“Think into when someone was thankful for what you did and think about how you felt when receiving that gratitude”. Andrew Huberman
Notes from a Huberman Lab podcast (Nov 21)
Black – my notes from the podcast.
Brown – my additions
Green – step by step instructions
Blue – direct quotes
About the Huberman Lab:
Huberman Lab podcasts discuss relevant health topics backed by the latest scientific research.
The podcasts are hosted by Dr Andrew Huberman who is a tenured professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford University School of Medicine. His laboratory studies neural regeneration, neuroplasticity, and brain states such as stress, focus, fear, and optimal performance.
For more than 20 years, Dr. Huberman has consistently published original research findings and review articles in top-level peer-reviewed journals, including Nature, Cell, Neuron, and Current Biology.
This podcasts looks at gratitude practices and uses the latest studies to show what practices are most effective for our wellbeing.
The following notes are my takeaways from the podcast. To get the most value, I encourage you to listen to the full podcast, which is 1 hour and 25 minutes long. It is extremely rich in information and very well presented. It is impressive how Dr Huberman explains everything so thoroughly. https://hubermanlab.com/category/podcast-episodes/
In the meantime… because it can be hard to choose how to spend a free 1.5 hours with so much at our fingertips these days, here are some brief notes on what I found most valuable.
*The following notes are based on various scientific studies.
Benefits of practicing Gratitude
Gratitude practice has been shown to:
à Have a long-lasting impact on subjective wellbeing.
à Have an impact on our resilience to trauma, both by reframing past trauma and inoculating us against future trauma.
à Shift the way the defence systems in the brain function.
à Pro-social circuit activation - enhance social relationships (and relationship with oneself).
à There is some evidence to show it lowers inflammation markers in the body (women).
à Coordinate brain/heart breathing.
Effects are on a par with:
à Pharmacology
à HIT (High Intensity Training)
(i.e. practicing gratitude is not a weak substitute)
Repetition of a familiar story that enables you to create and feel the experience of gratitude for yourself has a longer lasting effect on wellbeing than listing things we are grateful for or the simple expression of gratitude.
Fortunately, the podcast gives very specific information on how to practice gratitude using “story”:
1. Choose a memory/story when you experienced receiving gratitude (or help) from someone, or you witnessed someone else, who you can relate to, expressing gratitude (or receiving help).
2. Make some bullet points about the story to aid fairly quick repetition, for example, the struggle, the help, how that impacted you emotionally, and anything else that reminds you of the richness of the experience/story
3. The recounting/remembering of the story can be as short as 1 minute, or longer (5 minutes). As long as it takes for you to rekindle the feeling of gratitude.
4. This practice should be done at least 3 times a week.
Lucky for us, the human brain loves a story.
So an actual event doesn’t need to happen in real time. We don’t need to go chasing about trying to create gratitude experiences all the time. It can be experienced through story.
TIPS:
à The gratitude story should be grounded in a story that you will have heard or experienced in its entirety at least once, and now can remember in a shorthand version to drop into the emotional associations with the story.
à The story doesn’t need to involve you directly. You can think deeply about how the other person may have felt.
“Theory of Mind” - The ability to understand the experience of another without actually being involved.
à The story needs to be embedded in a larger story, a bigger context that explains clearly why the gratitude was felt.
à The story should be one that inspires you, moves you,
à You should use the same story for a while (repetition of the same story is more important than frequency). Having a story that you can return to over and over again will activate your pro-social brain circuits, it will regulate your heart rate (as seen in the below study), and shift your physiology into a more relaxed state.
à The gratitude must be genuine.
à Receiving gratitude is the focus, rather than giving gratitude.
à Doing a breathing practice first may heighten the effect. This would be powerful breathing, e.g. focus on the inhale, rather than a long exhale.
“There has to be a real experience of someone else’s experience – the best way to do that is through ‘story’”. Andrew Huberman
Listing things that we are grateful for:
Counting your blessings is, of course, a worthy practice. The difference is that it has short-term benefits and the “gratitude story” repetition has long-term benefits.
Listing things that we are grateful for (either mentally or verbally), and focusing on the associated feelings of each, can alter our immediate experience by shifting our nervous system state; i.e. anxious to calm; from sympathetic (fight, flight, freeze) to parasympathetic (rest, digest, recuperate). However, this does not reprogram brain circuitry or impact on our overall sense of wellbeing long-term.
Listing is what most of us with a gratitude practice are doing. I know I have been doing this for years (and so has Huberman).
This is the same for simply expressing gratitude.
How repeating the Gratitude Story affects the brain:
Neuroplasticity is the brain and nervous system’s ability to change in response to experience.
Pro-social Circuits:
à Simply explained: some neuro circuits in the brain are specifically wired for pro-social behaviour, as opposed to others which are wired for aversive/defensive behaviours.
à These are parallel pathways, meaning when one is active the other is not and visa versa. So circuits wired for aversive behaviours are not active when pro-social circuits are active.
à Pro-social circuits enhance the level of detail we obtain from an experience. They encourage us to prolong an experience, get closer to it.
Negative Bias:
Our brain is wired for negative bias, for survival reasons. In order to survive, we need to be paying attention for possible threats at all times. It wouldn’t be good for survival if a beautiful flower display in the middle of the road took our attention more than an oncoming bus, for example.
This is why we need to actively practice gratitude. To re-establish a balance.
Neuromodulators are chemicals that make certain areas of the brain and neural circuits more active, e.g. dopamine, serotonin, ACTH, epinephrine…
Dopamine, epinephrine and norepinephrine activate exteroception (looking outward, to the outer world, pursuit).
Serotonin activates interoception (looking inward, gratitude for what you have).
Antonio Damasio studied neural correlates of gratitude.
Medial prefrontal
cortex – affects the deeper areas of the brain (e.g. hypothalamus.) It gives our experience context. E.g. If we get into an ice bath by choice we can have positive health effects and a good experience. If we were pushed or forced into an ice bath we would probably have an unpleasant experience and possibly negative health effects. It’s the same thing – the water would still feel really cold either way, but the mindset is different.
Ineffective Gratitude Practice:
Genuine gratitude or fake it till you make it?
The studies show that you cannot lie to the brain. You cannot fake it till you make it. This is a myth. You cannot simply lie to yourself or try to trick yourself by saying “this is horrible but I’m going to think good thoughts about it to make it okay…”.
The Significance of “story”
A study has shown that if you tell the same story to different people, in different settings, at different times of the day, in different parts of the world while measuring their heartrate (by ECG), their heartrates all show a similar pattern. This has significant implications for pro-social behaviour and how we can use “story”.
(Cell Press Journal)
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