how much you're going to exercise, all of those things.
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  Speaker 1: There isn't one giant lever that determines whether we age well.
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  Speaker 1: It's hundreds of small levers being pulled over and over
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  Speaker 1: again across decades in similar directions. So what do we
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  Speaker 1: actually do with this research? So I'll give you three
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  Speaker 1: very simple options, and you certainly don't need to do
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  Speaker 1: all three, and you can make your own now. So
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  Speaker 1: the first is the classic one. I sort of referenced
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  Speaker 1: that a bit earlier. On at the end of the day,
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  Speaker 1: or ideally when you're you're in bed, just grab a journal,
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  Speaker 1: write down three things you genuinely appreciated that day, but
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  Speaker 1: try to make them specific right, rather than writing I'm
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  Speaker 1: grateful for my family, which is so broad your brain
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  Speaker 1: doesn't really get activated by it, and write something like
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  Speaker 1: I'm grateful that my son or daughter made me laugh
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  Speaker 1: at dinner, or I'm grateful for that first coffee in
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  Speaker 1: the morning, I'm grateful that I was actually able to
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  Speaker 1: work out today, something like that. And the specificity matters
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  Speaker 1: because it gets you to revisit the experience rather than
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  Speaker 1: just naming a category. So your second option is actually
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  Speaker 1: to tell someone think of somebody who has made your
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  Speaker 1: life better and actually let them know, you know, send
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  Speaker 1: them a message, make a phone call, and tell your partner,
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  Speaker 1: your kid, an old teacher, a coach, or a mayt
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  Speaker 1: that you really appreciate them. We're often incredibly generous with
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  Speaker 1: compliments about people when they're not in the room, and
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  Speaker 1: strangely reluctant to say the same thing directly to them.
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  Speaker 1: And there's been research studies in this with people write
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  Speaker 1: a letter of gratitude to someone and it has a
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  Speaker 1: big impact on the person writing the letter and the
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  Speaker 1: person receiving it. So don't wait on till somebody's funeral
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  Speaker 1: to give a speech. Whenever they're cocked it give them
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  Speaker 1: some of it nigh. The third option is to use
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  Speaker 1: gratitude when your brain starts chewing on itself at night.
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  Speaker 1: If you notice your mind heading into rumination, don't get
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  Speaker 1: into the wrestling match. Acknowledge that the worry is there,
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  Speaker 1: and then deliberately ask yourself, so, what was good today?
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  Speaker 1: What am I glad for in my life? What am
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  Speaker 1: I taking for granted right now? Well? I have now
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  Speaker 1: that I used to dream of having. Now. This is
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  Speaker 1: not toxic positivity. This is attentional flexibility. This other stuff
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  Speaker 1: is still there, but it's what you focus your attention on.
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  Speaker 1: You're teaching your brain that, yes, this problem exists, and
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  Speaker 1: this good stuff also exists as well. And maybe that's
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  Speaker 1: the bigger lesson from all of this gratitude research. Health
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  Speaker 1: isn't just about what we eat, how many clumulers we run,
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  Speaker 1: how much heavy shit that we've lifted, and how much
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  Speaker 1: our veal to max has improved. We are biological, psychological,
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  Speaker 1: and social creatures, biopsychosocial creatures, and our relationships matter. So
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  Speaker 1: does our sense of purpose, Our behaviors matter, and where
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  Speaker 1: we repeatedly place our attention matters as well. And it
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  Speaker 1: turns out that gratitude maybe one very simple way of
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  Speaker 1: reminding ourselves of something that modern life makes surprisingly easy
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  Speaker 1: to forget, which is that there's often far more going
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  Speaker 1: right in our lives than our threat focused brain and
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  Speaker 1: all of the negative media gives us credit for. I
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  Speaker 1: want to end this with something I normally talk about
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  Speaker 1: in my talks when I reference gratitude. And you know,
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  Speaker 1: scientists have estimated that our chances of ever having been
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  Speaker 1: born as us are between one and three hundred and
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  Speaker 1: one in four hundred trillion to one. You know, think
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  Speaker 1: about all of your ancestral history going back millions of years.
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  Speaker 1: If any one of your ancestors right back to Homo
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  Speaker 1: habilist two point four million years ago, with any one
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  Speaker 1: of those had not escaped being eaten by a lion,
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  Speaker 1: you would not be sitting here right now. We have
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  Speaker 1: won the world's greatest ever lottery, right And if you're
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  Speaker 1: over the age of twenty seven, you've already exceeded the
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  Speaker 1: lifespan of the average human being in sixteen hundreds England.
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  Speaker 1: And the last thing I'll leave you with is that
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  Speaker 1: if you have a roof over your head, fresh clean
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  Speaker 1: running water, electricity, food security, safety, and a job. You've
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  Speaker 1: got it better than probably ninety nine percent of Homo
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  Speaker 1: sapiens that ever walk this planet. How about we start
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  Speaker 1: and end of the day thinking about that. That's it
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  Speaker 1: for this week, folks, Catch you next time.