November 24, 2025 • 27 mins
It's Thanksgiving - a good time to think about gratitude and being selfless. Concentrating on the things we have to be grateful for is a great way to boost your happiness. So thank the people who've done good things for you, and think of ways you can help others too.
This circle of gratitude – the science suggests – will also make you a better friend to one of the most important people in your life… your future self.
In a re-run of a 2020 episode, Dr Laurie investigates this effect with Northeastern University’s Professor David DeSteno – author of “Emotional Success: The Power of Gratitude, Compassion and Pride.”
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin Hey Happiness Lab listeners. Here in the US, Thanksgiving
season is just around the corner, and that means it's
a time of year to connect with an emotion that's
super important for feeling happier, gratitude. Many of us associate
gratitude with things like thank you cards or toasts around
the dinner table, but research shows that gratitude can also
(00:37):
be a powerful tool for reaching our future goals. How
can gratitude help your performance? You ask? Well To answer that,
I'm turning back to one of the episodes we did
all the way back in twenty twenty. In this throwback episode,
I talked to my friend David Desteno. David is a
professor of psychology at Northeastern University, the host of the
How God Works podcast, and the author of Emotional Success,
(01:00):
The Power of Gratitude, Compassion, and Pride. David's work shows
how the simple practice of gratitude might be the very
habit you need just to feel happier, but to be
nicer to your future self. I hope you enjoyed this episode,
Have a happy Thanksgiving, and here's to being a bit
more grateful most of the time. I like to think
(01:22):
I'm a relatively nice person. But if I'm being completely honest,
there is one person out there that I do tend
to screw over constantly. Now, mind you, I don't intend
to be a jerk to this person. I mean I
actually care about her a lot, so I'm not purposefully
out to get her, but I do inadvertently wind up
making her life a lot more difficult. I've roped her
(01:46):
into doing all kinds of things she didn't want to
deal with. I've cheated her out of money, I've made
her pick up the pieces whenever I miss a work deadline,
and I've even forced her to eat healthier while I
get to pick out. This poor girl winds up being
the collateral damage in nearly every bad decision I've ever made.
So who is this easy mark that person I'm constantly sabotaging.
(02:09):
She is future Lauri. She's me just in the future
tomorrow Lauri or next month Laurie. And let me tell
you from her perspective, right now, Laurie is a real bitch.
To be happier in twenty twenty, I need to stop
screwing over future Laurie. That's the only way I'm going
(02:29):
to form better habits and meet my new decade goals?
But how do I stop sabotaging my future self? What
can we all do to avoid instant gratification and take
better care of our tomorrow selves? Our lying minds give
us a quick answer to this question. We need willpower.
I bet you still have the intuition that gritting your
(02:51):
teeth is the way forward, but that just force yourself
kind of willpower tends to disappear as soon as times
get rough, deserting us in the very moment we need
it most. But what if I told you that science
teaches us an easier way to kick ourselves into goal mode,
one that makes delaying gratification to protect our future selves
a total breeze. Sound too good to be true, Well,
(03:13):
it gets even more shocking because my favorite thing about
this willpower supercharge strategy is that it doesn't just help
you achieve your future goals, it can also make you
happier in the process. So if you're ready to harness
some self control and feel better, then join me doctor
Laurie Santo's for the next installment of the Happiness Lab
twenty twenty. I wanted to learn more about this strategy
(03:40):
that helps you achieve your future goals and feel good.
So I dropped a line to my friend David Disteno.
Are we rolling?
Speaker 2 (03:48):
Here? We go? I'm David Disteno, Professor of psychology at
Northeastern University and author of Emotional Success, The Power of Gratitude,
Compassion and Pride.
Speaker 1 (03:59):
So, Dave, one of the things I love about your
book is that it really discusses in a lot of
detail the limits of willpower. I think in the book
you actually call it a candle in the wind. So
why is will power so fragile?
Speaker 2 (04:10):
Well, let me give you some examples of why I
say that. So, we tend to use willpower when we're
trying to pursue a long term goal, you know, something
that has a big reward in the future, but might
be difficult in the moment or require some effort on
our part to persevere toward. You know, whether you're trying
to study to do well in school or on an exam,
exercising and eating right, saving money rather than buying the
(04:32):
new iPhone. And we tend to try and use willpower
to overcome our desires for more immediate gratification. And if
it's something that we consider even more important, you know,
this time of the year. We can think about New
Year's resolutions, right, eight percent of New Year's resolutions are
kept till the year's end. Twenty five percent are gone
in the first week or two of January. And so
(04:54):
we're doing something really wrong, right If pursuing our long
term goals we all know leads to success, yet our
failure rate is that high. And there's a lot of
reasons why willpower is weak. For most of our history
here on Earth as a human species, the future very uncertain.
I didn't know if the food I was looking at
was going to be here tomorrow. I didn't know if
I was going to be here in two months. But
(05:16):
now the world is a lot more certain, and it's
just that our mental calibration hasn't caught up to that certainty.
If you're always using willpower to kind of tamp down
desires for what you want in the moment, then your
body is in kind of a perpetual state of stress.
You're always trying to tamp down one desire to persevere
(05:36):
towards something in the long term, to not eat something
you want, but to exercise. That is a problem. Work
by Greg Miller, who's a psychologist at Northwestern University was
looking at this in terms of students in high school
and college who were studying for exams. What he found
is when you train kids in these cognitive strategies to
build willpower, to build grit, to kind of suppress their desires,
(06:00):
yeah they perform better, but there was actually premature aging
to their DNA because of the stress, which, if you
extrapolate out, means yeah, I'm doing better, but I'm not
going to be around as long to enjoy the fruits
of that success. But the other problem is, oftentimes we
choose not to invoke willpower in the first place because
(06:20):
we're really good as humans at engaging in rationalization. Right,
I deserve the extra scoop of Ben and Jerry's I've
been good this week. I deserve to spend money on
myself or whatever it might be. And if we go
that route, we're not going to engage in willpower in
the first place. We're going to give ourselves the easy
way out.
Speaker 1 (06:38):
This looks pretty bad for New Year's resolutions, right, Like
this one thing we usually rely on, willpower is not
going to save us. So if not willpower, if not
pushing ourselves, you know, what can we do?
Speaker 2 (06:47):
You know, economists talk about this problem as they's a
fancy term which is called intertemporal choice, which basically means
do I want an immediate gratification now or am I
willing to forego that so that I can have a
better gain in the future. And if you think about
why we as a human species have the ability for
self control, self control didn't evolve so that I could
(07:09):
save from my four oh one k. None of it
existed for most of our evolutionary history. What mattered for
our success was the ability to be a little bit
selfless as opposed to selfish, that is, to cooperate with others,
to be fair, to be honest, to be generous. Those
are the traits that allowed us to be good partners
(07:31):
and valuable partners to other people. And what underlie those
abilities are what I call moral emotions, things like gratitude,
things like compassion, things like authentic pride, not arrogance and
hubrist They tend to make us more willing to be selfless,
to cooperate with others, to engage in self sacrifice, to
(07:53):
be willing to tamp down our desires for immediate gratification.
And people often ask me, Laurie, you know Dave. If
I want to be a success, should I be a
nice guy or a nice woman, or should I be
kind of a selfish jerk? And by that I mean
should I cooperate and work fairly with others or should
I basically exploit others and be very self interested? And
(08:14):
the answer what science shows is, you know, I say, well,
what's your time frame, right, And if you want to
be a success in the short term, yeah, you can
be a jerk, you can be selfish, you can exploit others.
Individuals who are self interested to exploit other people's rise
very quickly, but over time they begin to fail because
no one wants to cooperate with them, no one wants
(08:35):
to work with them. And individuals who are selfless, who
have the ability to control their desires for immediate gratification
and selfish behaviors, do well in the long run. And
so a lot of what I argue in this book
and in my work is that we are not using
the emotional tools that we have in our arsenal to
help us succeed in the long run. We're relying on
(08:59):
these weaker tools of kind of tamping down emotional responses
via willpower that researchers shown are pretty fragile.
Speaker 1 (09:07):
So let's zoom in on one of these tools. In particular.
You mentioned gratitude, Like, what is gratitude?
Speaker 2 (09:13):
Yeah, so, gratitude is the emotion that we feel when
someone gives us something of value at some cost to themselves,
a present or financial assistance. It can be you know,
a shoulder to cry on. It can be someone who's
going to help us and mentor us. The important thing
about it is that we feel that the benefit that
(09:33):
this person is giving us we couldn't achieve very easily
on our own, and they're doing it not to help themselves,
but at some cost. And it's not a feeling of
indebtedness in the negative sense, but a feeling of this
person really helped me, and I value that and I
want to go above and beyond to pay them back.
That feeling is gratitude.
Speaker 1 (09:54):
I mean, gratitude sounds awesome and it increases happiness. But
you know, at first, blush, it doesn't seem obvious that
this emotion has anything to do with willpower. You know
that feeling grateful isn't going to help me eat healthier
or get to the gym in the morning. But like
what's the connection there.
Speaker 2 (10:08):
Well, the beautiful about gratitude is, and any emotion really is,
while we feel it, it kind of sets our expectation
for what we should value and what we should do next.
Why would you have an emotion that's only focused on
the past? Right If you're feeling an emotion that can't
change anything you do in the future, it's a waste
even metabolically, Why would the brain want you to waste
(10:29):
its time feeling something? And so I tell people gratitude
is really about the future. It makes us value long
term goals more than immediate gratification.
Speaker 1 (10:40):
You may still doubt the idea that gratitude is more
powerful for protecting our future selves than good old fashioned willpower,
but there's some super cool scientific results to back it up.
Once it we'll hear about right after this break, that
happiness lab will be right back. What's the biggest obstacle
(11:00):
to being kinder to our future selves, to getting more
exercise and stopping procrastination and saving more money. Turns out
it's our lying minds. We tell ourselves that all we
need is a bit more willpower, that our self control
will save us. But as we've seen, when push comes
to shove our rationalizing minds will just say it's okay
to screw over our future selves just this once. But
(11:23):
what if we tried a different strategy. What if we
harness an emotion like gratitude, one that naturally primes us
to protect our future selves. This was exactly what researcher
David Desteno set out to test. He defies an experiment
to see whether people could be nice to their future
selves in the face of attempting reward.
Speaker 2 (11:40):
So in our lab, we bring people in, we have
them answer a bunch of questions of the form would
you rather have ten dollars now or thirty dollars in
three weeks? Right? And to make it real, we tell
them we're going to pick one of your answers and
honor it. So if you said I'd rather have ten
dollars now than thirty dollars in three weeks, we gave
you ten dollars. If you said I'd rather have thirty
dollars in three weeks, We'd send you a check in
(12:03):
three weeks. And what we found, right, is that most
people tend to be pretty impatient. That is, they discount
the value of future rewards a lot. So for example,
our average subject said they would take seventeen dollars now
rather than one hundred dollars in a year. Another way
of saying that is, they viewed one hundred dollars in
a year is worth seventeen dollars now. And I don't
(12:24):
know about you or your listeners, but if you don't
need that seventeen dollars to survive right now, then passing
up an opportunity to quintuple your money given with the
banks are paying is not the greatest decision. When we
made people feel grateful right suddenly, how much they discounted
the future, how impatient they were to get that money
(12:44):
in their hands changed. These folks suddenly viewed one hundred
dollars in a year not as worth seventeen dollars now,
but as worth thirty dollars. So we'd have to give
them at least thirty dollars before they passed up the
opportunity for one hundred dollars in a year. And what
that means is they're discounting the value of a future
reward less. And if you take this and you extrapolate
(13:04):
it out to the real world to decisions that matter,
you know other people have found that people who experience
gratitude are more willing to exercise for better health, They're
more willing to save their money rather than spend it
on impulse buys. They're more willing to work harder for
long term goals. And so what we see here is
(13:27):
just by changing the emotional state you're in, how much
you value the future changes.
Speaker 1 (13:33):
And so that raises the question of you know, how
did you, as this clever experimentalist, get people to experience gratitude?
You know, how do you make people more grateful in
the lab?
Speaker 2 (13:42):
One way we do this is we have them doing
this task on the computer that's designed to be god
awful boring.
Speaker 1 (13:49):
Psychologists are good at that.
Speaker 2 (13:50):
Yeah, it's a god awful boring tech god af a boring,
And right as they think they're about to be done,
the computer is rigged crash or to look like it
crashes on them. And then the experimenter comes in and says, oh,
I'm sorry, you're going to have to do this all
over again. Let me go get the tech. And of
course people are not happy. We have somebody else in
(14:11):
the lab who are our subjects. Believe is another subject
taking the study, but it's actually an actor who works
for us, and this person will get up, walk over
to them and say, oh, this is terrible. I'm pretty
good with computers. Let me see if I can help you.
And so, you know, she starts futzing with the wires
and surrepetitiously hits a key that starts a timer and
lo and behold, bang the computer comes back on. And
(14:35):
ninety five percent of our subjects are incredibly grateful for this.
Five percent of them think somehow they fix it themselves,
but for the most part when they get excluded, but
for the most for if people are very grateful because
they don't want to do this god awful task over again.
And then that way, what we can find is that
the people who are actually experiencing gratitude in the moment
(14:56):
compared to people who are feeling neutral or people who
are feeling happy. And that was important because we wanted
to show it wasn't just that you were feeling positive,
but that it was something really particular about gratitude. What
gratitude makes you do is engage in self control and
as I said, evolutionarily speaking of that, so you're willing
to be less selfish. But if you think about it,
(15:17):
when you feel gratitude, there's one person besides strangers or
people you meet on the street or friends who you
can help that's important to your own future goals, and
that is your own future self. And what we find
is when you're feeling grateful, yes you're willing to sacrifice
for other people, but you're also willing to sacrifice for
your own future self. And that's how you can pivot
(15:40):
the power of gratitude from just being this emotion that
has kind of a moral cast to do the right thing,
to repay debts or to behave morally, to actually help
your own future self achieve her or his own goals.
Speaker 1 (15:52):
I wanted to talk a little bit about some of
the specific domains in which gratitude helps because I just
find these data it's totally fascinating. So in your book,
you show that gratitude doesn't just help you on financial
decision making, it can also help you, like at your job.
Speaker 2 (16:04):
Yeah, it just depends what your job is. So you know,
Adam Grant has this great data where he should that
people who are working in a call center and talk
about a thankless job. You're calling people up for fundraising,
asking people to donate money When gratitude is expressed in
those offices, people's preductivity goes up fifty percent, and not
(16:25):
only do they work harder, but they're actually happy about it.
They feel good about it, and so there's no stress there.
When you're a doctor, right, if you're feeling gratitude, it
makes you more willing to invest the effort to do
the right thing, and so you're more willing, the data
show to engage in greater thought in terms of your diagnoses.
(16:47):
And so gratitude in whatever the realm is that we're
talking about. By giving you more patients, by giving you
and nudging you, is going to improve the outcome. And
while it's doing it, it's going to solve two other
problems for you. And and this is something else that
I really want to talk about, is that it does
it in a way that's better for your mind and
(17:08):
your body in terms of your physical health and your
mental well being.
Speaker 1 (17:12):
And so talk about the mental well being part, because
one of the things we're trying to do is to
help people find strategies that can allow them to achieve
their goals, but in doing so, can make them happy
in the moment too. And that's really the amazing thing
about gratitude is it doesn't just help you exercise more
and save more. It feels good, unlike willpower.
Speaker 2 (17:29):
That's right. So David Brooks likes to talk about that.
There are two types of virtues people have. Resume virtues,
which are the virtues like being dogged, working hard, having grit,
trying to get ahead, and eulogy virtues, things like being fair,
being generous, being kind. And the eulogy virtues are the
ones that ultimately we want to be remembered for. They're
(17:52):
the ones that draw other people to us, that give
us the relationships that help our lives. And so if
we're pursuing our own success and whatever realm it might be,
you know, as I said, for millennia, the way to
do that was to have good character, to be fair,
be generous. It used to be that you would give
(18:12):
virtues and resume virtues were the same, there was no
difference between them. But because of the way we structure
our lives now we can pursue success in a very
atomistic manner. That is, you know, we can just be
dogged and if we earn enough money we can meet
all of our needs. We don't have to have other
people around us as much. But that leads to a
(18:32):
not very fulfilling life and it's a very stressful existence.
When you choose to pursue success by cultivating emotions like gratitude,
by virtue of what you're doing, Yes, it's going to
give you the self control to pursue your goals, to
have patience, to persevere in the face of difficulty, but
(18:53):
it's also going to change your relationships. Right when we
feel gratitude, not only do we work harder, but we
show more appreciation to others around us. It makes us
behave more loyally, it makes us behave more compassionately toward
other people, build that social safety net that are there
to buttress us. And so you know, when you look
(19:14):
at a gratitude people who feel more gratitude, yes they
exercise more, Yes they save more, Yes, they get ahead
in life more, but they also sleep better at night.
They also have better blood pressure, they show less stress
reactivity than do people who don't experience gratitude more often.
They even have better cholesterol. How and why these things
(19:36):
are intertwined is an interesting story, you know, having to
do with the stress and do they exercise more because
of that? Gratitude, et cetera. But gratitude really is a buffer.
It helps us pursue our resume virtues and our eulogy
virtues at the same time.
Speaker 1 (19:50):
What's so striking about this, though, is that I think
if you ask people, people often think those resume virtues
and eulogy virtues are in conflict, right, Like, you know,
to boost up your resume, you got to you know,
stop feeling your fellow man. And that's right, but it's
just the opposite. So so much of this podcast is
about the idea that our minds are leading us astray. Right.
We have this bad into about what gratitude is going
(20:10):
to do, Like it makes us weak, you know, it's
going to make us help others rather than getting out
of life.
Speaker 2 (20:14):
Yeah. And part of that, right is, you know, I
think our resume and our eulogy versus we think of
them as distinct, but for most of our evolutionary history
they weren't. And we're kind of told that, you know,
the way to succeed is to be self interested, but
if you actually look at the data, it's not true.
You know, I think we're being sold a bill of goods.
(20:35):
You know, it is in the short term, right, the
faster way is to kind of be self interested. But
in the long run, it is people who experienced gratitude,
who experience compassion and empathy that do really, really well.
You know, my friend Bob Frank's economists at Cornell, and
he wrote this great book called Success and Luck, and
he talks about the illusion that people have that the
(20:58):
way that any of us succeeded was through our own
self determination. And I'm not saying that doesn't matter, of
course it does. But there's a lot of luck along
the way. And if you think about what a lot
of luck is is, it's not really luck. It's people
open in doors for us. It's people supporting us in
our hours of need and helping us out and us
doing the same for them. Right, that's what a lot
(21:20):
of luck is, not all. When people do that for us,
we feel gratitude. And when we feel gratitude, it makes
us not only want to pay those people back, but
to pay it forward to other people. So, for example,
in our studies that we were talking about, when we
make people feel gratitude in the lab and then they
leave the lab thinking the experiment is over, and we
(21:40):
have a stranger approach them who asks for help, they'll
help the stranger too. And the reason why is when
you feel gratitude, it makes you want to help someone else.
The brain is nudging you that way because in the
long term, that's a successful strategy. And so the beautiful
thing about gratitude is it makes us pay it forward
and it creates kind of an ongoing cycle. And so
(22:02):
I think people often feel that gratitude can be a
sign of weakness, but really gratitude is an emotion of power.
Speaker 1 (22:10):
And so hopefully listeners are sold on this idea that
becoming more grateful is a good thing. But then that
raises the question how do you do that? What can
listeners do to improve their sense of gratitude.
Speaker 2 (22:21):
One strategy is simply doing daily reflections, thinking for a
few minutes about what it is that you're grateful for
in life. Lots of people do gratitude diaries. The trick there,
right is we all have the two or three things
that were incredibly grateful for in our lives. But if
you think about the same things over and over again,
they're going to lose their power. You're going to habituate
(22:43):
to it. It's going to become boring and so think
about little things. Think about the person who gave you
their seat on the bus or the subway. Think about
the person who gave you directions, you let you get
on the highway, someone who held the door for you.
And you might say, Dave, really, is that going to work?
It does. So you know, I told you earlier about
the way we induce gratitude in our lab where we
(23:04):
have these these big shenanigans we go through where computers
crash on people. When we simply ask people reflect on
something in your life that you're grateful for, whether it's
something somebody did for you, your parents, a friend, the universe,
if you believe in God, God, whatever it might be.
Those simple reflections produce the same exact effects. And so
(23:24):
it may sound trite, but it's not. Cultivating gratitude daily
in your life. We'll do this through reflections. Another way
is to engage in something called the reciprocity ring. This
is great if you have an office and you're trying
to create a culture of gratitude, or a classroom, or
even for families at home, have everybody take a post
it note and write on the post it note something
they need help with. Then on a board, or on
(23:47):
the refrigerator or wherever it might be. Stick up those
post it notes in kind of a circle. Now, everybody,
take a different color post or note and write your
name on it, and go up and stick it next
to a post it note that's up there already. Where
a person's requesting helps you, you're saying, Ah, John says
he needs help with this, I dave am going to
help him with this, right, And then what you do
(24:09):
is draw lines or tie strings or tape whatever you
might be, and what you'll see is connections in this circle.
And then most importantly, go give that assistance that you said.
And what this does is a few things. One, it
shows that asking for help is okay and offering to
help is okay. And by you actually helping the person
(24:31):
who you said you were going to help, that person
feels gratitude. And what our research shows is when that
person feels gratitude, it increases the probability very dramatically that
they're just going to go and offer help to someone else.
And it's a way of creating kind of a norm
and a culture for gratitude in your family, or your
classroom or your workplace.
Speaker 1 (24:49):
Have you used this in your lab or in your
own family. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (24:52):
I you know, before I started doing this research, I
wouldn't say I was an ungrateful person, but I don't
think I thought a lot about gratitude in my life.
But what I realized through doing this work is that
you can curate your own emotional life. Right. Emotions don't
just happen to us. We can curate what we feel
(25:14):
by taking time to think about what we want to feel,
by paying attention to the people that help us as
opposed to the people that annoy us. And so what
I've begun to do in my own daily life now
is to do that is to focus on when somebody
does something for me or someone helps me, to not
say thank you and quickly move by that, but to
focus on it for a few minutes, to curate the
(25:35):
emotions that I feel are important and valuable in my
daily experience as opposed to the ones that aren't. And
what happens when you do that is it begins to
change the lens through which you automatically view your life,
so that suddenly gratitude isn't something that you're trying to curate,
but it becomes a lens that you pick out things
with daily in life, and I think it becomes a
(25:56):
habit in some ways. And the beautiful thing about gratitude
is as opposed to habits, is you know, if I
have a habit to save money that works for saving money,
if I have a habit to study that works for studying.
But if I have a habit to experience gratitude, that's
going to bleed over into making me better able to
pursue my long term goals in any realm. And I
(26:17):
would encourage your listeners to try and create gratitude as
a habit.
Speaker 1 (26:24):
After talking to Dave and hearing about his work, I've
decided on a personal goal for this new decade. I'm
going to stop sabotaging future Laurie. I'm going to stop
assuming that will power will save me. Instead, I'm going
to harness the power of my moral emotions. I'm going
to work harder to become a bit more grateful starting now.
So here goes. I'm so grateful that Dave and so
(26:47):
many other scientists took time out of their busy schedules
to share these insights with us. I'm so so thankful
that we all have a fresh start with this new decade.
To make a bunch of positive changes that we want
to see in twenty twenty. And I'm so so grateful
for you. Thanks so much for listening to this podcast,
and thank you for being a part of this journey
to use science to live a little bit better. And finally,
(27:11):
I'd be super grateful if you joined the Future Laari
for our third bonus episode of The Happiness Lab twenty
twenty
Pushkin Hey Happiness Lab listeners. Here in the US, Thanksgiving
season is just around the corner, and that means it's
a time of year to connect with an emotion that's
super important for feeling happier, gratitude. Many of us associate
gratitude with things like thank you cards or toasts around
the dinner table, but research shows that gratitude can also
(00:37):
be a powerful tool for reaching our future goals. How
can gratitude help your performance? You ask? Well To answer that,
I'm turning back to one of the episodes we did
all the way back in twenty twenty. In this throwback episode,
I talked to my friend David Desteno. David is a
professor of psychology at Northeastern University, the host of the
How God Works podcast, and the author of Emotional Success,
(01:00):
The Power of Gratitude, Compassion, and Pride. David's work shows
how the simple practice of gratitude might be the very
habit you need just to feel happier, but to be
nicer to your future self. I hope you enjoyed this episode,
Have a happy Thanksgiving, and here's to being a bit
more grateful most of the time. I like to think
(01:22):
I'm a relatively nice person. But if I'm being completely honest,
there is one person out there that I do tend
to screw over constantly. Now, mind you, I don't intend
to be a jerk to this person. I mean I
actually care about her a lot, so I'm not purposefully
out to get her, but I do inadvertently wind up
making her life a lot more difficult. I've roped her
(01:46):
into doing all kinds of things she didn't want to
deal with. I've cheated her out of money, I've made
her pick up the pieces whenever I miss a work deadline,
and I've even forced her to eat healthier while I
get to pick out. This poor girl winds up being
the collateral damage in nearly every bad decision I've ever made.
So who is this easy mark that person I'm constantly sabotaging.
(02:09):
She is future Lauri. She's me just in the future
tomorrow Lauri or next month Laurie. And let me tell
you from her perspective, right now, Laurie is a real bitch.
To be happier in twenty twenty, I need to stop
screwing over future Laurie. That's the only way I'm going
(02:29):
to form better habits and meet my new decade goals?
But how do I stop sabotaging my future self? What
can we all do to avoid instant gratification and take
better care of our tomorrow selves? Our lying minds give
us a quick answer to this question. We need willpower.
I bet you still have the intuition that gritting your
(02:51):
teeth is the way forward, but that just force yourself
kind of willpower tends to disappear as soon as times
get rough, deserting us in the very moment we need
it most. But what if I told you that science
teaches us an easier way to kick ourselves into goal mode,
one that makes delaying gratification to protect our future selves
a total breeze. Sound too good to be true, Well,
(03:13):
it gets even more shocking because my favorite thing about
this willpower supercharge strategy is that it doesn't just help
you achieve your future goals, it can also make you
happier in the process. So if you're ready to harness
some self control and feel better, then join me doctor
Laurie Santo's for the next installment of the Happiness Lab
twenty twenty. I wanted to learn more about this strategy
(03:40):
that helps you achieve your future goals and feel good.
So I dropped a line to my friend David Disteno.
Are we rolling?
Speaker 2 (03:48):
Here? We go? I'm David Disteno, Professor of psychology at
Northeastern University and author of Emotional Success, The Power of Gratitude,
Compassion and Pride.
Speaker 1 (03:59):
So, Dave, one of the things I love about your
book is that it really discusses in a lot of
detail the limits of willpower. I think in the book
you actually call it a candle in the wind. So
why is will power so fragile?
Speaker 2 (04:10):
Well, let me give you some examples of why I
say that. So, we tend to use willpower when we're
trying to pursue a long term goal, you know, something
that has a big reward in the future, but might
be difficult in the moment or require some effort on
our part to persevere toward. You know, whether you're trying
to study to do well in school or on an exam,
exercising and eating right, saving money rather than buying the
(04:32):
new iPhone. And we tend to try and use willpower
to overcome our desires for more immediate gratification. And if
it's something that we consider even more important, you know,
this time of the year. We can think about New
Year's resolutions, right, eight percent of New Year's resolutions are
kept till the year's end. Twenty five percent are gone
in the first week or two of January. And so
(04:54):
we're doing something really wrong, right If pursuing our long
term goals we all know leads to success, yet our
failure rate is that high. And there's a lot of
reasons why willpower is weak. For most of our history
here on Earth as a human species, the future very uncertain.
I didn't know if the food I was looking at
was going to be here tomorrow. I didn't know if
I was going to be here in two months. But
(05:16):
now the world is a lot more certain, and it's
just that our mental calibration hasn't caught up to that certainty.
If you're always using willpower to kind of tamp down
desires for what you want in the moment, then your
body is in kind of a perpetual state of stress.
You're always trying to tamp down one desire to persevere
(05:36):
towards something in the long term, to not eat something
you want, but to exercise. That is a problem. Work
by Greg Miller, who's a psychologist at Northwestern University was
looking at this in terms of students in high school
and college who were studying for exams. What he found
is when you train kids in these cognitive strategies to
build willpower, to build grit, to kind of suppress their desires,
(06:00):
yeah they perform better, but there was actually premature aging
to their DNA because of the stress, which, if you
extrapolate out, means yeah, I'm doing better, but I'm not
going to be around as long to enjoy the fruits
of that success. But the other problem is, oftentimes we
choose not to invoke willpower in the first place because
(06:20):
we're really good as humans at engaging in rationalization. Right,
I deserve the extra scoop of Ben and Jerry's I've
been good this week. I deserve to spend money on
myself or whatever it might be. And if we go
that route, we're not going to engage in willpower in
the first place. We're going to give ourselves the easy
way out.
Speaker 1 (06:38):
This looks pretty bad for New Year's resolutions, right, Like
this one thing we usually rely on, willpower is not
going to save us. So if not willpower, if not
pushing ourselves, you know, what can we do?
Speaker 2 (06:47):
You know, economists talk about this problem as they's a
fancy term which is called intertemporal choice, which basically means
do I want an immediate gratification now or am I
willing to forego that so that I can have a
better gain in the future. And if you think about
why we as a human species have the ability for
self control, self control didn't evolve so that I could
(07:09):
save from my four oh one k. None of it
existed for most of our evolutionary history. What mattered for
our success was the ability to be a little bit
selfless as opposed to selfish, that is, to cooperate with others,
to be fair, to be honest, to be generous. Those
are the traits that allowed us to be good partners
(07:31):
and valuable partners to other people. And what underlie those
abilities are what I call moral emotions, things like gratitude,
things like compassion, things like authentic pride, not arrogance and
hubrist They tend to make us more willing to be selfless,
to cooperate with others, to engage in self sacrifice, to
(07:53):
be willing to tamp down our desires for immediate gratification.
And people often ask me, Laurie, you know Dave. If
I want to be a success, should I be a
nice guy or a nice woman, or should I be
kind of a selfish jerk? And by that I mean
should I cooperate and work fairly with others or should
I basically exploit others and be very self interested? And
(08:14):
the answer what science shows is, you know, I say, well,
what's your time frame, right, And if you want to
be a success in the short term, yeah, you can
be a jerk, you can be selfish, you can exploit others.
Individuals who are self interested to exploit other people's rise
very quickly, but over time they begin to fail because
no one wants to cooperate with them, no one wants
(08:35):
to work with them. And individuals who are selfless, who
have the ability to control their desires for immediate gratification
and selfish behaviors, do well in the long run. And
so a lot of what I argue in this book
and in my work is that we are not using
the emotional tools that we have in our arsenal to
help us succeed in the long run. We're relying on
(08:59):
these weaker tools of kind of tamping down emotional responses
via willpower that researchers shown are pretty fragile.
Speaker 1 (09:07):
So let's zoom in on one of these tools. In particular.
You mentioned gratitude, Like, what is gratitude?
Speaker 2 (09:13):
Yeah, so, gratitude is the emotion that we feel when
someone gives us something of value at some cost to themselves,
a present or financial assistance. It can be you know,
a shoulder to cry on. It can be someone who's
going to help us and mentor us. The important thing
about it is that we feel that the benefit that
(09:33):
this person is giving us we couldn't achieve very easily
on our own, and they're doing it not to help themselves,
but at some cost. And it's not a feeling of
indebtedness in the negative sense, but a feeling of this
person really helped me, and I value that and I
want to go above and beyond to pay them back.
That feeling is gratitude.
Speaker 1 (09:54):
I mean, gratitude sounds awesome and it increases happiness. But
you know, at first, blush, it doesn't seem obvious that
this emotion has anything to do with willpower. You know
that feeling grateful isn't going to help me eat healthier
or get to the gym in the morning. But like
what's the connection there.
Speaker 2 (10:08):
Well, the beautiful about gratitude is, and any emotion really is,
while we feel it, it kind of sets our expectation
for what we should value and what we should do next.
Why would you have an emotion that's only focused on
the past? Right If you're feeling an emotion that can't
change anything you do in the future, it's a waste
even metabolically, Why would the brain want you to waste
(10:29):
its time feeling something? And so I tell people gratitude
is really about the future. It makes us value long
term goals more than immediate gratification.
Speaker 1 (10:40):
You may still doubt the idea that gratitude is more
powerful for protecting our future selves than good old fashioned willpower,
but there's some super cool scientific results to back it up.
Once it we'll hear about right after this break, that
happiness lab will be right back. What's the biggest obstacle
(11:00):
to being kinder to our future selves, to getting more
exercise and stopping procrastination and saving more money. Turns out
it's our lying minds. We tell ourselves that all we
need is a bit more willpower, that our self control
will save us. But as we've seen, when push comes
to shove our rationalizing minds will just say it's okay
to screw over our future selves just this once. But
(11:23):
what if we tried a different strategy. What if we
harness an emotion like gratitude, one that naturally primes us
to protect our future selves. This was exactly what researcher
David Desteno set out to test. He defies an experiment
to see whether people could be nice to their future
selves in the face of attempting reward.
Speaker 2 (11:40):
So in our lab, we bring people in, we have
them answer a bunch of questions of the form would
you rather have ten dollars now or thirty dollars in
three weeks? Right? And to make it real, we tell
them we're going to pick one of your answers and
honor it. So if you said I'd rather have ten
dollars now than thirty dollars in three weeks, we gave
you ten dollars. If you said I'd rather have thirty
dollars in three weeks, We'd send you a check in
(12:03):
three weeks. And what we found, right, is that most
people tend to be pretty impatient. That is, they discount
the value of future rewards a lot. So for example,
our average subject said they would take seventeen dollars now
rather than one hundred dollars in a year. Another way
of saying that is, they viewed one hundred dollars in
a year is worth seventeen dollars now. And I don't
(12:24):
know about you or your listeners, but if you don't
need that seventeen dollars to survive right now, then passing
up an opportunity to quintuple your money given with the
banks are paying is not the greatest decision. When we
made people feel grateful right suddenly, how much they discounted
the future, how impatient they were to get that money
(12:44):
in their hands changed. These folks suddenly viewed one hundred
dollars in a year not as worth seventeen dollars now,
but as worth thirty dollars. So we'd have to give
them at least thirty dollars before they passed up the
opportunity for one hundred dollars in a year. And what
that means is they're discounting the value of a future
reward less. And if you take this and you extrapolate
(13:04):
it out to the real world to decisions that matter,
you know other people have found that people who experience
gratitude are more willing to exercise for better health, They're
more willing to save their money rather than spend it
on impulse buys. They're more willing to work harder for
long term goals. And so what we see here is
(13:27):
just by changing the emotional state you're in, how much
you value the future changes.
Speaker 1 (13:33):
And so that raises the question of you know, how
did you, as this clever experimentalist, get people to experience gratitude?
You know, how do you make people more grateful in
the lab?
Speaker 2 (13:42):
One way we do this is we have them doing
this task on the computer that's designed to be god
awful boring.
Speaker 1 (13:49):
Psychologists are good at that.
Speaker 2 (13:50):
Yeah, it's a god awful boring tech god af a boring,
And right as they think they're about to be done,
the computer is rigged crash or to look like it
crashes on them. And then the experimenter comes in and says, oh,
I'm sorry, you're going to have to do this all
over again. Let me go get the tech. And of
course people are not happy. We have somebody else in
(14:11):
the lab who are our subjects. Believe is another subject
taking the study, but it's actually an actor who works
for us, and this person will get up, walk over
to them and say, oh, this is terrible. I'm pretty
good with computers. Let me see if I can help you.
And so, you know, she starts futzing with the wires
and surrepetitiously hits a key that starts a timer and
lo and behold, bang the computer comes back on. And
(14:35):
ninety five percent of our subjects are incredibly grateful for this.
Five percent of them think somehow they fix it themselves,
but for the most part when they get excluded, but
for the most for if people are very grateful because
they don't want to do this god awful task over again.
And then that way, what we can find is that
the people who are actually experiencing gratitude in the moment
(14:56):
compared to people who are feeling neutral or people who
are feeling happy. And that was important because we wanted
to show it wasn't just that you were feeling positive,
but that it was something really particular about gratitude. What
gratitude makes you do is engage in self control and
as I said, evolutionarily speaking of that, so you're willing
to be less selfish. But if you think about it,
(15:17):
when you feel gratitude, there's one person besides strangers or
people you meet on the street or friends who you
can help that's important to your own future goals, and
that is your own future self. And what we find
is when you're feeling grateful, yes you're willing to sacrifice
for other people, but you're also willing to sacrifice for
your own future self. And that's how you can pivot
(15:40):
the power of gratitude from just being this emotion that
has kind of a moral cast to do the right thing,
to repay debts or to behave morally, to actually help
your own future self achieve her or his own goals.
Speaker 1 (15:52):
I wanted to talk a little bit about some of
the specific domains in which gratitude helps because I just
find these data it's totally fascinating. So in your book,
you show that gratitude doesn't just help you on financial
decision making, it can also help you, like at your job.
Speaker 2 (16:04):
Yeah, it just depends what your job is. So you know,
Adam Grant has this great data where he should that
people who are working in a call center and talk
about a thankless job. You're calling people up for fundraising,
asking people to donate money When gratitude is expressed in
those offices, people's preductivity goes up fifty percent, and not
(16:25):
only do they work harder, but they're actually happy about it.
They feel good about it, and so there's no stress there.
When you're a doctor, right, if you're feeling gratitude, it
makes you more willing to invest the effort to do
the right thing, and so you're more willing, the data
show to engage in greater thought in terms of your diagnoses.
(16:47):
And so gratitude in whatever the realm is that we're
talking about. By giving you more patients, by giving you
and nudging you, is going to improve the outcome. And
while it's doing it, it's going to solve two other
problems for you. And and this is something else that
I really want to talk about, is that it does
it in a way that's better for your mind and
(17:08):
your body in terms of your physical health and your
mental well being.
Speaker 1 (17:12):
And so talk about the mental well being part, because
one of the things we're trying to do is to
help people find strategies that can allow them to achieve
their goals, but in doing so, can make them happy
in the moment too. And that's really the amazing thing
about gratitude is it doesn't just help you exercise more
and save more. It feels good, unlike willpower.
Speaker 2 (17:29):
That's right. So David Brooks likes to talk about that.
There are two types of virtues people have. Resume virtues,
which are the virtues like being dogged, working hard, having grit,
trying to get ahead, and eulogy virtues, things like being fair,
being generous, being kind. And the eulogy virtues are the
ones that ultimately we want to be remembered for. They're
(17:52):
the ones that draw other people to us, that give
us the relationships that help our lives. And so if
we're pursuing our own success and whatever realm it might be,
you know, as I said, for millennia, the way to
do that was to have good character, to be fair,
be generous. It used to be that you would give
(18:12):
virtues and resume virtues were the same, there was no
difference between them. But because of the way we structure
our lives now we can pursue success in a very
atomistic manner. That is, you know, we can just be
dogged and if we earn enough money we can meet
all of our needs. We don't have to have other
people around us as much. But that leads to a
(18:32):
not very fulfilling life and it's a very stressful existence.
When you choose to pursue success by cultivating emotions like gratitude,
by virtue of what you're doing, Yes, it's going to
give you the self control to pursue your goals, to
have patience, to persevere in the face of difficulty, but
(18:53):
it's also going to change your relationships. Right when we
feel gratitude, not only do we work harder, but we
show more appreciation to others around us. It makes us
behave more loyally, it makes us behave more compassionately toward
other people, build that social safety net that are there
to buttress us. And so you know, when you look
(19:14):
at a gratitude people who feel more gratitude, yes they
exercise more, Yes they save more, Yes, they get ahead
in life more, but they also sleep better at night.
They also have better blood pressure, they show less stress
reactivity than do people who don't experience gratitude more often.
They even have better cholesterol. How and why these things
(19:36):
are intertwined is an interesting story, you know, having to
do with the stress and do they exercise more because
of that? Gratitude, et cetera. But gratitude really is a buffer.
It helps us pursue our resume virtues and our eulogy
virtues at the same time.
Speaker 1 (19:50):
What's so striking about this, though, is that I think
if you ask people, people often think those resume virtues
and eulogy virtues are in conflict, right, Like, you know,
to boost up your resume, you got to you know,
stop feeling your fellow man. And that's right, but it's
just the opposite. So so much of this podcast is
about the idea that our minds are leading us astray. Right.
We have this bad into about what gratitude is going
(20:10):
to do, Like it makes us weak, you know, it's
going to make us help others rather than getting out
of life.
Speaker 2 (20:14):
Yeah. And part of that, right is, you know, I
think our resume and our eulogy versus we think of
them as distinct, but for most of our evolutionary history
they weren't. And we're kind of told that, you know,
the way to succeed is to be self interested, but
if you actually look at the data, it's not true.
You know, I think we're being sold a bill of goods.
(20:35):
You know, it is in the short term, right, the
faster way is to kind of be self interested. But
in the long run, it is people who experienced gratitude,
who experience compassion and empathy that do really, really well.
You know, my friend Bob Frank's economists at Cornell, and
he wrote this great book called Success and Luck, and
he talks about the illusion that people have that the
(20:58):
way that any of us succeeded was through our own
self determination. And I'm not saying that doesn't matter, of
course it does. But there's a lot of luck along
the way. And if you think about what a lot
of luck is is, it's not really luck. It's people
open in doors for us. It's people supporting us in
our hours of need and helping us out and us
doing the same for them. Right, that's what a lot
(21:20):
of luck is, not all. When people do that for us,
we feel gratitude. And when we feel gratitude, it makes
us not only want to pay those people back, but
to pay it forward to other people. So, for example,
in our studies that we were talking about, when we
make people feel gratitude in the lab and then they
leave the lab thinking the experiment is over, and we
(21:40):
have a stranger approach them who asks for help, they'll
help the stranger too. And the reason why is when
you feel gratitude, it makes you want to help someone else.
The brain is nudging you that way because in the
long term, that's a successful strategy. And so the beautiful
thing about gratitude is it makes us pay it forward
and it creates kind of an ongoing cycle. And so
(22:02):
I think people often feel that gratitude can be a
sign of weakness, but really gratitude is an emotion of power.
Speaker 1 (22:10):
And so hopefully listeners are sold on this idea that
becoming more grateful is a good thing. But then that
raises the question how do you do that? What can
listeners do to improve their sense of gratitude.
Speaker 2 (22:21):
One strategy is simply doing daily reflections, thinking for a
few minutes about what it is that you're grateful for
in life. Lots of people do gratitude diaries. The trick there,
right is we all have the two or three things
that were incredibly grateful for in our lives. But if
you think about the same things over and over again,
they're going to lose their power. You're going to habituate
(22:43):
to it. It's going to become boring and so think
about little things. Think about the person who gave you
their seat on the bus or the subway. Think about
the person who gave you directions, you let you get
on the highway, someone who held the door for you.
And you might say, Dave, really, is that going to work?
It does. So you know, I told you earlier about
the way we induce gratitude in our lab where we
(23:04):
have these these big shenanigans we go through where computers
crash on people. When we simply ask people reflect on
something in your life that you're grateful for, whether it's
something somebody did for you, your parents, a friend, the universe,
if you believe in God, God, whatever it might be.
Those simple reflections produce the same exact effects. And so
(23:24):
it may sound trite, but it's not. Cultivating gratitude daily
in your life. We'll do this through reflections. Another way
is to engage in something called the reciprocity ring. This
is great if you have an office and you're trying
to create a culture of gratitude, or a classroom, or
even for families at home, have everybody take a post
it note and write on the post it note something
they need help with. Then on a board, or on
(23:47):
the refrigerator or wherever it might be. Stick up those
post it notes in kind of a circle. Now, everybody,
take a different color post or note and write your
name on it, and go up and stick it next
to a post it note that's up there already. Where
a person's requesting helps you, you're saying, Ah, John says
he needs help with this, I dave am going to
help him with this, right, And then what you do
(24:09):
is draw lines or tie strings or tape whatever you
might be, and what you'll see is connections in this circle.
And then most importantly, go give that assistance that you said.
And what this does is a few things. One, it
shows that asking for help is okay and offering to
help is okay. And by you actually helping the person
(24:31):
who you said you were going to help, that person
feels gratitude. And what our research shows is when that
person feels gratitude, it increases the probability very dramatically that
they're just going to go and offer help to someone else.
And it's a way of creating kind of a norm
and a culture for gratitude in your family, or your
classroom or your workplace.
Speaker 1 (24:49):
Have you used this in your lab or in your
own family. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (24:52):
I you know, before I started doing this research, I
wouldn't say I was an ungrateful person, but I don't
think I thought a lot about gratitude in my life.
But what I realized through doing this work is that
you can curate your own emotional life. Right. Emotions don't
just happen to us. We can curate what we feel
(25:14):
by taking time to think about what we want to feel,
by paying attention to the people that help us as
opposed to the people that annoy us. And so what
I've begun to do in my own daily life now
is to do that is to focus on when somebody
does something for me or someone helps me, to not
say thank you and quickly move by that, but to
focus on it for a few minutes, to curate the
(25:35):
emotions that I feel are important and valuable in my
daily experience as opposed to the ones that aren't. And
what happens when you do that is it begins to
change the lens through which you automatically view your life,
so that suddenly gratitude isn't something that you're trying to curate,
but it becomes a lens that you pick out things
with daily in life, and I think it becomes a
(25:56):
habit in some ways. And the beautiful thing about gratitude
is as opposed to habits, is you know, if I
have a habit to save money that works for saving money,
if I have a habit to study that works for studying.
But if I have a habit to experience gratitude, that's
going to bleed over into making me better able to
pursue my long term goals in any realm. And I
(26:17):
would encourage your listeners to try and create gratitude as
a habit.
Speaker 1 (26:24):
After talking to Dave and hearing about his work, I've
decided on a personal goal for this new decade. I'm
going to stop sabotaging future Laurie. I'm going to stop
assuming that will power will save me. Instead, I'm going
to harness the power of my moral emotions. I'm going
to work harder to become a bit more grateful starting now.
So here goes. I'm so grateful that Dave and so
(26:47):
many other scientists took time out of their busy schedules
to share these insights with us. I'm so so thankful
that we all have a fresh start with this new decade.
To make a bunch of positive changes that we want
to see in twenty twenty. And I'm so so grateful
for you. Thanks so much for listening to this podcast,
and thank you for being a part of this journey
to use science to live a little bit better. And finally,
(27:11):
I'd be super grateful if you joined the Future Laari
for our third bonus episode of The Happiness Lab twenty
twenty
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Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.