Ep. 14: Gratitude extra

Get some encouragement and a few more ideas about gratitude practice.

Transcript

I'm mostly here to encourage you

SPEAKER_00 0:06

Hi, my name is David Murphy, and welcome to How to Be Happy and Successful, the podcast for and from the mildly incompetent. Hi everyone. Welcome to the first extra episode. The goal here is to revisit a topic, in this case, gratitude, with a few ideas, uh, but hopefully not go on and on about it. If you want to get the full story, you just go back and listen to the original episode. So again, today I'll talk about gratitude. And I've got a few things to say, but mostly I'm here for encouragement. I'm here to encourage you to do it. Do the practice. This work, and it's I call it work, it's really very easy to do. This work can end up changing your life for the better, can make you a much happier person, but you have to do it and to do it again and again. You have to do it repeatedly. As I said in the initial gratitude episode, doing it one time or two times, it can have an effect on you. You can do a single gratitude list and it can make you feel better about your day or about your life or about some event that happened. But really, the big change will come. And I I know you you would like a big change in your life to you'd like a way to become much more happier than you are, if possible, and that's wherever place you're at now. That comes through persistence. A gratitude list, not just once or once a month, five days a week. You know, it's ten minutes a day, five days a week. You could do it seven days a week if you want. That would be great. But that kind of persistence with that little bit of effort truly can affect your whole perspective on your life, and that's essentially where your happiness comes from. A highly developed sense of gratitude, of appreciation for the life you live, will make whatever is good in your life feel better. It'll make whatever is bad in your life not as harmful to you, not as disruptive to your happiness. You may have heard of the idea of a psychological set point, which is sort of a baseline that you will tend to revert to whatever happens, good or bad in your life, you will, after little, you know, fluctuations up and down, you'll come back to your set point. And for some people, that's a generally positive and optimistic place. And for other people, that's a more negative and pessimistic place. And that's it's unfortunate, but people can be in this position where they're gonna tend to have a less happy outlook on life, sort of whatever happens. And you might think, well, that sucks. That doesn't sound great at all. What if I'm in that position? What can I do about it? You can change your set point, you can improve your set point, start moving it to the happier side of things. It takes time and takes effort. Gratitude is not the only way. Another demonstrated way that that happens is through persistent meditation. Generally, mindfulness meditation, but other kinds as well. I think gratitude is actually easier. I recommend you do both. I recommend that you work on gratitude, and I recommend that you actually do mindfulness training. I talk about that and be here now. The gratitude is actually easier. Humans, you might not know those, they're not built to be good meditators. Meditating is really very challenging, or at least it feels challenging because most people they don't know what they're really looking for. They think they're looking for a sense of calm, and then when they sit down and their minds just wandering all over the place, they think they suck at it and then they feel bad about themselves. If that's you, you're not really doing it wrong. You're just demonstrating to yourself what your brain is like. But, anyways, meditation actually it's a challenging process. It's it's challenging to become good at meditation or to develop skill at meditation. It's worth the effort to do so. Gratitude's much easier. You can get a piece of paper and a pen and spend 10 minutes writing a list. When you're done, you throw the list in the recycle. Nothing precious. You don't have to memorize it or keep it for a long time. And the next day, you write another one. Over the years, your set point, your whole view of your life will improve for the better. You know, gratitude can really seem like a platitude. You know, be grateful. You know, look at the good things in your life. It can sound like a platitude and it can it can feel like you're taking medicine, like the the unpleasant cough medicine type. You know, you don't get the job you wanted, or your car breaks down, and maybe someone tells you, no, you should be grateful for what you do have in your life. Look at the good in your life. And you're like, all right, I'll look at the good in my life, and it just it's it's not very inspiring at all. Well, there are a lot of skills in life that feel very awkward until you get used to them a little bit. Start practicing gratitude regularly, and it won't feel like you're taking medicine every time. It'll actually feel useful to you. Or at least it'll feel easier. The usefulness of it might not hit you in some big way at any given moment within three months or even six months. It's over time again that the effect really will get into your life. You know, all lives are a mixture of good and bad. And I'm not equating all lives. So many people in this world have things much harder than other people, I think much harder than I have them. But there's gonna be ups and downs in your life. What gratitude does is it brings the upsides more to the forefront of your mind. And it makes the downsides, those frustrating things in your life, you take a back seat. And that means that if these are actually important downsides, things that you need to change, it doesn't make you forget them or think or make you unmotivated to change them, but they won't dominate your perspective and your happiness. And if these things are trivial, they might jump in and disrupt your brain for a few moments, but you'll be able to realize that's that's just trivial. I can set that aside and not let it disrupt my appreciation for all the good things I have in my life. And understand you you're never gonna be in a place, well, unless you become enlightened, in which case, congratulations, you're never gonna be in a place where you never feel those moments of anger and frustration. And sometimes that lasts for much longer than a moment, of course. And you're also you're gonna have hedonic adaptation, that idea that you get something that really is good and you love it, you're excited about it. That excitement is gonna diminish. You're gonna see flaws in this object, or else it's just even if there's no flaws in whatever it is, this birthday cake or the new car you got or whatever's going on, some achievement that you you know, something you accomplished, your excitement will diminish. That's how life is. Gratitude will not take away this fact of psychology, this fact of your life. All it will do is, as I said, make the good better. It sort of makes it last longer. It doesn't necessarily make you more excited about a new car you get. That that enjoyment might not last longer because you're writing gratitude lists, but it tends to stretch out the appreciation we have for things that really are good in our lives and find so many things that we don't appreciate at all. Things we don't even realize are good or terrific in our lives. We almost don't we almost never notice them. Writing gratitude lists makes us see them. And in my experience, gratitude makes it so much easier. Bear the burdens that we have to carry in life. And that can be burdens that you don't want to carry, that you get stuck with. Great, that's useful. I'm actually talking here more about burdens that we choose to take on. We know they're worthwhile, but still it's so easy in the moment to be obsessed with the downsides. So, an example that many of us uh deal with, the burden we deal with, is our are children. You know, children are wonderful. Children are sort of three things they are a pleasure, they are a responsibility, and they are a burden. It's dishonest to say they're not a burden. If they're not a burden to you, you're not working hard enough as a parent. The question is, what comes to the forefront? What do we experience most of all? The the pleasure of being with them and seeing them grow, and you know the the funny moments they share with us and the good feedback we get from them, or the burdens, the stress of having to, you know, hurry and not as much free time as we would like to have, and the stress of dealing with them when they're not acting appropriately, you know, those are part of parenting, those negative sides, and especially if you are having things like financial difficulties, having kids makes those difficulties much more stressful. But what is it that is most present in your mind? The stresses and the burdens or the pleasures. Doing things like writing a gratitude list regularly, it will change the whole perspective where it is the pleasure of having children that comes to you more, that is more present in the forefront of your minds. It just really there's a lot of people in the world who know they want to have a family from the time they're young. You know, they become adults in either in their 20s or their 30s, maybe their 40s, they finally get to become parents, they're thrilled about it, and then for the next 18 years or 20 years or more, it's more downside than upside, or at least in the moment, it feels more stressful than pleasureful nearly all the time, and it doesn't have to be that way. Much of the difficulty that we experience, that we feel, we think about being parents, comes from the fact that we are focused so much on the hard aspects of it. So gratitude can make carrying that burden and really any burden easier for you. And where does happiness come from? As we talked about a long time ago, it mostly comes from reducing how much we're in the grip of negative emotions. There is a famous line from Socrates The unexamined life is not worth living. Well, at least Plato says Socrates said that. Now, I don't really believe that line. I don't think a person has to be introspective or or spend a lot of time analyzing life in order to make that life worthwhile. For Socrates, that was important. A life without his philosophy was not worth living. Well, I would say this: an unexamined life is much less appreciated than a life that you do examine, at least in this way that I'm talking about, where you look at it to see what is good in it, what can I appreciate in it? An examined life in that sense becomes more appreciated and becomes a much happier one. You know, imagine you live in a neighborhood that is just really beat up and ugly. Maybe that's not hard for you to imagine. But imagine you live in a neighborhood like that, but a block away is a really nice neighborhood garden. Like it's it's right there, it's not that far, and it really is a nice place to visit and to look at. Well, you could spend all of your life just walking through the crappy streets and never go into that garden, or you can occasionally look at it and say, Well, that's really quite nice. I'm gonna move on and look at the rest of this crappy neighborhood. Or we could spend a lot of time looking at the garden and appreciating it. It's really that simple a choice as to what you want to do. Do you want to be paying attention to things that make you happy or paying attention to things that don't make you happy? And this idea can sound not just simple, but simplistic. Like you're a simpleton if you do it. You know, you can sound a bit like the village idiot in a way, if you think, well, no matter what happens, I'm gonna be happy with it. You know, you're at your job and your job tells you, well, we're gonna cut your pay by 25%. You're like, well, I'm just lucky to have a job. And you know, you go home and you say, Well, you're not gonna have three people living in your bedroom with you. It's like, well, I'm just lucky to have a roof over my head. And like, no matter what happens, you say, I'm happy. Nobody wants to live that life, right? And you, if you think that's what I'm recommending, you think, well, that's just a stupid perspective on things. Well, I'm not suggesting that you spend your life being pushed around and and giving up everything you've accomplished and things that you do find make your life worthwhile. But that simpleton that I just sort of described a moment ago would be an unusually happy person. You should find an accommodation with a willingness to work on improving your life and appreciation for your life as it is, and appreciation for appreciation for the opportunities to make your life better. Okay, so again, this episode, this little extra episode, it's mostly about encouragement. If you haven't listened to the full gratitude episode, take time, go back and do that, and then start doing the practice. You know, write a gratitude list once a day, at least five days a week. Your life, I promise, over time it will transform in that your perspective on it will transform. Okay, let's do a little mantra here as we do. You matter, this work matters, you could do this work, you have value, you making yourself happier matters, and you can do it. This is an easy practice. You know, just write on a piece of paper 10 items or so that make you feel good about your life. Little things like I got to sleep in today, or big things like my children are happy and healthy. Just get going. Okay, take care. We'll see you next time. All right, this has been the How to Be Happy and Successful Podcast. Thanks for listening. Hope you enjoyed it and found it useful. So if you're interested in reading an article that goes with this uh podcast episode, you can go to the website. Website is www.happy successful.com. So it's happy and successful.com is type 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. I also offered coaching. So if you'd like some help being happy or being successful, or both, you think my ideas are good, reach out to me to the website. If you like the episode, please go add a nice review about it wherever you listen to it. And if you didn't like it, or you just keep that to 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 of the console. 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 actually 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.