How to Be Happy and Successful
Guidance for and from the mildly incompetent on how to be happy and successful.
How to Be Happy and Successful
Ep. 4: Gratitude (Happiness)
Use gratitude lists to appreciate the large and small aspects of your life, and to become happier by diminishing the influence on your mind of all of the negative feelings that want to run the show.
Hi, my name is David Murphy, and welcome to How to Be Happy and Successful, a podcast for and from the Mildly Incompetent. All right, well, welcome to the episode on gratitude. This is an important one for me. It's so important to me that it makes me nervous because I worry I'm not going to explain to you properly its potential in making you happier people. But we must carry on and do our best, as I've said before. Now, I say in the title that gratitude is a half-step from happiness. Now, even I don't know exactly what that means, but here's what I'm trying to convey with it. Gratitude really is a form of happiness, but it's when it takes a little bit of thought and work and practice. What's really important about gratitude as a step towards happiness, as a tool to making ourselves happy, is that it's producible. You can learn to feel grateful and appreciative for things that are in your day and in your life. But here's the thing. Have you ever heard the phrase, you know, hey, think happy thoughts? You know, someone tells you to think happy thoughts. Or if I were to tell you right now, think happy thoughts, maybe you think about rainbows or bunnies or your team winning the Super Bowl or who knows what. Uh, you know, you could try to conjure up happy thoughts. And maybe that would be easy for you or hard for you, and maybe some good would come out of it. I don't know. But it is not a strategy for you becoming a happier person. It'd be nice if it really were that simple. If you could just think about things that have connotations of happiness, and you could just change your life. Every time you don't feel good, you could think happy thoughts and feel happy. But guess what? No luck. It doesn't work like that. But what you can do is learn to bring up a sense of appreciation and gratitude, and that will make you feel happy. You can learn to think of things that make you feel grateful, and you can increase the amount of gratitude you feel for those things. So you're increasing the number of good experiences in your life, and you're increasing the goodness of those experiences. Now I can feel already that some people, I can think, God, this sounds awful. This is not interesting to me at all. Either it sounds so ridiculously sweet that it has nothing to do with my personality. I'm not gonna be able to do that. Or it just sounds unrealistic. Like, look, if I had things in my life to be grateful for, believe me, I would feel grateful. But my problem is I have problems that make me unhappy. Now you're not alone in having problems that make you unhappy. Your problems might be relatively mild or normal, they might be terrible. I don't know. But I do know that you have some control over how much you let those problems make you unhappy. And that's why you're here, right? You're not here to say, I'm gonna listen to this podcast and take away all my problems. You know I can't do that. You're here to learn how to be happy with the life you have. And this is what I'm telling you to do. Learn to feel gratitude and appreciation for your life through the technique that I will teach you in this podcast. And if you think that's just not something that you can do because of who you are, look, my parents came here from Ireland. You can hardly find a more cynical, sarcastic, emotion-suppressing culture than the one my parents brought into the household I grew up in. You can learn to express gratitude, at least on pieces of paper that only you will read in order to improve your life. You can do that. There's a common saying that we don't appreciate what we have until it's gone. And always implied in that statement is the idea that we would be so much happier if we could appreciate things while we have them. Well, we can. We can practice gratitude as an actually do some practice of it. We can learn to appreciate things when we have them and be happier. You know, you don't have to take it from me. You know, Tony Robbins, who's famous, of course, in the personal development world, has said many times that he meditates every morning for 20 minutes on gratitude. And he says the reason is that you can't feel grateful and angry at the same time. And I agree with that, but I think it doesn't even go far enough. You really can't feel grateful and angry at the same time. You can't feel grateful and anxious at the same time. You can't feel grateful and full of regret at the same time. Gratitude will fill you with good thought about now. It doesn't take away your whole understanding of your difficulties in life. Nothing does, I hope. But what it does is that it makes you appreciate that life you have right now. And that's what happiness really is. It's an appreciation for what's going on right now. If you're desiring for things to be other than they are right now, if that is the primary feeling in your head, then you're not happy. Happiness comes not when you forget that your life can be better or the lives of other people could be better, but when the feeling of goodness in your life is stronger. Gratitude is the same way. It's when the feeling of appreciation for the good things in your life overcome the feelings of frustration and anger and regret for the things you don't like in your life. And the thing again about it is that you can train those thoughts to, you can train to your mind to raise those thoughts up and appreciate them and make them take the forefront over the negative things that are going on in your life. Now, again, I know that there are people out there who hear the idea of expressing gratitude or practicing gratitude, and they go, oh my God, really? It does not sound appealing at all. Because people see it as something either you do for other people, it's about someone else's happiness, not your own, or it's an obligation that you are supposed to express, you know, like let's say every year at the Thanksgiving table, it goes around, you have to say what you're thankful for, it's awkward. This is not a key to happiness, it's a key to feeling uncomfortable. I understand that perspective, and I'm just saying you're missing out. I do think people should treat each other uh with gratitude. That is more for the treat people well uh lesson that'll come up later on. I think it's a very good uh um practice to undertake in life, treat other people with gratitude, for sure. But is expressing gratitude for things in your life to yourself an obligation? Well, I'm not doing any of this happiness stuff to say, oh, you should be like this. You should, you have an obligation to be like this. We all have obligations in life, but I am trying to teach you gratitude and everything else that I bring up at any point on this podcast uh for the sake of your happiness. I am here to tell you that gratitude is there to make you feel good. That's why I'm saying it can be the foundation of your happiness. If you remember in the What is Happiness episode, we see the number one way we are gonna work on expanding the happiness of our lives is by reducing the grip of negative emotions on our minds. Gratitude, as Tony Robbins sees, is probably the best way to break that grip. And one thing to know about practicing gratitude is that it's an intellectual way to get you into this emotion of greater happiness. And when I say that, I don't mean that we're gonna be studying what French philosophers say about happiness. I just mean we're gonna be thinking, we're gonna be using our thoughts to adjust our perspective on our lives. We're gonna do things a little bit at a time, you know, little thoughts, little thoughts, little thoughts, five, six, or seven days a week. And those thoughts will end up transforming our feelings over a lot of time. You know, this is the kind of work that can have an effect relatively quickly, but really it's a practice of years that will end up transforming your life, as I talked about in the very first episode. And if you think, well, I don't want to try to think my way to happiness, and first of all, it's just easier for me to, I don't know, watch some clip about somebody, you know, falling over at a wedding. I get that. But you should not underestimate uh the effect that thinking has upon your emotions. You know, if you feel shame and regret, it's because you are thinking about your past. If you feel anxiety, it's because you're thinking about the possibilities of the future. If you spend an hour angry at someone, it's because you're thinking about how they wronged you. You know, as Sam Harris talks about in his uh Waking Up app, you really can't stay angry for more than a minute or two without putting work into it. You've got to use your thoughts to carry forward your anger. And we are generally pretty good at carrying it on and on and on. It's your thoughts that are doing that to you. And on the happy side, if you win millions in the lottery and feel ecstatic, it's because you're thinking of all the great things you're gonna have, all supported by the incorrect thought that your problems are now solved. Also, on the positive side, cognitive behavioral therapy called CBT is a way to use your cognition, your thoughts, to help guide your emotions to a better place. Well, here we're gonna learn to use our thoughts to have more appreciation for our life and help release anger and shame and regret and anxiety and give ourselves more happiness. And no, we won't get the knee-jerk laugh we get when someone gets wedding cake all over their face in a video. But I guess we just can't have it all. So let's talk about the technique itself. Let's talk first about why you want to write down your gratitude thoughts. That essentially you should be writing gratitude lists. And I know that I started with an example of Tony Robbins spending 20 minutes a day meditating, not writing down gratitude thoughts, but meditating on gratitude. I use that an example of somebody who you might have heard of who uses gratitude to make themselves happier. But I am urging you to do the practice by writing and writing and writing. Well, maybe not writing that much. Now, the first reason is that if you sit down for a certain amount of time to think uh about uh to think thoughts of gratitude, you're surely gonna get distracted. You're likely, because you're a human, to spend a lot of your time distracted. Now, if you have spent years doing a concentration meditation practice, and you know it sounds like Tony Robbins, that's exactly what he does. It's a it's a form of a concentration practice. Well, you will get better and better at staying concentrated and focused. But I assume you haven't done that. And I'm not even trying to get you to do that right now. I'm trying to get you to work on your gratitude. And so let's assume you're like every other human being, where if you sit down to for 10 minutes, let's say, I'm gonna say I'm gonna sit for 10 minutes and think gratitude thoughts, you are surely gonna spend seven of those minutes thinking, you know, with without knowing you're getting into these thoughts, you're gonna think about, you know, the traffic you were sitting in yesterday or earlier today. You could think about this annoying thing your friend said, you could think about we're gonna have for dinner tonight. These thoughts just come up and they carry us away. Then you think, oh, I should be thinking uh things to be grateful for, and you go back to that for a little bit and then you get distracted again. And then again, 10 minutes goes by and 30% of that time is used like it's supposed to be used. If you sit down with a paper and a pen, well, you will still get distracted, but your mind will come back to the paper sitting in front of you and the pen in your hand, and you'll see, you know, a blank page or a half blank page, and you'll get back to work. So, distraction, that's reason number one why we want to be writing these things down. Next reason, it's a way to signal to ourselves that this work is important. You know, if if you just sit down to think about gratitude, to meditate on gratitude, so to speak, you know, for many of you, because even meditation is a whole you know new idea and it would feel very silly, and I don't need that hurdle getting in our way. So it would feel you'd feel a little foolish, very likely. On the other hand, you're trained through years of school and work to say when you sit down with a piece of paper and a pen, you say to yourself, well, this is a task I should take seriously, you know, somewhat at least, to step forward and to taking this work more seriously. And I have told you that I believe this work can be the foundation of your happiness. And I've already told you that your happiness matters. So I do want you to take this work seriously. Now, the next reason why we want to write things down, and you know, as an aside, certainly if for some reason you don't have access to a pen and paper on a day, yes, just think your grateful thoughts. I'm not saying that's not useful at all, but most of us, in most of our lives, do have access to the tools of writing. We want to avail ourselves of those tools when we're doing this practice. Okay, so the next reason we want to be writing things down is that writing things down helps us expand our view of the things we should be grateful for. If we sit down to think about the things we should be grateful for in our lives, even if we can stay focused on the topic, what will happen is that we'll tend to get circular and go back over to the same topic. So it's not so bad. It's not bad if every day we feel grateful for the same things in our lives and if we express that gratitude. But part of the goal is to again expand our list to see more things in our lives that are worthy of gratitude. So if we're writing a list down and we know we're not trying to write the same thing 10 times in a row, then when we have written four or five things, and those things might be things we wrote down yesterday. You know, if you had a great lunch and you repeated it today, sure, write it down today. If you're grateful that you got to spend time with your kids in the morning or last night, you can write that every single day. That's fine. But you're gonna hit a point on your page where you've used those up, and now you got to find new things, and that is part of the purpose. So writing things down helps us be a little less circular and makes us find new things to be grateful for. And that is a big part of the purpose and the ongoing work that we're doing here. We are, as we do this day after day and week after week, and yes, month after month and year after year, we are opening our eyes to the many things in our lives that are worth being grateful for. And writing helps us do that. And finally, the act of writing helps imprint information on our brain. So if you're studying for a test, you're trying to memorize information so you can recall it when your test comes up. There's different ways to do that. You can read things again and again, you can walk around and say things out loud so you can memorize it. But also the act of writing something down or writing information down helps get the information into your brain. Now, you're not trying to memorize your gratitude list. You don't have to repeat this for anybody else at any point, but you are trying to imprint onto your brain these ideas, these aspects of your life that you may hardly have noticed before. You're trying to make them salient to you. You know, these last two points, the idea of expanding the things for which we can be grateful, and the idea of paying more attention to them and making them, you know, a more important part of our frontal cortex, more noticed by our frontal cortex. These two aspects of the work, they're not all the work, but they are a big part of using gratitude to make you a happier person. Now, I'm gonna tell you exactly what I do, which is not what you're required to do, but it works for me, and so I'll go over for you. Now, again, I write down my lists, and I just use scratch paper. I don't have a journal I keep. Once I write my gratitude list, I don't think about it anymore. I don't go back and assess it later and see what I was grateful for. It's not that you can't do that practice if that's something that is useful for you, but really the the benefit is in the act and in repeating the act. You know, you want to be doing this work, and I say it's work, but you know, it's it's 10 minutes and it's it's not hard to do. Um, but you want to do it at least five days a week. Really, you know, it's not that doing it one or two days a week is useless, but what we're going for here is a a change of perspective, a change of mindset, and that will come through repetition. So I encourage you to do it every single day. But I'll give you a couple days off a week if that's what you have to have, but go for at least five days a week. Anyway, so I take my um a piece of scratch paper usually, you know, eight and a half by eleven, blank on one side, and I fold it in half. So now I'm just looking at uh half a piece of uh blank paper. So that's what uh five and a half by eight and a half, and then I write across the top uh today's date, you know, July 1. Things to be grateful for today. And make a little line under that and I start writing. I just start writing ideas, and it could be anything, and it's like a shopping list, it's it doesn't have to be prioritized. It is natural when you write a shopping list to write the most important things to the top because it's the first thing to come to your mind, you know, for a gratitude list. If something big happened to you, you know, you someone threw your birthday party last night, it's natural for that to come up and be at the top of your list. But it doesn't have to be. There's no required order by any means. I do find it useful sometimes just to be chronological. I start with the morning and I just start writing down things that happen. I've been doing this for years, so I'm pretty good at it. It's not hard to make myself uh fill that page and sometimes go over, you know, into the second half, especially if I didn't get a chance to write a list uh yesterday. Then it's very easy for me to fill up a full page. But your goal, you know, if you're if you're doing this kind of, you know, the same thing I do, just fill that half page up. Now you don't have to look at a blank piece of paper, you can instead do like a numbered list. Say I want to do ten items. Again, they don't need to be in order, you're not prioritizing the items, you're just writing down ten things to be grateful for. The important thing though is that you want to do something like ten items, you don't want to do three items. This is what's important about the work, really. It's important that you give yourself more to write than is very easy to write. So if your practice is just to say, well, every day I'm going to write down three things for which I'm grateful, okay. It's not that that's a useless practice, but it's almost surely very easy to think of three things to be grateful for. Especially if you allow yourself to repeat them, which you should. You know, you should be grateful every day for some of the things you have in your life. But if you do that, again, you're not expanding the things that you see in your life that are worthy of gratitude. You're not making your mind reach and see more of what's around you that deserves gratitude. And that is a big part of this work. So, what you want really is to have yourself, you know, your page in front of you, your half page in front of you, whatever it is. Or if you say, like, I'm gonna go with numbers, I'm gonna do 10 things uh every time, okay. It should be easy to get about halfway through what you need to do. So halfway through your half page, or through five items on your 10-item list. But then you got to do some work to come up with the rest. And that work, you know, you fill it up however you can. You know, what you don't want to do is lie. So you don't want to say, oh, I've got a um, I don't know, I've got a root canal later, and I'm just so grateful for that. Really, we should be grateful for those things because we're lucky to have the dental care that's available to us in the 21st century. But if you don't feel grateful for having your root canal, don't write it down. You know, oh, somebody swiped my car last night and it and they damaged it and drove off. I'm so grateful. That's a lie. So don't put that down. And also don't just list every good thing in the world that you can think of. You know, you're supposed to be putting down things that actually move you somehow. And that could be anything like they had the brand of root beer that I like at the store. What a happy surprise. Or it could be something that's happening in the world at large if it does move you. But you're not just trying to fill up space by saying good things that exist. You're writing down things that in some way touch you. Or at least touch you once you make yourself think about them. Yes, before you ignored them, so they didn't make you very happy at all, but now as you think about them, think that is a good thing. So whether it's a big thing or a little thing, you don't want to make things up. But it is good to write down things that you never would think about. You know, I got to pay my electricity bill this morning. Well, most people don't think of that as something to be grateful for, but you can be grateful that you had enough money in the bank to do that. Um I have clean running water in my apartment. My spouse took out the garbage last night. Uh I got to go to Starbucks this morning and get a hot chocolate. You know, anything you can think of where you realize, well, that's actually a good thing in my life. I'm lucky that I had that. You put it down. You're just doing a homework assignment right now. You're trying to fill up your page or get to number 10. That's okay. As long as you're being honest, as long as you're telling the truth about these things, again, you don't need to think, oh, I really feel grateful for everything I'm writing down. As then you don't have to be moved to tears. You don't have to feel like you just received a heart transplant. You have to have some sense, though, that this for real is a good part of your life. And maybe you never noticed it before. Maybe it's a very small good thing in your life. Take it. Or maybe there are big good things in your life. Just you have to look for things that actually move you. If my suggestions mean nothing to you, you don't get to use them. It doesn't have to be a list, it could be more of a narrative in that, you know, if I yesterday spent a really good day with my kids or got to spend half a day doing something really fun with them, I will often sort of take it from the top and say, yesterday we got to do this. And I'll say, first we did this, and then we did these things, and then we got ice cream, and then we did whatever. And, you know, that will take up a fair bit of my space. You know, so unless I'm interrupted, I always get myself down to fill up the space I'm supposed to fill up. And sometimes I go over. You know, again, I've been doing this for years, so it's easy for me, but it was always the goal to fill up that half page, which is the amount of space I assigned to myself. And that should be your goal too. Fill up the space, or again, if you set yourself a list of 10 things you've got to write down, get yourself to number 10. And it might seem very challenging at first. And you're allowed to repeat some of the things you've done before, but you don't want to memorize a list of 10 and put that every time. There's just no point in that at all. You are looking to put things that mean something to you without, again, trying to generate a ton of feeling in this moment. Again, this isn't a sentimental movie where we're trying to conjure emotion at the end. We are trying to open our eyes and change our perspective. And you finish your list and then you throw it in the recycle and you move on in life. You know, you the goal is not to spend forever on these things, but to spend 10 minutes and then move forward. And of course, you the goal eventually is to have this viewpoint, this perspective on your life expand into your life. And if you start to do that consciously, great. You might think of like, oh man, it's not easy for me to make these lists. It's I should pay a little more attention, noticing in, you know, in my life, things I can put down for tomorrow's lists. You know, great. That's perfectly fine. You know, another practice could be where, you know, every three or four hours you will write down three or four things. You know, that can make you sort of more present if you want. I do one list a day. That's how I do it. But, you know, so so make yourself more present as you go through your life. But really, once you write your list, just put it away and move on. You have things to do. Now it's very important to understand as you start to write your lists that you're not trying to recreate whatever feeling you had when you had the experience you're writing about earlier today or yesterday or whenever it was. You're not trying to put yourself right back in that moment so you can live it again. That can happen. You can once again feel, you know, laughter or excitement or just pleasure at an experience you enjoyed. But that's not exactly what you're going for. You're probably gonna feel the emotions less powerfully because you have some distance from the actual events that you're recording. Though, in truth, it is sometimes possible to feel more pleasure from these events when we're writing than we did when we're in the actual experience. Because well, sometimes good things happen to us in the middle of stressful moments. And so it requires that later we look and say, Oh, that was a really good thing. I couldn't enjoy it at that time. Or sometimes we just bring that stress, right? You know, we are we're going out to some kind of a great dinner, but we're spending our time worried about the fact that we're not really dressed how we want to be dressed, or that we're late because of traffic or for some other reason. And these frustrations overtake the pleasure we have in the moment. And so looking back and writing down that this great thing happened can actually make us, we can enjoy those moments of writing more than the original moments. But even that is not actually what we're trying to create. It's not the feeling we're trying to create here. What we want to create in ourselves is simply a sense of appreciation. And I know I'm overusing that word, appreciation. You know, we're trying to create an intellectual understanding of just how much good fortune we do have in our lives, despite all the problems, big and little, that hit us every day. Uh, you know, and it can be anything from the fact that you were able to pay your rent earlier today, to the fact that you got to go out to a nice dinner with friends, you know, to the fact that again you got to spend some time with your children in the morning. Writing down things that we can realize intellectually that's a good thing. That's a good thing in my life right there. There's one, there's another one, there's another one. When I write my lists, I don't try to sink in and get every last ounce of juice out of every experience. I just write these thoughts down. And doing that practice helps create that feeling of appreciation. And that's what we're going for here. You know, I I feel right now like I'm being redundant as I go through this point, but I want to make it clear. I don't want you to write gratitude lists for, you know, two days or for a week and say, you know, if this isn't working because I'm just not feeling what I felt when I went through these experiences. I write them down, it doesn't recreate it for me. I know that is not the point. We're generating something different here. We're building a long-term positive perspective on our lives. So don't get caught up in the frustration you will feel if you're putting all this effort into recreating feelings. And also, to touch upon something I said a little bit ago, don't get caught up in the frustration you might feel with yourself for not appreciating these moments enough when you were living them. You know, you can write them down and you might realize, boy, this was such a great thing, but I blew it because I wasn't. Focused enough, or I was stressed out about something stupid. Well, maybe you're right. Maybe you were stressed out about something stupid, and it did take away your pleasure at the time. But we are not writing this list so that we can beat up on ourselves. That's not going to help you at all. You are a human being. So, yes, you're probably very good at not appreciating what you're experiencing when you're experiencing it. And you can learn to do better. You know, four episodes from now, I think it is, I'm going to talk about the idea of being here now, being in this moment and not thinking about everything else that's going on. But we'll get to that when we get to that. One technique at a time. You know, I keep saying phrase like it's gonna make you happier. What are the actual rewards of doing this work? You know, it's my anxiety in doing this episode that I feel is so important is that I won't be able to express to you or convince you of just how useful this work can be. But the truth is that if you can make yourself see how many good things you already have in your life, make yourself see how fortunate you are in so many ways compared to so many people in the world and throughout history, then when you face the frustrations that come with daily life and the bigger challenges and the bigger losses in your life, those things will not have the same grip upon you. Remember that key point from the What is Happiness episode. How are we working to make ourselves happier? We are freeing ourselves as much as we can from all those thoughts and feelings that want to dominate us and make us unhappy. Gratitude and the idea and the understanding of all the good things in our lives helps break that grip. Even when we're in the grip, it helps us free ourselves much sooner than we would otherwise. And of course, I'm not saying that you don't have and that you're not going to have real and serious problems in your life. This would not be much of a practice if it were only for people with trivial problems. This work will eventually give you a baseline of appreciation for your life, for the people in your life, even for yourself that will help carry you through even very large challenges. The work acts as a shield or might say a force field, sort of reduces the impact of negative events in your life and gives you a different perspective on those negative events. And if you're interested in the rewards to other people, as in how will the people around you benefit from you doing this gratitude work, well, just realize that it's so much easier to treat people around you better when you feel like you have a lot in your life. It's easier to be generous towards people, and that's people whom you are close to and to strangers. It's easier to be generous and kind and helpful when you feel like you already have so much. So this episode is about your happiness, but of course, it will have greater effects than just your happiness if you do the work. But realize that even though this work can have such a powerful effect on your life and on the happiness of the people around you, it's unlikely to sweep you off your feet in the beginning as you start the work. You know, if you start writing gratitude lists, it may very well be that the first day or the first week, you bring to mind experiences that you realize you hadn't appreciated enough when you were going through them. Or you bring to mind aspects of your life that you realize you have not been appreciating at all, and now you can appreciate them. So I hope you have those good moments. But it might be very hard to see how this work can fulfill what I said it can, that can become the foundation of your happiness. It reminds me a little bit of meditation, in that regularly practicing mindfulness, mindfulness meditation, can have a tremendous effect on your life. But at first, it's generally very frustrating. Your writing gratitude list is not nearly as frustrating as the initial days, weeks, sometimes months of practicing mindfulness meditation. If you haven't tried it, believe me, it can be very frustrating just to sit there and try to watch your thoughts and try not to get distracted and then realize that you're doing nothing but getting distracted. And furthermore, it's easy to ask, what is the point of this? As I said, I subscribe to a meditation app called Waking Up, started by Sam Harris. And I don't say that because I have some kind of affiliation with the app. I just, that's what I use. And Sam Harris has said a number of times that hallucinogenics were for him and for many people who end up becoming very serious meditators, sort of a way to uh kickstart. And it's not that they're exactly related, hallucinogenics and meditation, but people sometimes take hallucinogenics and they for the first time realize just how different their perceptions of reality can be, how different their mind state can be. And that makes them go explore something like Eastern meditation. Now, for gratitude, I don't have anything to offer you along those lines. You know, I don't have anything to make you just realize, oh my goodness, I can my life can be changed so much by appreciating what I have in my life. The real benefits come after a long time of regular practice. You really can't stop after 25 days and say, Well, how much have I gained from this? How much different is my life now? And the same way you can't stop after 25 days of meditation and say, Well, how much has this changed my life? Not that much yet. With work, it will change your life greatly. That goes for both those practices. Now, I'd like to take a few minutes to tell a couple of stories. And uh first story is not mine. I got it from the the show called The Old Man on FX with Jeff Bridges. Uh, and I watched the first season and I enjoyed it. The second season I haven't seen it. That's more a reflection of my lack of time for television than of the show's quality, in my opinion. Uh, anyways, one of the characters in the show tells this story, and I like to retell it here. It goes like this. There's a mom and her son who's about eight years old, and they are walking along a beach one afternoon. And it's not like a nice, you know, sunny beach day. It's after a storm and it's very windy, and the waves are crashing on the water, and they're having a nice time walking along and and watching the tumultuous ocean and the waves crashing. And the boy gets so excited that he breaks away from his mom and tears off down to the water to jump in the waves. And of course, his mom calls after him and then chases him. But before she gets to him, he's out leaping among the waves, and a huge wave comes and crashes down on him, and she can't see him. And she searches through the water and she can't find him. He's gone. And she comes back up to the sand and she kneels down and she prays. And she says, God, that boy is everything to me. He's all I have. Please, please bring him back to me. And a moment later she feels something and she looks up out over the water, and from the horizon she sees two lights approaching. And as they come closer, she can see that these lights are angels, and they're flying over the surface of the water. And a few hundred feet from where she's kneeling, they dive down into the water and they come up a few moments later, carrying her son between them, and they fly with him over to the sand and deposit her boy right in front of her, and then they fly up into heaven. And the woman looks at her son, who's standing there alive and well, right in front of her. She looks at him and she looks up to heaven and she says, He had a hat. You know, so there's the punchline. And of course, the point is to hear it and to go, oh, that's a surprise. And what an idiot that she would say that. Or maybe, you know, what a shrewd operator. Oh, I was trying to get more. But you know, the reason I bring it up here because that is exactly how we are. We look at the amazing things in front of us. We look at the miracles in our lives. And I'll tell you this, I'm not myself a religious person. So when I use the word miracle, I mean the amazing things that do happen in our lives and have happened unnoticed by us because we're so busy concentrating on the stupidest things like hats being lost. You know, and I'm I'm a parent of three kids. I mean that literally. It's so easy to get obsessed with the fact that they lost this piece of clothing you just got for them, or whatever, did some stupid thing that you told them not to do. It's so frustrating, and it will totally overwhelm any any good experience we're trying to have with them that day or hope to have with them that day. And sometimes we blame them for that. Like I was looking forward to a good day with you, but look what you did. And of course, that's one example. You know, in our lives, it is so easy to make what is silly and trivial seem important. And when I say silly and trivial, I mean silly, trivial, and negative. Right? The positive things have such a hard time fighting against that which is negative and frustrating and seems to hold us back from the happiness we should be having. Now I suppose you don't think that you have events like angels diving down into the ocean to save your children happening to you on a kind of a regular basis, and I suppose you probably don't. And if you did, I'm sure you would not immediately ask for his hat. Not immediately. It would take you longer. That's part of the you know the joke of the story is that you're right away she's like, hey, where's the hat? And uh for most human beings, it would take a day or two, or maybe even a week, before we sort of move on from witnessing this miracle and saying, okay, but seriously, we can't go losing our hats all the time. You know, that's a little frustrating. But eventually, and not too long into it, we will move right on and forget about these amazing events. And what is frustrating about our nature from my perspective is that we feel that unless we've received what seems miraculous, what seems impossible, we tend not to feel any obligation to feel grateful. It's like, sure, sure, send two angels down to dive into the ocean. Okay, I'm really gonna be grateful. But if that didn't happen, if my child never went into the ocean to drown, I don't need to be grateful that they're sitting there alive in front of me. I get to be mad about the hat. And that is, of course, the opposite message I'm trying to get across in this episode. You know, we want to make ourselves happy. And to do that, we want to be able to appreciate the wonderful things that are in our lives, even if they have not arrived through a miracle. Now, this brings me to my second story. Now, as I've mentioned before, once or twice, I am a nurse. And I work in a hospital in an acute care setting. So I've seen in my time as a nurse lots of sick people, obviously. Uh there's one I want to talk about right now. This is a woman who I met a few years ago. She was 38 years old at the time. When I met her, she'd been a patient for years. She had uh stage four cancer, and she'd had multiple surgeries and different kinds of treatment. When I met her, she was coming into the hospital for pain management. Her pain at home was so terrible that what she was taking uh just wasn't sufficient to handle the pain. And furthermore, she couldn't really eat. Cancer was in her abdomen, and she she couldn't really keep anything down. She's very thin, so we were going to try to help her with nutrition as well. Um, but the pain was the main thing, and she ended up going on to what's called a diluted uh PCA drip, which you know you don't need to know much about it if you're not in that kind of situation, but it means you're in a lot of pain if you're there. And this woman was, you know, suffering a lot, but she was fighting very hard to stay alive because she had three children who were under the age of 18. And she was incredibly nice, she's very appreciative if you did anything for her, which it almost like could tell someone in a situation, you don't have to be so appreciative considering where you're at, but she was. Now, at this time, I was 46 years old, and I was about to have surgery. You see, I needed a right hip replacement. That's young to have a hip replacement. I was diagnosed at 42 with advanced osteoarthritis. Uh, and by the time I was 45, I was bone on bone. Uh and so I had to go get uh hip replacement because my leg was hurting a lot and I wasn't walking great. And people would say to me, Oh man, that's just awful. It just sucks so much that you have to do that when you're so young. But of course, here I am, I've got this patient. Uh, you know, I was still able to work, even though I was hurting some. And I get this patient, she's 38 years old, as I've said. Now, at the time I imagined a sort of story for this woman. And the story went like this as I, David Murphy, her nurse, is leaving the room, an angel comes down invisibly, and in a small form, and lands on her shoulder and says to her, Hey, you see that guy is leaving the room right now? He doesn't know it, but in a month he's gonna have surgery and he's going to die on the operating table. And you can't tell him. But here's what we can do for you, says the angel to this woman. We can give you that life if you want. Not we can turn you into this male nurse you have to work in the hospital, but rather we can give you eight more years of life. We'll take away this cancers going on in your stomach, and we will, you know, put you back in life where you're practically pain-free. You can eat whatever you want, you could spend years more with your children, as long as you take the fact that when you're 46, you're gonna die on operating table. That's just part of the deal. No arguments about it. Eight years of more life with your kids, pain-free, feeling good, then you're gonna die in the OR one day. Everyone's gonna call it uh a tragedy. Uh, do you want that deal? This woman, of course, I mean, if such a thing had happened to her, she would have thought her prayers have been answered. She would have seen that as a true miracle to be given eight more years with her children, eight more years with her husband, eight more years just living essentially a pain-free life, because my pain was nothing comparison to what she was enduring. She didn't get that, right? I went to have my surgery. I was off work for three months. When I came back, I asked about her, and I was told that while I was recovering, she came into the hospital and then ended up going home on hospice care because there's just nothing more that could be done for her. So she didn't get hemerical. I got three months off work and got a full recovery, and she went off and passed away. Now, here's the thing, and here is the real point that I'm trying to make with the story. I've never had cancer. So if she had had some kind of recovery, just recovery to full health at that point, she and her family, everyone she knows, would think that is a miracle. That's amazing. And you're just so lucky and you should appreciate every moment of every day. But I've never had cancer, and so no one expects me at all to have any kind of appreciation like that. You know, I still get the right to complain if I want to. It's like, man, I was in my 40s. I had that surgery most people have when they're in their 60s or 70s. I had it so young, I'm gonna have to get a replacement on that replacement in 25 years or so, and I'm probably gonna have to have a left hip operation too, they tell me. You know, I still get to gripe because I didn't have cancer, or so I didn't I didn't have to have a miracle occur. But as far as I'm concerned, that's crazy. That is crazy like that woman complaining about her son's lost hat at the end of the last story. It doesn't make any sense at all that because you don't that you've never suffered from something, you don't have to be grateful that you've never suffered from it. And there's that phrase, have to, you know, and I could I know people can feel like, oh, well, here comes the obligation side of gratitude. Yes, I I should feel grateful for this life I had because she didn't get to have it. I've already told you, I'm not trying to fill you with obligation. I'm trying to give you a sense of appreciation. I don't think about that woman and feel an obligation. I just feel how lucky I am. I have three children also, and I'm lucky to spend time with them. And look, and she is not the only patient I've known who's died younger than me of cancer. So I know I'm not promised all this time with my children, and that makes me feel lucky to have what I have. It's not a sense of I've got to feel this way. It's look what I can learn by seeing what's in front of me. And another concern that can come to mind is people can say, well, look, I'm not gonna, I don't want to look at somebody else's misfortune and their suffering and take pleasure out of that or take even some kind of good feeling out of that. No, thank you. Well, obviously, I'm encouraging compassion. I'm not encouraging us to literally take joy from the suffering of the other people. But if you think that you can't see what other people go through and learn from that, and learn to appreciate your own life more, well then I don't know what you're gonna learn from. You know, you can it only your own suffering you can learn from in life, that's gonna be a hard way to learn things. You're doing no one a disservice to look at their life and see what they've gone through and feel compassion for them and feel appreciation for your own life. But while the point of these stories is to see in what you might call a larger context or a clearer context, the good things that we have in our lives. Remember that the the work overall that I'm urging you to do is not to constantly think about, you know, funny stories about women on the beach with their kids or terrible stories about people who have suffered and lost so much when they're still young. But to do the work of writing down the things that you can appreciate in your life and to just take it as a simple task, not to try to infuse it with lots of emotion, but to make yourself spend that 10 minutes a day, ideally every day, again, at least five days a week, just writing the kids down and pushing yourself to find more, more even little things that can make you appreciate what's happening in your life and what you have in your life. Because doing that, that's how you can see more and more that your life is just full of these things all the time, even when your life is also full of challenges and missing things that you for good reason wish were there. The work is really simple and straightforward. You just have to do it regularly. And perhaps the last thing I'd like to say about gratitude for now, it's a it's a big topic and it's a kind of thing I can go on and on about. But the last thing I want to say for now is that, well, as I said in the first episode, you know, on the site in this podcast, you know, I consider sort of the happiness side to be about hedonic happiness, you know, happiness in right now, in the moment, and the success side of things to be about eudaimonic happiness, happiness, you know, with your life, you know, happiness uh that you uh you can get by fulfilling your potential or going after your potential. And this gratitude, you know, work that I'd like you to do is definitely towards that hedonic side. It's about being happy in your day-to-day life, being happy, hopefully, when you wake up in the morning and being happy as you go through tough times, or just coming out of those tough moments quicker so you can appreciate what's going on in your life more. At the same time, a true gratitude practice will also increase that happiness with your life that we call eudaimonic happiness. It will make you see the large things. When someone asks you, are you happy with your life, you try to look at a big picture. And a sense of gratitude and appreciation will also make you appreciate and be glad for those bigger picture things. And even when some big picture things are are missing, you will be grateful for the things you do have in your life. And of course, you know, there are people for whom they just can't help but think, well, that's just like giving up almost. Like, you know, you're supposed to have all these goals, supposed to go after them, and not just be glad when you get some of them. Well, I've I've talked about happiness before and how you don't set it upon the eventual achievement of all your goals. You know, I want you to have happiness in the moment as you go through your life, as you work towards your goals. I want you to also have happiness with your life as you go through it and work towards your goals. And gratitude and appreciation is the best way to do that as well as achieve that in-the-moment happiness. Okay, we've come to that part of the episode where we review our mantra, which I guess I'm the one that keeps repeating it, so it's my mantra. If you've heard the other episodes, or even one of them, you know this mantra already. It goes like this you matter, this work matters, and you can do this work. And of course, you do matter, you're an important person, just like everybody is. Uh, your this work matters. Your happiness and your ability to appreciate your life matters. And you can do this work. This is very simple work to do. You know, it's it's nothing grueling about it in the least. You gotta find 10 minutes, you gotta find a paper and a pen or a pencil or a cray. You know, you can do that. It's almost too simple in a way, because it's the kind of thing that can seem so easy. It might seem like it can it really have that much of an effect on your life? Yes, it really can. You know, with persistence, with persistence. On and on and on. Do this work for weeks and months and years, and it will start fairly early on to have an effect on you, but that effect will deepen as time goes by. You can do this work, and the sooner you start doing it and the more regular you are about doing it, the larger an effect it will have on you, and hopefully, of course, on the people around you as well. Okay, thank you for being here. Thanks for sticking with the longest episode yet. Set goals might go longer, but we'll cross that bridge when we come to it, which is next time. Uh, here comes the outro. All right, this has been the How to Be Happy and Successful Podcast. Thanks for listening. Hope you enjoyed it and found it useful. Or just one of those things. I would just take one, that'd be great. As I said, we don't need to be perfect all the time. We're just doing our best. So if you're interested in reading an article that goes with this uh podcast episode, you can go to the website. The website is www.happy-successful.com. So it's happyandsuccessful.com, but there's typings in between the words. You can read articles there. You can also sign up for the mailing list there. So when I put out new content, you will get an email saying, hey, there's new content. Go listen or go read. If you like the episode, please go write a nice review about it wherever you listen to it. And if you didn't like it, or if you just keep that for yourself. And if you really like the episode and the podcast in general, feel free to go to the Patreon page and become a supporter. That'd be awesome. If you have any questions or comments or complaints, go to the website and uh send me an email. I will do my best to respond. So practically I barely have time to put this thing together, so I won't promise, but I will try. Okay, I think that's it. Until next time.