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**Adam Stacoviak:** Right. Which is why mental our mental frameworks are important, and perspective, and positive thinking over negative thinking... |
**Mireille B. Reece, Psy.D:** Yeah. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Because you can see far an narrow, but you don't have that panoramic view. You don't see wide in terms of your -- what do you call that...? When you can see really-- |
**Mireille B. Reece, Psy.D:** Peripheral? |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, peripheral vision. I couldn't get the word in my brain. But yeah, your peripheral vision. You essentially can only see a certain degree in front of you, but your peripheral vision gives you the opportunity to see -- I don't know what the exact science is behind it, but I'm assuming at least 90... |
**Mireille B. Reece, Psy.D:** Yes. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** ...for some that are really good at it. \[laughter\] |
**Mireille B. Reece, Psy.D:** Right. Well, it's interesting that you talk about it like that, because even between my husband and I, we always joke - he's got the visual aspects and I'm the words; I'm verbal. But his ability to see things is so different than me... So he'll always be like "How can you not see that?" \[... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Right. |
**Mireille B. Reece, Psy.D:** \[11:40\] So that's just it. The reason why this practice or skill is so valuable is because while it might seem small, it's the cumulative effect that is huge. It has this sort of exponential multiply effect after practicing it over and over again. One of the things that is helpful whenev... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** It's a fine-tuning of your focus on the positive, not the negative. And that doesn't mean the negative doesn't exist. Because I'm thinking, how can we, in today's world, right this moment, while we have uncertainty looming over us, how can we ask people to find a habit of gratefulness, of gratitude?... |
**Mireille B. Reece, Psy.D:** Exactly. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** ...while acknowledging the negative. |
**Mireille B. Reece, Psy.D:** Precisely. And great word there, acknowledging. I'm not gonna deny that there's other ill effects, or uncomfortable, unwanted aspects of any one person's life right now, but rather while that is going on, there is also benefits and blessings within whatever circumstance. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. Help me out to this list, because I wrote this down thinking about this idea of practicing gratitude... And I thought of it as like a layering of many skills. Some we've covered on the show, some we plan to cover in more deeper aspects, but like habits, we'll talk about journaling and other th... |
**Mireille B. Reece, Psy.D:** Well, one of the things is -- you know, I'm not sure how many of our listeners have heard this, but it's not recommended that when you wake up, you first look at email. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. |
**Mireille B. Reece, Psy.D:** And the reason being is that it prompts more of this reactive mode, of like "I'm already filtering and have to figure out how to respond." And so gratitude, on the other hand, is a practice that is helpful to do first, in your top three in the day... Because it sort of sets up your mind, l... |
So gratitude is a skill or a habit that you can practice, that actually broadens and builds upon other skills, so that you're sort of in charge more of your mind and how you respond to things. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Starting with gratitude is an interesting concept, because while I've considered and have built in gratitude into my life, more so -- I don't know when exactly, but I can tell it's been in my life and in my mental framework for a while... Maybe not every single day, but definitely a part of my psych... |
**Mireille B. Reece, Psy.D:** Yeah. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Starting your day with it is different. |
**Mireille B. Reece, Psy.D:** It is. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** \[15:46\] What you said, that perspective of how you run your day with gratitude - if you begin with it, it's easy to sort of... It's already happened, so it's like -- I don't know if this is a great analogy, but it's like breaking Spades. If you've ever played Spades, the card game, once Spades are... |
**Mireille B. Reece, Psy.D:** Yeah, imagine that you wanna set up the conditions internally so that you can better manage the external environment and challenges that emerge throughout your day. I get into my car, I have a sense of where I'm going to be going. I don't go "Oh shoot, what was I gonna do? Where was I gonn... |
Gratitude is a way in which -- I think about it like setting your mind according to a certain channel. So I'm going "This is where I'm gonna focus my mind", and I can turn the channel; sure, I can go to this other one, and look at all of the things that are unpleasant, upsetting, unwanted, whatever un- word you can thi... |
One other thing with this is -- we mentioned not comparing to anybody else... But also writing it down. Having worked in brain injury, so helping people with memory problems, which often occurs after brain injury, one of the best strategies that we would teach is writing things down. And the reason being is that it enh... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Tim Ferriss -- I'm gonna paraphrase something he had said. I'm not sure if you're familiar with this fella or not, but he is super-popular. He wrote a book called The 4-Hour Workweek. That was his claim to fame. He has since done tons of cool stuff. He is an experimenter in many ways. And a day ago ... |
**Mireille B. Reece, Psy.D:** Sure. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** They're not all the same. Like anything, there's many layers to it, and many different ways you can, and many different styles of journaling to get a certain result. And what he had said was like it's cementing today's thought. It's cementing this idea, in time. It's a picture, so to speak, of your ... |
**Mireille B. Reece, Psy.D:** Oh, I like it. I like that a lot. I also think about it sort of like consolidating... So it really also hones your focus. Because you wrote it down, it's clearer and it's now got form, as opposed to this ethereal, random thought cloud that goes by in my mind. So not just thinking about the... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** What about de-clogging? You said consolidating, but what about de-clogging? Because if we think about our brains as some variation of a computer, we have a marginal cognitive load we can handle or sustain over time... Removing some of these thoughts, especially around gratitude, so you can get it ou... |
**Mireille B. Reece, Psy.D:** Yeah, exactly that... Because you are consolidating, defragging... Like, I'm getting rid of the extraneous, irrelevant things. So if you can understand, you are literally training your mind's eye to see the world in this way, over and over again. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** It's kind of like glasses. |
**Mireille B. Reece, Psy.D:** \[20:14\] It is, yes. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** It kind of makes me think "If I can tint the world in a way..." Glasses do that. Sunglasses do that, glasses can do that with transitional lenses... Cooler sunglasses, that are like pink, or blue, or whatever colors... It tints the world. |
**Mireille B. Reece, Psy.D:** It does, I love that. Yeah, this hue of -- you know, that's why it improves health, Adam, because you're actually practicing seeing the upside of all the things. So I can't help but -- if we're talking about this conceptually, I wanna talk about the science behind it. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, absolutely. |
**Mireille B. Reece, Psy.D:** So one of the things that researchers have found is that practicing gratitude promotes or provides greater activity in the medial prefrontal cortex. So the medial prefrontal cortex - say that five times fast, right...? This part of the brain is an area in the frontal lobe where your two he... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Who doesn't want that, right? |
**Mireille B. Reece, Psy.D:** Right, exactly. So it actually calms your emotions. We know we're all going to react to stress, but we wanna be able to come back down. Encountering stress or having stress isn't a bad thing; it is prolonged stress, chronic stress that doesn't change. So this medial prefrontal cortex also ... |
There was a study done, and they did functional MRIs, with two different groups. And the first group was directed to think of a recent time in which they felt really grateful, and replay that in their mind... While the second group spoke their gratitude aloud, as though it was being recorded, to be shared with the pers... |
The scans showed that there was a surge of activity in this medial prefrontal cortex of the brain when the subjects expressed the gratitude that was different from the brain activity seen when these people were feeling grateful, but didn't express it. So we're going back and linking this back in - it doesn't just come ... |
Think relationally - even with your wife, it makes a difference if she tells you something, like "Hey, Adam, thanks for doing the laundry." |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, right... \[laughter\] |
**Mireille B. Reece, Psy.D:** Right? |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Thank you. |
**Mireille B. Reece, Psy.D:** ...as opposed to she just thought it, and you're like "Hey babe, did you notice...?" and she's like "Oh, yeah. Yeah, I did." |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah... It's kind of like "Show me, don't tell me" kind of thing. Express it is show me, and tell me is sort of just think it and replay the motion. |
**Mireille B. Reece, Psy.D:** Yeah. So it's not surprising that this also relates to how we relate, or have relationships. |
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