Dr. Robert A. Emmons, PhD: "The Science of Gratitude" (Ep 6 of the Fresh Start Podcast)

[Music] dr evans i am very grateful to be talking to you right now thank you so much rabbi it's great to be with you um you've done a lot of work on the topic of gratitude and uh i wanted to ask you about gratitude because gratitude is something as a rabbi it's a topic that we talk about all the time and um i want to tell you a problem that i have maybe you can help me with okay look forward to it sometimes we find that there are people who come from our tradition specifically who are raised in our faith community and because of experiences they had they're turned off like they have a visceral reaction to anything that has any type of theological um anything that smells of any type of you know theology and yet i know that gratitude is so healing for them and so important for them i'm wondering if you can help me sort of find a secular backdoor from the world of psychology to talk to someone who needs that gratitude so desperately but they're sort of temporarily locked off from getting to it from an overtly spiritual path yes that is a great question and i think that happens all the time i think that happens in many traditions um you know i think there is um one of the reasons why gratitude has had such an appeal to people not only because it's it's something which you know i think is very effective and very valuable for living you know a good life a full life a life of flourishing uh well-being thriving whatever you want to call it you know all of those things it's certainly a key to health and to wholeness and to to wellness in the fullness but also i think it serves a very deep spiritual need for people whether they think of themselves as spiritual or not whether they think of themselves as conventionally religious or not i think gratitude says something very deep about who we are as human beings and what we need just the the need to understand the origins of of kindness of goodness of benevolence where does it all come from and one can look at that either from the through the lens of you know theology and world religions and uh they've said some amazing things uh over the centuries of course about the power of of gratefulness and thankfulness uh but one can also approach that from surely uh or sheerly from the perspective of you know uh other fields humanities the sciences my own field psychology sociology so it's it's got a cross-discipline appeal to it and there's insights to be gained from all these different perspectives so doctor tell me a little bit because sometimes you know yeah a mentor of mine once told me that sometimes people are more comfortable listening to the person in the white coat than the person in the black coat so i wear the black coat the long black coat tell me give me numbers give me studies convince me that gratitude isn't just something that religious people made up convince me that this is that this has grounding in in today's science yeah i mean the science is really amazing since uh really 10 years ago there's been more research more studies on the science of gratitude than the previous 50 years now of course uh science and psychology especially as a social science has a very uh short history you know compared to theological understandings of gratitude so what we've learned we've learned in the in the really recent past and we know so much now about gratitude there's really a mountain of research showing that gratitude matters that it works and so no studies have found that gratitude is harmful uh which is also you know i think important to show there's no bad side effects so gratitude works on many different levels you really cannot overplay the hand of gratitude and we can quantify all of these things these are quantifiable measurable these are sustainable effects and we're learning more every day in every way that gratitude matters you know you mentioned that you can never go wrong you know we have there's a jewish expression it's like chicken soup it can't hurt you give them some chicken soup it can't hurt right but there are people who will push back and say that it can hurt what they what they say is well really what you're asking me to do is to have a candy-coated version of reality and to fool myself really to be deluded and to be out of touch from reality which is useless or maybe even harmful or dangerous and there's definitely an impression especially for people who've gone through a lot of pain in life yes that that gratitude is is is foolish or you know ignorant or uh or or even dangerous so how do you delay those fears i mean that there are a lot of beliefs and preconceptions that people have about gratitude sometimes you know there's some uh validity to it uh but some a lot of times though uh we can point to ways in which we can you know challenge some assumptions so and and i know i've been doing this for a while i've been swimming in the waters of gratitude for quite some time now and i get testimonies from people people call me they write to me they email me they send me letters from prison from hospitals uh they've been through all kinds of trauma in their lives suffering adversity afflictions addictions i mean you name it and they you know what they say is that they were at the end of their rope right they were in a hole that was so deep they had to reach up just to touch the bottom and they found healing and gratitude uh somehow someone you know shined some light on their situation there was a glimpse of goodness of kindness of benevolence someone believed in them and that started them on the road to healing that gave them a reason to go on that that that made gratitude very real and very concrete you know gratitude on the ground it's quite different from just a theoretical very you know abstract ethereal concept of gratitude that isn't it great to be grateful uh and to you know look on the bright side and have graduate as an orientation sometimes though we have to experience it very uh concretely on the ground in the in the uh in the face of goodness overcoming the darkness right and so gratitude is not just something that shines a light on the goodness but sometimes we see it in the in the depths and in the darkness and in the you know suffering of life as well and i got lots of testimony from people who say that sort of thing so i know that's a real phenomena you know it's interesting you're saying that because you know people tend to think about you're grateful for something good overtly good and what it sounds like you're saying is well gratitude doesn't mean you have to wait for something that's overtly good um i mean from our tradition we know this we we have a tradition that just as one is obligated to bless god for that which is overtly good one has to bless god and express thanks even when something happens that overtly uh on the face of it appears to be very painful because it's all from god it sounds like you're saying something similar well and that's the big question right i mean uh given the inevitability and unavoidability of stress and suffering and trials and tribulations the question becomes you know what do we make of those right and you deal with this on on a daily basis right on you know real life on the ground is and the question that i ask as a researcher is you know can anything good come out of something bad what good think can come out of you know divorce or separation or death or sickness or unemployment or the pandemic or you know the list is is endless you know can we extract some possibility uh some opportunities out of this terrible situation and and we know that people do that all the time i mean there's a huge body of research literature looking at how people grow as a consequence of stress and trauma obviously they didn't want the stress they didn't want the trauma they hate it right they're not necessarily grateful for it but can they find some possibilities or find some opportunities through it i think a critical distinction rabbi is is to be made between feeling grateful in response to something happening to you right now which i would call that conditional gratitude right it's circumstantial it's reactive to situations so obviously it's much easier we all feel more grateful when good things are happening right the question becomes can can our gratitude become unconditional can it become more proactive as an attitude which persists quite apart from circumstances right so can i say to myself you know i'm going to be grateful no matter what happens can i find the good and the bad or even think about you know long term maybe this is a terrible situation now but ultimately something good can be redeemed out of something bad we know that people do that because people are very resilient mentally and emotionally and for many people that is based upon their spirituality and their world view as you were saying but it's also a skill it's also a practice that people can engage in when people do that they can convert that adversity into potential prosperity and the problems become opportunities at least the potential for opportunities of course much easier said than done i think just just creating the possibility uh of looking at an event from different perspectives right i mean i think gratitude is a way of seeing that changes our gaze okay uh that we start to see where we just saw you know complaints or burdens before we get a glimpse of what might be possible okay with gratitude it's a way of seeing that gives us more flexibility and creativity and how we approach a situation it's really a form of problem solving when you think about you know during the last year the pandemic people kept talking to me and asking me and i was getting all these requests for interviews it's like you know professor edmonds how can we you know cultivate gratitude in the midst of this and i have to be honest with you you know i didn't really feel like participating those interviews because they were looking for like more advice about what to do right here's five things we need to do to cope better to have less stress to become you know more resilient or whatever and i was thinking you know most the time not always out loud not always explicitly but my one of my reactions was look people are being told enough stuff already you know they're already hearing all these things about what to do what not to do where to go or not to go you know what yeah and the list went on and on right it's like the last thing people need was one more so-called expert out there giving them advice about how to be grateful in the midst of a pandemic so you know i think there's a time and a place for everything but what i one of the things i stressed is that you know if we can't be grateful right now can we project ourselves into the future can we have what i call prospective gratitude that says you know even though my life is you know not the way i wanna right now even though you know the challenges and trials are much greater than uh i would ever you know want for myself or my family can i think about you know six months a year two years from now can i imagine myself and can i visualize uh maybe simulate positive outcomes uh of health and healing and you know recovery in all those different dimensions right and can i feel grateful for what now what not is right now but what might be in the future and i call that the kind of prospective or forecasted gratitude and that seemed to me kind of a a nice way of thinking about gratitude which doesn't you know ignore or deny the realities of the immediate situation but puts it in a broader perspective you know down the road so i think gratitude has this elasticity to it this flexibility it's not just about the present situation or even the past but also has bearing on the future and how we think about your potential future scenarios so i think it you know it it has the stretching uh of time it has an elasticity that a lot of you know approaches to life don't necessarily have that flexibility yeah i i what you're saying really resonates with me um i think part of the problem when people are cut off from gratitude is that they're very stuck right now here in the moment they can't see past what's happening right now you know one of the things we try to do from a faith perspective is just to expand people's thoughts about their situation so you know when you believe in something greater than yourself it sort of expands the context of life it's not just what's happening right here right now um there there's a bigger picture we try to give people a bigger picture um you know it's how this moment leads to future moments and how your decisions will affect others uh and you know the ripple effect and and you know the way we speak about it from uh from a faith perspective is you know god has a a much bigger plan and maybe this part of the plan is a painful part of it but you know it all sort of you know it fits into a bigger picture um yes yeah so i'm wondering what you can tell me from uh you know a psychological perspective how to get people to expand to see past their their the immediate present right right right i mean one of the reasons i think why gratitude is so powerful is that it by by its very nature it's transcendent it's other directed right because we're not grateful to ourselves right i mean it's always directed outward uh it's a self-transcendent attitude that's that sees ourselves as really dependent upon you know the kindness of other people the sustenance of god of other people doing things and securing things forces out there that are sustaining us we didn't we didn't create ourselves right i mean the belief that we are self-reliant you know is an illusion that most people at some point realize for some people it takes you know it takes suffering takes trauma it takes loss for them to realize how dependent they are upon circumstances which are much more you know powerful uh than they are so so these sometimes create the um the uh potential or possibility for gratitude um and so yeah the long perspective uh just just seeing oneself and and and drawing upon memories of when you've you know you've had these experiences in the past right i mean one of the things we we've asked people to do in some of some of the research studies on gratitude is is think about something that happened to you that really was maybe one of the worst things so we put people in a good mood by asking them think about something terrible right it's kind of like what psychologists like to do in the laboratory under safe conditions of course but then imagine but then remember that you know you made it through that you know that dark night you you've survived you recovered and look at your life now so ask them to engage in this mental comparison and we know that our minds do that all the time right we're always comparing ourselves in our situation to what it used to be to what it could be to what we want to what it's not and all those things so why not use that comparison in a way that you know fosters and advances our well-being as opposed to diminishing it and so one good way is just remembering the bad see where you are now though because you you recovered you made it through that dark time and maybe now you have some you know uh previously unknown strength or quality in yourself that you can recognize maybe now you realize you encounter other people in a way you couldn't before you realize that there's kindness and there's benevolence out there whereas before there was just you know randomness and fate and all kinds of negative you know attributions about the world so think about you know again going back to the notion getting very specific very concrete the truth is in the details right you know it's like listing a hundred blessings a day in your tradition or is it more than that it's a lot right right but very specific right and the more specific you are the more you're going to benefit from that practice and we do that with our gratitude journaling we ask people to write down what they're grateful for and the people who get very concrete very specific they show the most benefit can you speak a little bit more about what we know today about people's capacity to project to uh you know i think you called it elasticity yeah what do we know today about the way the human mind works that allows us to um well not to use your word to be transcendent yes yes well um there are people i'm not that familiar with i haven't kept up on the the psychology of happiness research which is actually where i began all my work on gratitude back in the mid 80s by studying happiness i was in graduate school that's what my professor was studying and uh actually happiness was thought to be too of a subjective concept two two two loose uh too soft uh you know not very rigorous or empirical so uh we decided we wouldn't use the h word at all you know you thought it was bad to study religion in the academy or spirituality well happiness was even worse okay so so we called it subjective well-being much more impressive right rigorous sounding you get grant money to do that sort of thing and so on but anyway so some of the happiness researchers of which there are a lot now there's a whole industry out there that tells you how to be happy in 10 steps in seven secrets 30 days three hours if you're in a hurry uh focuses on what they call forecasting or predicting your happiness and it turns out people are not very accurate at it so you can ask them to focus on something good in their lives and how long that will last and people will tend to think it's going to last a long time so we kind of overestimate the goodness and we um we also but we also uh overestimate the badness something bad happens to us like a loss like a relationship ends or a job loss unemployment people think it's going to affect them for like years down the road but it's amazing people recover very quickly i mean not overnight of course but you know even within uh six months to a year most people have recovered from major negative events even like an illness even an injury you know famous studies done on people who had spinal cord injuries you know found that within two years their levels of happiness were very similar to what they were two years before and really not much different from a control group and then you know good things were bad things yeah i mean that that's very surprising to hear that so basically you're not saying they were necessarily all happy but however before that's basically what they went back to they went back to their baseline and they were happier than most people thought they would be when when they were both both those people themselves predict how happy they would be but then average then the person who doesn't really know them or know about their conditions just just making predictions about given this set of circumstances how happy would this person be we tend to underestimate their happiness their happiness is actually higher than that so we're actually not very good at making these predictions but what would what emerges from this for me is that it sounds like you're saying the science shows that we human beings are a lot more resilient than we tend to believe we are i'm sincerely curious um from a social sciences perspective how do you even devise an experiment to test gratitude like how would you even okay i want to study gratitude how do you how do you study it what do you do what do you look for i mean describe for me a study or one that you've been involved in or that you've studied or that or we could maybe we'll we'll come up with a new study an idea for a new study right here but what does it even look like how do you test something like that sure of course well so a scientific view would of course uh rest upon empirical observations and testing and ideally experimentation now as a psychologist there's lots of ways that we collect data right we can interview people we can develop questionnaires and surveys you know which we do all the time you know it's what we do we do that while we're asleep right i've done that for a long long time but when i first started to do this research i wanted to do something that would have an immediate impact i wanted to to use a sports analogy put some points on the board early you know so i conducted what was a um a randomized controlled trial which is the gold standard for scientific research or medical research right if you want to prove the validity uh efficacy of a new treatment or drug you need to you know have people assigned to different conditions have a controlled condition make comparisons and all those sorts of things right the gold standard randomized controlled trials so did the same thing with gratitude now gratitude is not a it's not a treatment it's not a pill it's not a shot it's not a vaccine and so on but was there a way which we could have people maybe think more gratefully or cultivate an awareness of gratitude in their lives and if so uh what impact would that have so what would you measure as a dependent outcome right a dependent variable well you could look at their mood their happiness you could look at how they cope with stress you could look at their relationships if they felt you know more close or connected to others versus lonely getting along arguing with people so kind of there's a usual set of suspects when it comes to uh outcome what we call criterion variables in the domain of happiness and well-being and and uh which i traffic in anyway so but we need a comparison group right so we assigned a half the people to write about what they were grateful for and do this every day for roughly three weeks and you could do it basically yeah journaling gratitude journey right so the next group has to then the other group had to do a passage or a complaint so they were complaining so we call these the whiners and the complainers right about all their complaints every day so it was business as usual for most people right things going wrong and then you know they do this every day and so we're we're directing their minds to either blessings or gratitudes or burdens or hassles or complaints and the question becomes you know how do they experience life differently as a function of doing this on a regular systematic basis and would you find so we did find lots and lots of benefits for the people who were in the graduate condition i mean they they felt better uh in terms of positive emotions they felt more engaged more alive more vital uh they actually slept better we found lots of physical help health benefits they reported uh bothered less by everyday aches and pains um so the sleep was the most important i think most surprising finding to me was that they were sleeping more each night they were waking up the next day and feeling more refreshed they fell asleep more quickly i mean we all know that people are sleep deprived right i mean you know it's like one of the big health public health concerns we don't get enough sleep and all that sort of thing and so here's something that was benefiting uh people in terms of this ultimate you know bodily restorative activity i mean the list goes on and on we found benefits in the domains of relationships people felt closer more connected and they're actually becoming more more giving they were becoming more generous more compassionate people who knew them were saying we're noticing all these changes okay and it wasn't so it wasn't just people writing down what they were grateful for and saying oh yeah i'm happy now i'm healthy i'm helpful and so on but like spouses roommates right sons daughters parents we're saying you know i don't know what you did to you know so and so here but i'm sure glad he was in your study because he's much nicer to be around so so the differences were observable to people outside the experiments so and now thousands of people i think somewhere around 10 000 people have been in these studies and laboratories all around the world and so they're all kind of extending our initial findings and looking at you know positive changes across different realms of of living so gratitude is really this ultimate performance enhancing substance wow ultimate performance enhancing substance but it's legal it's legal right you don't get thrown out the olympics for it wow that's great by the way i just want to tell you that is gold for me because that that's what i need like that's what people when people are skeptical of me yeah i need to be able to play that you know and say listen to dr evans you know anyways i know and i appreciate that i've gotten so much support from the faith community for the science of gratitude even though you know uh people in in your profession and in other registrations you know you guys know all this stuff and you've been studying you've been immersed in that these traditions have you know been immersed in this as i mentioned the you know the the checks and teachings traditions are all about thanks thankfulness and thanksgiving gratitude but people are strange you know they don't believe it until they see the data right they want to see the numbers and so i get you know starting in september i start to get requests from journalists and interviews they want to do their annual thanksgiving day story about the science of gratitude it's like you know you don't need me right because you got thousands of years of tradition which tell you all about thankfulness but no they want to know what does it do with the brain right i mean what how does gratitude get under the skin right does it affect our blood pressure ah it reduces blood pressure by ten percent huh maybe i'll practice gratitude uh not because god says i shoot her because you know it's beneficial from an ethical point of view to be grateful to our parents or teachers whoever but now i'm going to experience some physical health benefits now i've got the motivation to do it that seems to be a a strong motivator for people doctor is a strong motivator that's why i'm so grateful that you're in this line of work because i i can beg and plead with people till i'm blue in the face please for your own good for your own good find what to be grateful for find the blessings and and you know sometimes i need the numbers i need to be able to say it's been studied it's been researched and and as i mentioned earlier sometimes because the people have trauma relating to religious experiences they need a side door they need another way to get to the gratitude and then they're able to come back to all the richness that our faith has to offer so i think you're making my job so much easier and i don't know about in your tradition uh whether this comes up or not but i i think it may that you know for many people the practice of gratitude is really fear-based uh it's like i need to be grateful because i don't want to be ungrateful uh you know because i fear the consequences either you know spiritual or relational or whatever and i mean that's certainly a valid point right because there's no tradition as far as i know that says it's good to be ungrateful you know uh you know every religious tradition it prescribes gratefulness and it proscribes ingratitude okay uh but you know is your i the question i think is it which an interesting one is is your gratitude faith-based or is it fear-based right are you being grateful to stay out of trouble or to stay in god's favor right or to avoid punishment you know spiritual punishment or are you grateful as as a response to god's benevolence and goodness uh and love and all of those things i think those are very different motivations for gratitude because you know what's going to sustain you over the long haul right and and uh this goes back to our earlier conversation about gratitude in good times versus bad times so if i have a theory if i have a spiritual world view which says that you know god provides good things for my benefit it's easy to be grateful when life is going well but what happens during those difficult times or those periods where i i sense god is not there god's absence can i sustain that gratitude even in the absence of goodness and i need a worldview that is deep enough and strong enough that has roots that go down far enough that i can still be grateful even though life is not giving me what i wanted to be giving me at that time and i think that's the that's the power of faith when it comes to gratitude otherwise gratitude is just this tactic or strategy for becoming happier and there's lots of those right there a dime a dozen you know what makes gratitude distinctive is that it really is rooted in these you know faith traditions that gives it a gives it a depth gives it a texture gives it a dimensionality that you know purely secular approaches don't have that's very interesting what you're saying that you know seemingly what difference would it make if your gratitude is fear-based or faith-based either way you have you have gratitude you know but what you're saying is no if it's fear-based then when the things happen that you fear you're going to lose your gratitude when you need it most yes but if it's faith-based then even when the you have times of trial and tribulation you you can project forward you can expand your your perspective you get through it and then you have the gratitude when you need it most that that's there it can even drive you can even amplify your gratitude right because it strips away everything else it forces you to recognize your dependence uh you know your humility which is really i think the ground of gratitude um and i think you know uh you know collectively one of the reasons why the pandemic seems to have increased people's levels of gratitude although i don't have i don't have data on it per se uh but and totally i think it's it's happening we may have some data on it in in the future as the studies get published is that people start to rely on you know other people more they they became a had a greater sense of awareness of where things came from whether it was you know supply chain things or whether it was health care providers governments you know pharmaceutical companies they became much more aware of what they needed in life and what was being provided for them they couldn't do these things for themselves and i think in some respects actually set the ground set the foundation for the experience of gratitude dr evans this has been absolutely fascinating i really appreciate you joining me today for this discussion thank you rabbi it's been my pleasure it's really i really enjoy our conversation as well thank you so much for having me today okay my pleasure we'll have to do it again sometime looking forward to that [Music] you