Stumbling on Happiness

Harvard professor Daniel Gilbert has described a psychological immune system which kicks in to promote happiness--and you can give it a big boost with gratitude.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to The Gratitude Diaries, a production of My Heart Radio.
Hi I'm Janice Kaplan. Thanks for joining me for another
episode and another chance to think more gratefully. Today's tip.
If you've made it a goal to be happier and
spread a little gratitude in the world, take some comfort

(00:25):
in knowing that your brain is on your side. When
I was writing my book The Gratitude Diaries, I was
struck by how many examples I found of people who
were very grateful and truly happy after situations that most
of us would consider pretty terrible. For example, lifestyle guru
Martha Stewart spent five months in prison on a stock

(00:49):
trading case back in two thousand five. She emerged saying
how grateful she was to meet the women there and
how grateful she was to understand another side of life.
A lot of people feel like they've been in prison
after these last several months of pandemic lockdowns, and maybe
that's going to turn out to be okay. In his

(01:10):
wonderful book Stumbling on Happiness, Harvard's psychologist Daniel Gilbert talked
about how bad we are at predicting how will feel
about going through a traumatic time. He gives the example
of would be brides and grooms who get jolted and
left at the altar. He says, if you asked someone
ahead of time how they would feel in that situation,

(01:32):
they would expect to be devastated, and they'd use phrases
like the worst thing that ever happened to me. But
those to whom it actually did happen see it more positively.
As he put it, once we've actually been heartbroken and
humiliated in front of our family, friends and florists, our

(01:52):
brains begin shopping for a less dreadful view, and the
human brain is one smart shopper. Our brains shopping for
a more positive view on events happens all the time.
Professor Gilbert describes it as a psychological immune system that
kicks in when we can't change something. You know how

(02:15):
a regular immune system works. It fights off the bad stuff,
the viruses and bacteria that get into your body. A
psychological immune system fights off the bad stuff that gets
into your mind. When things occur that seemed bad or upsetting,
your brain finds a way to see the good in them,
from truly terrible situations to less dramatic ones. Professor Gilbert

(02:39):
found that a significant percentage of people who survived traumas
claimed that their lives were enhanced by what had happened.
In the Jilted at the Altar example, your brain kicks
in to tell you how lucky you were to be
saved from a bad marriage, and how grateful you should
be to have seen the real person you were marrying

(03:00):
before you said I do, As Gilbert charmingly put it,
I know, I know it sounds suspiciously like the title
of a country song, but the fact is that most
folks do pretty darn good when things go pretty darn bad,
because we don't realize how our minds will kick in

(03:21):
to protect us. Bad events are usually worse when we
imagine them than when they actually occur. In several experiments,
Dr Gilbert asked people to guess how they'd feel if
they lost a job or a loved one, if they
flunked an exam or flubbed an interview. Then he looked
at people who had actually been through the experience. He

(03:44):
found that we all overestimate how awful will feel and
for how long will feel awful. In making the predictions,
we don't realize that once the calamity occurs, that psychological
immune system will kick in to make the awful seem
more tolerable. The very best way to boost your psychological

(04:06):
immune system is with gratitude. Making gratitude lists, giving yourself
a gratitude habit, and teaching yourself to reframe a situation
are all like vaccines that boost your natural immunity, Gratitude
provides you the resiliency to bounce back from any setback.

(04:26):
This hasn't been a perfect year for most people, but
the first round of real vaccines against COVID nineteen are
being given in US cities right now, and we're starting
to see some hope that sometime in life may come
back to something more familiar. The Christmas holiday is this week,
and that often inspires hope and possibility. If there's a

(04:50):
star on top of your Christmas tree, it's probably a
reminder of light in the darkness. The year is drawing
to a close, and instead of just being grateful that
it's over, you can probably think of reasons that you're
grateful that some of the craziness actually happened. So if
you're starting to feel some hope and optimism this week,

(05:12):
let your brain help you out. It's likely to be
shopping for a happier explanation for what you've been through,
and you can help that psychological immune system function best
by looking for reasons to be grateful. Thanks for joining me.
I'll be back with more ideas than how to have
a happy and grateful holiday season. Have a great day.

(05:38):
The Gratitude Diaries is a production of I heart Radio.
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