Transcript

Ani
Hi, and welcome to the Somatic Coaching Academy podcast. Hey, Brian. Happy Thanksgiving.

Brian
Happy Thanksgiving. Ani. Thank you. Yeah. For those of you who are in our listening area in the United States, today is Thanksgiving Day. Thanksgiving celebration. And for those of you who are not US residents, then we’re thankful that you’re here joining us. And you may not be celebrating a specific thankful holiday today, but perhaps in your country, in your culture, there’s a day in the year where you specifically take an opportunity to practice gratitude and thankfulness. We invite you to bring that spirit of energy here today.

Ani
Thanksgiving is our favorite holiday, and it’s the holiday that at our house is the gathering holiday for our family. It’s a super special time, and it really does bring up that gratitude, those gratitude feelings.

Brian
Yeah, interesting. Our holiday, the way we celebrate with our family, for me, it’s one of the reasons it feels so special to me. I’m so grateful for it is because it does feed some of my core values. They’re really important to me. Well, food. Yes. But actually, more importantly, how everybody contributes. It’s really a team effort on Thanksgiving for us. It’s not just everybody brings a dish, but our family gets together really for five days. Our extended family gets together for five days. Over that five days, we put the docks away for the winter and cover things up and put things away, get prepared for the snow to start flying. It’s a whole transition period, and everybody participates in doing it.

Ani
Part of the reason, I think, for that nature is because it happens at your parents house, which is this very special property. We’re gathering. We always gather at the place, and the place holds us. Then the family won’t gather again until we come to the place again in the summer when we’re bringing out the docks and that thing. It’s truly very special.

Brian
It’s a really coming inward, a coming together and closing down what’s happening outdoors as we come inside. It’s really a very special transition point.

Ani
I think, as I’m listening to you say, it really touches on your values, I think for me. Also, it touches on my values. This place that we live has such a presence to it. It helps me to feel present, and people are more present when they’re here. That appreciation for the place and the beauty and our ability to be present within ourselves because we’re here is really special. Yeah.

Brian
So that’s what Thanksgiving is for us. And we just are grateful you are joining us here on this day. That’s so meaningful for us.

Ani
So today we’re talking about gratitude, yeah?

Brian
Yeah. So today, in the spirit of Thanksgiving, we’re going to talk about the physiology of gratitude and the effects that it has on our body, mind, spirit when we do gratitude practices. And there’s been a lot of books written and a lot of podcasts and articles written about these things. So we’re grateful that you’re taking an opportunity to be here with us at the Somatic Coaching Academy and be a part of a conversation of how we think about these things and how we look at these things.

Ani
I think gratitude is one of those things. It’s gotten quite a bit of press because it really does hold its weight to the benefits that we can derive from gratitude. It’s also tough for people to feel gratitude. Sometimes it can be this aspirational quality to it, which, of course, aligns with coaching to have this aspirational quality. We’ll talk a little bit about that as well. But let’s go ahead and dive into some of the physiology of gratitude.

Brian
Yeah. There’s been a lot of research around gratitude. I just actually have some of the statement results of some research that I’d like to read to you from the Greater Good Institute, looking and measuring people in fMRIs, in functional MRIs, of where blood flow goes in the brain and that thing around gratitude experiences. And so I just want to kick us off with this statement. The report reads that, “We found that across the participants, when people felt more grateful, their brain activity was distinct from the brain activity related to guilt and the desire to help a cause.” Interesting, right? So in other words, your brain activity is different when you’re experiencing guilt as compared to when you experience gratitude. So they go on to say, “More specifically, we found that when people who are generally more grateful gave more money to a cause, they showed greater neural sensitivity in the medial prefrontal cortex, a brain area associated with learning and decision making. This suggests that people who are more grateful are also more attentive to how they express gratitude.”

Ani
So gratitude begets gratitude. Yeah.

Brian
And we’re more mindful of how we express gratitude. So when we experience or when we’re feeling more grateful, we become more mindful of how to express gratitude further.

Ani
I like that because then our uniqueness and our authenticity shine in terms of making decisions about how we’d like to express ourselves.

Brian
Yeah, because if we have that blood flow and that medial prefrontal cortex, again, that’s the part of our brain that has to do with decision making. And so we can make a decision to practice gratitude when we are conditioned and we train ourselves to experience more gratitude.

Ani
That’s interesting. Maybe you’re going to talk about this, but we talk about how when we’re stressed, that prefrontal cortex is offline. So it would make sense, I think, that if we are practicing stress a lot in our lives that perhaps we actually don’t have as much access to or we’re just not building the muscle quite as much for gratitude.

Brian
Yeah, the neural network isn’t as robust for gratitude. So we’re actually going to talk about it a little bit. So They go on to say that, “Most interestingly, when we compared those who wrote the gratitude letters, that was a part of what they did in the study, was wrote gratitude letters. Those who wrote the gratitude letters with those who didn’t, the gratitude letter writers showed greater activation in the medial prefrontal cortex when they experienced gratitude in the fMRI scanner. This is striking, as this effect was found three months after letter writing began.” Oh, wow. That’s cool. “This indicates that simply expressing gratitude may have a lasting effects on the brain. While not conclusive, this finding suggests that practicing gratitude may help train the brain to be more sensitive to the experience of gratitude down the line. And this could contribute to improved mental health over time.”

Ani
That’s really cool that the results were extended. It wasn’t just right in the moment.

Brian
Yeah. So we practice gratitude, it helps us become more sensitive to practicing gratitude again in the future, which I know is something you wanted to talk about, Ani, that sometimes gratitude isn’t easy to feel.

Ani
Yeah, it’s not easy to access. We see all over social media and out there in the media that “Practice gratitude. It’s important to practice gratitude.” It’s like taking your multivariate vitamins now. It sometimes feels like a ‘should.’

Brian
Yes.

Ani
Then when our nervous system isn’t conditioned to feel good anyway, when we don’t have those neuro pathways to be able to feel good. We’re talking about when we’re stressed a lot and we don’t have access to those parts of our brain, we can start to feel bad about ourselves because we know that we should be taking our vitamins. We know that we should be practicing gratitude, and either we can’t get ourselves to do it or we forget about it, or we don’t really feel it when we’re doing it. It can be this added reason to beat ourselves up about it, think we’re less than or confirm our lack of ability and worthiness. Yeah.

Brian
With some of the people I’ve worked with, and certainly with myself, too, and I think the research is starting to show this out, is that speaking to what you’re talking about, Ani, that when we practice gratitude regularly, we build new neural networks. That just happens. I’ve got a whole other bunch of results physiologically that happens when you do gratitude practices that we’re going to talk about in a minute. But when we do these things regularly, we’re building new neural networks. Now, this is a little bit different for everybody. But at some point in time, if you practice regularly enough, I guarantee will happen is you’ll reach a threshold tipping point where your resting state becomes being grateful. Agree. And again, it’s different for everybody. And so there’s no judgment. And so what we want to do is step back from using the law of relativity against ourselves here of saying, well, “I needed to do it for two years. Someone else just needs to do it for two weeks. I must be broken.” We’re going to step back from that. Let’s use the law of relativity to actually support ourselves by comparing ourselves to a past version that at this point in time, we feel better now about ourselves than we did back then.

Brian
We have a past podcast on law of relativity you can look back to to to get more details about what that exactly entails. But if you just keep at it, if you just find simple ways, simple gratitude practices that, again, we’re going to pitch a couple out there, some of our favorite ones to you that you can think about doing. At some point in time, you’ll build enough neural network where it just becomes a resting state of gratitude. Then your reflex to challenges rather than reflexing to complaining, you reflex to gratitude. And that can happen just with consistency of practice.

Ani
So what I’m hearing you say, it’s a worthy practice, and it’s going to take time for each of us, different amounts of time. And there really is true transformational change that can happen on the other side, and it’s sustainable. Yeah.

Brian
But we also want to point out, too, on the way to that tipping point, you’re having benefits also. It’s not like you’re not having benefits until you get to that tipping point.

Ani
Oh, until you’re enlightening on the mountain.

Brian
Yeah, exactly. You’re getting benefits from the first day you do a gratitude practice, you get a benefit from it. Now, you might not feel it acutely, but Right.

Ani
You might need to believe it’s true or start to gather evidence that it’s true.

Brian
Correct. But you have to just stay honest, stay on that gratitude practice. The research is very, very clear about that, how beneficial it is to do gratitude practices on our physiology, knowing that it might be difficult to feel that right away for people. The reason it’s difficult to feel that is simply because likely you’ve been conditioned to look with a greater degree of negativity bias, which, by the way, we’re all conditioned with negativity bias. Some of us have been taught to buy into the negativity bias more than others.

Ani
Yeah. We live in societies where we spend a bunch of time in our heads. A lot of people are totally disconnected from our bodies. Even those of us who take time to connect with our bodies, know that we’re not connected to our bodies all the time. It makes perfect sense, actually, that we would need to pay attention. It’s going to be subtle and nuanced and notice and get those little nuggets. We call them pieces of driftwood. Then it’ll be able to grow and grow from there. I’m reminded about the thing that we teach our students about taking a moment and recognizing where in your body feel something. So as you’re doing your gratitude practice, actually tapping in with your body and taking a moment to be mindful around what that feels like. Yeah.

Brian
So let’s tap into a little bit of the physiological benefits as a segue into and out of what you’re talking about there, Ani. So one of the neurohormonal effects of practicing gratitude is you have an enhancement and an increase of your dopamine and serotonin in your body. So we’ve done podcasts on dopamine and motivation. Go back and check those out as well. But just in short, dopamine is the reward chemical. So it helps you feel more motivated. It helps you feel like you got a reward. Now, serotonin is the satiety neurohormone. It helps us feel satisfied. When we practice gratitude regularly, we enhance our dopamine and our serotonin levels, which helps us to feel both good and rewarded, but also satisfied.

Ani
That serotonin probably helps with the effect that you were talking about where it’s prolonged. Yeah.

Brian
You’re getting real neurohormonal changes when you practice, when you do gratitude practices. But the other thing that happens, too, in the research is that people have decreased pain experiences as well. We get a little bit of endorphins are actually a part of that also. When we practice gratitude, we actually have elevation of our endorphin levels. One of the best treatments, if you will, for chronic pain conditions is practicing gratitude regularly. That’s a way to change our subjective experience of pain from a neuroendocrine level. From the inside out. Yeah, from the inside out. Really pretty cool. What else happens when we practice gratitude? Well, on the brain, it alters the function of the hippocampus and the amygdala as well. Of course, the amygdala has a lot to do with our emotional regulation or dysregulation. When we’re practicing gratitude, we’re stabilizing amygdala function in order to help ourselves be more emotionally regulated. It’s an important aspect to think about. Also, the hippocampus has, of course, to do with memory retrieval and specific memory retrieval or how we create context of time spacing and that stuff. When we practice gratitude regularly, we have a better functioning of the limbic part of our brain.

Brian
That the unconscious or subconscious hub of our brain centers is in that area.

Ani
As you’re talking about that, it reminds me that as we practice gratitude, we actually start to change the past and the things that happened in the past actually have different context and meaning because we’re tapping into those brain areas, which is just fascinating, wonderful thing that can happen from this work.

Brian
Yes, exactly. Another interesting part of the brain that gets affected by gratitude practice is the hypothalamus. So the hypothalamus is our… Like the brain’s… Actually, our body’s carburetor. It runs the metabolism of the body. And you were pointing out and talking about stress, Ani. Well, one of the primary stress loops is what we call the HPA axis, the hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal axis, that when we perceive threat, the hypothalamus charges itself up and then sends some information to the pituitary gland, which sends some information down to the adrenal gland, and then we have a stress response. Adrenaline and cortisol get released. The hypothalamus, when we practice gratitude regularly, it actually helps to regulate hypothalamic function. It helps to regulate our metabolism. It keeps our metabolism at an even keel. Helps us be on cruise control. If we were a car driving, you can either put your foot to the floor and accelerate your foot on the gas pedal when you’re driving down the interstate, or you can slam your foot on the break. A regulated hypothalamus is like having your cruise control on. It’s just you have this nice steady-state of metabolism going on. That happens when you do gratitude practices regularly.

Ani
Bet that sounds good to a lot of people.

Brian
Yeah, that’s a result of that. Also, harkening back to what you’re talking about with stress, too, Ani, it reduces cortisol levels. When we practice gratitude, and cortisol is a primary stress hormone, and we have a lot of cortisol in the system for prolonged periods of time, that reduces our hippocampus function also, so memory, those sorts of things. But also our immune function drops when we have a lot of cortisol or extended stress responses. So gratitude practices have been shown to improve your immune response. So one of the best ways to not get sick on a regular basis or to protect your body from things like cancer and heart disease and inflammation are to have regular gratitude practices.

Ani
It’s one of my favorite times to practice gratitude, actually, is when I’m sick, which happens very infrequently. But when I am sick, I will sit or lay in bed or whatever doing and take extra time to appreciate my body for how well it works and to keep me, to be able to fight this thing. It’s working good. I can tell because my immune system is working right now. It’s a much better frame of reference to be in when I don’t feel well, to be practicing gratitude. Yeah.

Brian
Yeah, I agree 100%. There’s one more brain area that we already talked about, too, but let’s just go into a little bit more, that is enhanced, the function in the blood flow in that area is enhanced when you practice gratitude, is again, the media prefrontal cortex. So that part of the brain, again, has a lot to do with… It has some effect over emotional regulation. So the stronger the medial prefrontal cortex is, the more likely we are to auto-regulate or consciously regulate, rather, our emotional responses. So that’s an important thing. But this is also the part of our brain that we use when re-appraising guilt, and shame, and worry. So when our medial prefrontal cortex isn’t working as well, guilt and shame and worry just wreak havoc in our nervous system and in our mind. They just run out of control. But when we have a stronger medial prefrontal cortex, we have better capacity to reappraise the situations that are associated with guilt, shame, and worry. And so with regular gratitude practice, when something comes up that we might feel guilty about, we have the capacity to separate ourselves from it and say, “Oh, wait, let me understand a little bit more about what’s going on here.

Brian
Let me look at it from a different context.” So they’re not embodying and holding on to these really destructive, physiologically destructive emotions of guilt and shame.

Ani
So I’m just thinking back to how it can be challenging to feel gratitude or to hear that we should do the gratitude practices, but can’t get ourselves to do it. We don’t remember, we can’t feel it when we do. And why those things can happen and to keep going because we’re rewiring our physiology, we’re rewiring our nervous system, we’re developing new capacities, working new muscles. It’s good to hear that thing because otherwise, sometimes we can think something’s wrong with us, but it’s actually our body is working perfectly. We just want to change the patterns around the capacities that we’ve developed.

Brian
It’s our willingness and commitment, should I say, to just being consistent with the practices over time that create really amazing long term changes in the nervous system, in your brain and your body. We talked about neuroendocrine, we talked about brain, and that all has an effect on our mental wellness at large, our likelihood to become anxious, our likelihood to become depressed, our likelihood to become unmotivated. All those things that so many of us are working with in our lives and hoping to create something new in our lives, these gratitude practices and feeling grateful. So that’s, I think, the key part. Not just thinking grateful, that’s important. It’s feeling grateful. And doing the somatic work and the somatic practices to actually create a felt state around gratitude is really what helps to create the changes fastest of all. If we’re going to supercharge the rewiring of the nervous system and the neuroendocrine system, it’s really about using the somatic felt sense capacities to create those changes.

Ani
It makes sense that we involve our bodies because it’s really something we want to embody. So it’s not just about making a list. Do you have have some practices?

Brian
Yeah. Let’s talk about our favorite gratitude practices.

Ani
Yeah, because as we’re talking about this, I’m recognizing some of the things I’ve heard out there in terms of how to practice gratitude. They generally come back to write things down.

Brian
Yeah. A lot of the research, I think because they can then objectively look at it, are things like gratitude journals. Yeah.

Ani
There’s a bunch of gratitude apps or actually apps that cue you on some gratitude prompt. That usually involves writing stuff down. Maybe you’re going to say that, but what do you feel like?

Brian
Those are popular ones that a lot of people do. Those aren’t my go-tos. I’m not a journaler. I don’t sit and journal and write. I know some people do, and if you do, then tech, add some gratitude practices into your journals. That has been shown to be a very powerful way to get the effects. Absolutely, do that. That just doesn’t happen to be the way that I operate or function. One of my absolute favorite ways is to practice gratitude is to have a gratitude buddy.

Ani
100% agree.

Brian
I have somebody that I text with every day, and we send a gratitude back and forth every day.

Ani
Why do you think that’s important?

Brian
Well, for me, it feels like something I can do pretty easily. But at the same time, it’s a commitment for me to do it. I’m accountable to somebody else. I think it’s also really amazing to be able to be vulnerable and share what you’re grateful for for somebody and have that be seen and witnessed by somebody else. Then also witness someone else’s gratitude, even if you’re grateful for a struggle or you’re grateful for a big win in your life. There’s no rules around what you’re grateful for. It’s like, “Hey, what I feel grateful for, I feel grateful for.” And that’s been hugely helpful for me in my life, hugely beneficial for me to actually have that exchange back and forth because the accountability helps me do it. I guess I am writing it, I’m texting it in a way. But it’s also being witnessed by somebody else, and I’m witnessing someone else’s gratitude. So for me, that’s been really instrumental in my life.

Ani
I echo you 100%. It’s one of the things when I work with clients and they want to develop gratitude practices, I think it’s one that sticks the most. It’s one that people appreciate the most. And like you said, I think a big part of that is the being seen and witnessed and seeing the other person and that connection and capacity between people. The accountability is awesome. It’s usually really easy to pull off. You can think of somebody and reach out and say, Hey, I’m thinking about doing this. Would you like to do it with me? It does not have to take a lot of time. I have to agree with you that I think that is just awesome.

Brian
Yeah, that’s a good one. Which one of your favorite ones?

Ani
I was going to I would say that, actually. So I’ll say the other one I was thinking of is in terms of feeling gratitude, when I am expressing gratitude or when I am in gratitude for whatever it is, the trees are changing color and it’s beautiful outside, or somebody said something lovely, or whatever. I’m experiencing a connection, whatever it is, to notice where I feel that in my body and pause, and I call it savoring. It’s an experience that I like to metaphorically, it’s like the the tea bag in my tea. It just sits there and steeps. To take a moment and just widen the moment where I pay attention and I savor that moment and what it feels like. I’ll be honest with you, sometimes something else comes up that’s not like that quintessential yummy feeling. I’ll still sit and savor that because guilt is a big thing that I deal with in my life. It comes up whenever I want to change something or because it’s Tuesday. Perhaps when I recognize that I’m really grateful for something in my life, I will feel a little guilty. I’ll feel a little guilt come up, and I’ll do the same thing.

Ani
I’ll just sit and savor that as well. I learned that from somewhere. It was a part of a connection for me and my learning, and it was for purpose, wherever I learned it from, and I’m alive, and I can feel guilt. That’s something to be grateful for, too.

Brian
I love the savoring pause. The pause and savor, that’s really powerful. That’s really great. I have another one, too, that for me brings a sense of embodiment, is when I go to bed at night. When I lay down in bed, I put one hand on my heart, one hand on my lower Dantian, and I just sense myself sinking into the pillows, and I just say thank you over and over and over again. I just bring a sense of thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you is my mantra at night as I’m falling asleep, as I sense into my body. Even if I’m feeling tight in my body in places, intense in my body in my places, I’m just thanking my body. I’m thanking the experience of being in a comfortable bed and being able to let go of the day and all those things. And even if my mind’s racing, I just come back to this, Thank you, thank you, thank you. And it’s so helpful to get me to sleep. But I also then drift off into sleep in a state of thankfulness.

Ani
A smile on your face. It reminds me of the I’m probably going to say it wrong, the Ho’oponopono prayer. You know what I’m talking about, right? Thank you. I’m sorry. You’re welcome. I’m not saying it right.

Brian
I don’t remember it.

Ani
But yeah, that’s a similar thing where you bring up the different words that… I love you. I love you. Thank you. You’re welcome. I’m sorry. And breathe. And there’s been research about that specific prayer.

Brian
It’s really powerful. It’s bringing a sense of embodiment. I do some other gratitude practices also. Just moving and moving around and being thankful. In one of our advanced core centering graduate trainings, we spend some time doing some gratitude practices with our organs, specifically. That’s good. I like that. You do an organ gratitude practice. There’s other practices that we do with our core centering practices, which are cool. But the one I do every single night before I go to bed is that embodiment practice where I’m just sensing it in my body and just scanning and saying, Thank you, thank you, thank you. That’s been hugely transformative for me.

Ani
I don’t think either one of us do this one all the time now, but teaching our students, I really like it in our Level One program, the Somatic Practice Essentials program, doing the Wandering Smile meditation. Yes. Never ceases to amaze me how much people love that, and they go and practice that and really, really enjoy it. That’s another great one.

Brian
Yeah, right. That’s another great one. We try to weave these things into everything we do so that if you’re doing some of the practices that we teach here at the Somatic Coaching Academy, you’ve got gratitude baked into them as we go along.

Ani
Speaking of gratitude, we’re really grateful that you listened to the podcast and give us an opportunity to sit here and have a really good time and educate and feel really on purpose and do meaningful work that matters. We love that you cue in on Thursdays in our Slack channel for our community on Love It Every Week. Lila, our student support person, posts, “It’s everybody’s favorite day! It’s podcast day!” She’ll put the mind-blown emoji, and then people will put their insights in and stuff. Lila, we’re grateful for you.

Brian
Of course, Lila also cues us on Gratitude Tuesday. Every Tuesday in the group, we do a gratitude share on Tuesdays. Yeah, we do.

Ani
We do a lot of gratitude practice, actually. We are grateful that you’re a part of the Somatic Coaching Academy in whatever part that you play even if you’re just pulling us out of your pocket on Thursdays and listening for 20 minutes, that’s amazing. If you’re in the Slack channel, commenting on the Gratitude Tuesday Post and all that stuff, that’s awesome, too. So thank you for being part of our lives and for playing along, listening along with us.

Brian
Yeah. So as we enter into the holiday season, wherever you are in the world, I hope that you can find a way that this is helpful to think about carrying gratitude through the whole holiday season to help yourself be healthy and robust and present and connected to the people that you care most about.

Ani
All the things that matter to you. Thanks for listening.

Brian
Thanks so much. See you soon.

Ani
Bye-bye.