00:00:00 – Introduction to Gratitude

full episode

Brent: Happy time period, Bracketeers. I want to tell you a story. The other day, I was headed to work to my day job, and I got there in record time. I looked at my watch, and I said, how did I get here so fast? And I had to go and mentally go through all the steps, and I realized that I hadn’t stopped at a red light. I hadn’t encountered any traffic. There hadn’t been any crazy drivers. There hadn’t been a train. Everything was as perfect as it could have been on my drive to work. And I didn’t even notice. And that bothered me. I said to myself, you know, if there had been an accident or a crash or something, I would have immediately noticed that. And I would have fussed about it under my breath for the rest of the morning. But everything went awesome. I had so much to be grateful for. And it didn’t occur to me. It didn’t even register on my radar. And so I started thinking about that, Bracketeers. Like, why is gratitude so hard? And that is what we’re going to talk about today.

Announcer: The Full Mental Bracket

Brent: Welcome to the Full Metal Bracket, my friends. Today in the stunt host seat is my friend, Aaron Shafer.

Aaron: Hey Brent, how’s it going? Thanks for having me here.

Brent: Oh, it’s so good. Aaron is a research scientist at St. Jude. He is one of the smartest people I know and one of the wisest people I know, which begs the question, what is he doing here with me? Slumming is my theory. I think he’s slumming, but that’s okay.

Aaron: I’m good with that. Oh, yeah, I’m okay.

Brent: Don’t sugarcoat it, Aaron. Yeah, I’m pretty much slumming with you. It’s okay.

Aaron: Hey, it’s all good. Slumming, friending, whatever you want to call it.

Brent: So we are boldly going into the Bracketeer today, and we’re going to talk about the psychology of gratitude.

Announcer: This is Full Mental Bracket.

Brent: Now, I don’t know about you, Aaron, but when I was a kid, gratitude was always approached to me as a moral virtue. My parents and pastors and everyone else says, you need to be more grateful. What’s wrong with you that you’re not grateful?

Aaron: Absolutely. I mean, it was kind of a religious exercise. Let’s, let’s say grace. We should be grateful. Let’s pray and thank God.

Brent: And I think there’s some truth to that, but maybe it’s just the way that my family presented it to me. It’s like, you should be grateful for these crumbs we’re giving you. And it just really didn’t sit right. And it just felt like it was really forced. Like I was a bad person because I wasn’t grateful.

Aaron: I get that.

Brent: So as I’ve been thinking about it, I think I’ve done a little thinking, a little digging, and it seems to me that we’re all bad at gratitude.

Aaron: I would agree.

Brent: I think that the brain is wired to be bad at gratitude. And that’s some of the things we want to talk about today. The thing is, why is gratitude hard? We want to talk about why is gratitude beneficial and how to do it.

Aaron: I’m all for that. Maybe we could learn something here with our audience.

Brent: I don’t know about that. I’m not sure. What do you think, Brody? Can we learn something today? All right, Brody says we can. All right, so we have permission.

Aaron: So you’re talking about how our brain is more hardwired to acquire than towards gratitude? Is that what you’re saying?

Brent: Yeah. The brain, it seems to me that it is a survival device. It’s like, we need to work it for danger. We have to get more. It doesn’t spend a lot of energy appreciating what it has.

Aaron: Right.

Brent: You know, just because it’s of the survival value.

Aaron: Right. I don’t think you have a lot of time to ponder. Probably a thousand years ago, you weren’t Thinking about that as you were running away from a lion or whatever.

Brent: Yeah, angry evil.

Aaron: Should I be grateful about this?

Brent: Yeah, angry tribesman from another tribe trying to kill you, a lion trying to eat you. It’s like, okay, I got the melon. This is great.

Aaron: Oops, I died.

Brent: And that’s part of it. That’s exactly, you’re so wise. I told you he was wise. You’re so wise. That’s exactly where we’re going. So the first thing we like to talk about is the negativity bias. The negativity bias is the way that your brain is wired to focus, attend to, remember, and associate more with negative, angry, and dangerous information than with positive information.

Aaron: Right. So just this built-in survival mechanism.

Brent: Yes. It causes you to focus on danger. Like, okay, that could be a threat. That could be a threat. I think he’s looking funny at me. And so your brain is wired like that and it’s automatic.

Aaron: Right. So you get, basically, you were just prone to overreacting to really what are seemingly, what are not seemingly, actually just calm situations. We, we put them in a much higher red category.

Brent: I think so, I think we see the negative attributes. Like my story, if I had run into red lights, that would have been very memorable to me, but since everything went right, I didn’t even think about it. Advertisers use this, the evening news uses this, danger, danger, danger, tune in at 11. And that danger might actually represent only 1% of the information that day, but it’s 100% of what we talk about and think about and panic about and clutch our pearls and whatnot.

Aaron: And it’s great marketing, right?

Brent: It works.

Aaron: You look at a lot of movies that are still using action guns and violence. Clearly, it’s a universal top seller for grabbing people.

Brent: I’m already going on a rabbit trail, but I was on video the other day, and I saw this video came on. It’s like, this city is the most dangerous in the world. It kept getting closer and closer. There’s a murder every day. People live in abject fear. Oh man, the Northeast is terrible. Memphis, Tennessee.

Aaron: Oh no.

Brent: I live here. That’s not true. What are you talking about? Don’t go in there. Beware, there’s dragons. I was like, oh, come on.

Aaron: Only downtown.

Brent: Come on. And there was a bunch of comments. Oh yeah, I never go there. I went there once and I ran away in fear. I wet myself. I’m like, oh, come on, people. Anyway, that’s it.

Aaron: Okay, so Memphis rabbit trail.

Brent: Yes, Memphis rabbit trail, so Aaron you work you work with tests and studies and data so if I understand correctly there’s there’s two types of errors there’s like a type one error and a type two error and Like a false positive and a false negative?

Aaron: Sure, you get false negatives, right, when you got tests?

Brent: Right.

Aaron: So you think, you think, hey, everything’s good. That’s probably the worst of the two. It’s when someone gets a false negative and they’re like, oh, wow, I’m cancer free. And it turns out, yeah, that was a false negative. Whatever the test was, didn’t pick up on what was actually there versus the false positive.

Brent: So sometimes the false positive is better to be cautious than overly optimistic.

Aaron: Correct.

Brent: The brain agrees with you. The brain would rather go for false positives of danger than false negatives. The brain would rather that you saw a stick and thought it was a snake and freaked out and embarrassed yourself than you reached out to grab a stick and found it was a snake and it bit you. It doesn’t care about your stress. It doesn’t care about your mental health. It doesn’t care about your psychotic breakdown 30 years from now. Are you alive at the end of this interaction? Aaron: Right, so you could end up seeing a lot of snakes in your lifetime.

Brent: Yes, that’s how the negativity bias works. It’s like, I think that’s a threat. I think that’s a threat. It’s like, you think everything’s a threat. That’s why I’m alive. Oh, there’s Princess Bride. You think everything’s a trap. That’s why I’m still alive.

Aaron: So yeah. Absolutely. Speaking of snakes, I know this is kind of a rabbit trail, but I almost stepped on a snake fishing. So, I don’t know if this has anything to do with negativity bias, but you know, when you get so focused on something, sometimes you lose that negativity bias.

Brent: So maybe that’s the safety function there.

Aaron: Right.

Brent: It’s just trying to keep you from being an errand. It’s like, don’t be an errand. Exactly. It’s like, I’m like, well, that’s it. Cause you’re focused on the fish, the prize. Right. This is good. And you forget about the bad. Exactly. And the negativity bias is to make sure that you think about the bad twice as much as the good. Right. So that you don’t get bit.

Aaron: So. It can be a good thing.

Brent: The catchy little thing I came up with for that when it comes to negativity bias the brain says when in doubt let’s freak out. That’s just kind of how I got.  So the second thing we want to talk about is the world’s most awkwardly named cognitive bias. Now, the psychologist Daniel Kahneman, which, I’m almost positive that’s how you pronounce his name. I looked it up at one point. It’s not Kane-man, it’s Kahn-man. I don’t want to sound like an ignorant ignoramus from Memphis here. I don’t know how to pronounce nothing.

Aaron: He’s not a Kahn-man, he’s a Kahn-man. Kahn-man.

Brent: Right. Yes. Lots of extra H’s and N’s and E’s and stuff. So Daniel Kahn-man, who wrote Thinking Fast and Slow, he became the Nobel laureate. He’s like the most popular psychologist in the world.

Aaron: Oh, wow.

Brent: He did unfortunately die, but he was the most popular psychologist in the world. And so he named this thing What is it? I can’t pronounce it right. WYSIATI. And it’s a very long acronym. It’s like, what you see is all there is. W-Y-S-I-A-T-I.

Aaron: WYSIATI. OK.

Brent: So he’s a great thinker, not really good on the branding. The trademark WYSIATI, not so good.

Aaron: That could go to other places.

Brent: So basically, what that means is that your unconscious mind is happy to make stories just from the things that are at hand. It’s like, it doesn’t notice how little information is there before it starts spinning a tail.

Aaron: Okay, so we’re talking like filling in the blanks, kind of?

Brent: Yes, it’s filling in the blanks. So like, you come into a room, you see a hairbrush, you see a towel, You’d like, you may, okay, obviously there was a, there was a shower here and this other thing. I was like, and it could be completely wrong. You’ve got these two pieces of data, but you put it all together. And the amazing thing, the bias is not that you put it all together. It’s that you put it all together and you didn’t realize that three quarters of the story was missing.

Aaron: Oh, wow.

Brent: The brain’s ability to take, and conspiracy theories are a great example of this. You take these two, three different facts together and suddenly they come together like magnetism. It’s like, oh yes, it’s clear to me what happened. It’s like, it’s not clear to anyone what happened. It’s still a mystery. It’s always an error to theorize before the facts or whatever. Like, oh, let’s theorize away.

Aaron: Right. Is that the same kind of what most of the audience would know as being the variability in eyewitness accounts?

Brent: Yes, yes, that’s another thing, yes, because they’re taking it from their own point of view, and the different points are salient to them. Like, this is the important part that I saw. I interpreted it this way.

Aaron: Right.

Brent: That’s a great thing. We’re going to have to get into that later in the show, because that is huge. Just the way that we perceive the world changes so much. It explains so much about our polarized world that we’re in, when you realize that people are not seeing the same world that you are. They’re seeing their own personal, tailorized, bespoke world. And when you say, clearly you can’t argue with me, it’s like, in my world, I can.

Aaron: Yeah. And yeah, we could, you could say yes, I could say no. And we have totally different entry points. I guess that’s a whole other episode on how people build their filters.

Brent: Yeah. And I want to talk about that, but we’re going to be disciplined today. Okay. So disciplined.

Aaron: Good job, Brent.

Brent: So this bias, the WYSIATI, now I like to call it the tyranny of omission because you don’t ever realize what’s gone. Like think about think about how often in a group of of people you’re not familiar with you end up taking role. Like for instance, you were like a school teacher or something. You know you look at a room, and it’s like it feels like some people are missing, but my brain cannot identify to me who’s missing. Let’s take role. And so you go down like oh, it’s Jones Jones and Smith. They’re both gone. But your brain didn’t instinctively know that they were gone. They saw a group of people, and it’s like, ah, this is probably good enough. I’m sure they’re all here. This is close enough for government work.

Aaron: Right. Let’s round up.

Brent: But until you take that deliberate step of seeing what’s missing from the picture, you don’t notice it.

Aaron: Kind of like some of our favorite childhood, those cartoons when you get the two images.

Brent: Oh, the magic eye?

Aaron: The magic eye. Like, what if there’s seven things that are gone?

Brent: Oh, no, that’s a different one. Yeah, yeah. Look, what are the differences are? Yeah. It’s a lot like that. So, So you have to with the, with the WYSIATI or the tyranny of omission, you have to be intentional about trying to figure out what’s not in the picture.

Aaron: Ok

Brent: And so the third. The third bias we’re gonna talk about.

Aaron: So let’s unpack that. So you have to be intentional about what’s not there. So when you think about doing that, what purpose would that serve? What are you thinking there, Brent?

Brent: Well, specifically about gratitude, it’s realizing what wasn’t. Like in my story, nothing was there. There was no red lights, there was no traffic, but nothing good replaced that. It was just an empty story. There’s only one data point. I made it to work in 7.2 minutes. But I didn’t notice all the good things that were in there. And that’s the other thing after the negativity bias is realizing that our stories are made of good things and bad things. Things that we appreciate and things that we don’t appreciate.

Aaron: So, you’re saying there’s a lot of good things in that experience you had going to work.

Brent: Yes.

Aaron: Because of negativity bias, you’ve deleted these things almost automatically.

Brent: And then because of the WYSIATI, you see these handful of negative things and you spin a story out of it. You don’t go looking for the rest of the ingredients. It’s like you’re making a recipe with like…

Aaron: Half the ingredients.

Brent:…salt and vinegar and other nasty things. Like, how come this recipe sucks so bad? It’s like, well, because the sugar is still over there and the flour is still over there and the chocolate chips are still over there. And you skipped all the good stuff and only focused on the bad stuff. I don’t want anyone to think.

Aaron: The sweet ingredients.

Brent: I don’t even think that vinegar is bad.

Aaron: It is in chocolate chip cookies.

Brent: The people for the promotion of vinegar comes and boycotts the show. You hate vinegar, we hate you.

Aaron: Yeah, vinegar’s okay in our salads. But yeah.

Brent: So, and then the last thing we want to talk about is, and this is probably more familiar, it’s called hedonic adaptation, which is the base of the hedonic treadmill. It’s that your emotional set is set with a thermostat. So if you have really good events or really bad events, they feel really good or really bad for a while, weeks or months, and eventually it resets. You can get a horrible diagnosis from your doctor, and you can be, generally speaking, depressed for a few months or even a year, but over time, you know, short of clinical depression and things that Paul would discuss, but he’s not going to discuss it.

Aaron: You adapt to it. So, we call that in the scientific world homeostasis.

Brent: Yes, like a homeostasis. It’s like a thermostat set on the emotions. You win the lottery, you’re like, this is great! And then, you know, the next week, yeah, it’s all right. And the week after that, yeah, it’s okay. Like you go to a new restaurant and you find this this great I guess I’ve never had this just before this is great. And then you go back the next day say well I mean it’s not as good as it was yesterday, but it’s still pretty good. And I go back the next day and the next day and after a month. It’s like I don’t know.

Aaron: Yes, it goes both it could be both a positive and negative.

Brent: Yeah. Yeah.

Aaron: If you’ve had a traumatic experience you can learn to live with new circumstances adapt to those.

Brent: Yeah, and I think that’s why it’s a survival value right something horrible happens and you know, if we were just to sit there in a pool of depression and stop eating or something, then we would die, and then our brain would fail as a survival mechanism. And if something amazing happened, and we just also stayed on the couch and just celebrated our victory and never looked for the next success, also, we’d stagnate and die, and the brain would fail in its mission to keep us alive.

Aaron: Makes sense, yeah. Although it can be dangerous if you’re looking for that stimulus, and you adapt to that stimulus, and that stimulus is toxic, then you’re looking for an increased dose, which would eventually kill you.

Brent: Which is kind of what happens in smoking, right? You gotta keep increasing the dosage.

Aaron: Or many other things.

Brent: So, in a previous episode, Paul’s episode, episode 8, we talked about the differences between hedonic and eudaimonic happiness, and it’s the same kind of thing, where the hedonic is the pleasure and pain in the moment, and the eudaimonic, which is not demonic, so don’t stop boycotting us, it’s Greek, look it up. Eudaimonic is the long-term satisfaction.

Aaron: I’ve not heard of eudaimonic before.

Brent: I just came across it fairly recently. It’s unfair, this podcast, because I may sound smarter than I really am, but I look this stuff up and, as everyone knows.

Aaron: Eudemonic

Brent: As of Tuesday, I’m part of everyone that knows about eudaimonic, so keep up with me. But it’s a good term, because it’s like pleasure and purpose. It’s like we talked about the metaphor of a guitar note. There’s the transient where you pick it, and then the string sustains. It’s like you get this pleasure, or in this case of the negativity bias, you get this pain, but it doesn’t sustain.

Aaron: So eudaimonic, you’re saying, is a sustained, where it’s lasting more, as opposed to hedonic, where you adapt out of it.

Brent: It’s like the core effect. It’s the pleasure and pain, the peak pleasure and pain, and then Eudaimonic is more like how you look back on your life and the satisfaction that you take.

Aaron: Okay.

Brent: Which is kind of some of the stuff we talked about in episode 8, which is sometimes the things that may not feel good at the time, they are reinterpreted to be very valuable experiences.

Aaron: Okay. So, you can actually gain a certain level of satisfaction when you go back and reframe an experience you’ve had.

Brent: Yes. Like an example I bring up a lot is that I went into a Marine Corps boot camp. It was a very unenjoyable experience. It was a lot like being in prison. And, uh, but over the years, I look back on it, I was like, man, that was, that was tough. I learned a lot of stuff. Wouldn’t want to do it again. But I’m just gonna, I’m gonna definitely lean into what I learned and take some pride in that.

Aaron: So, when you look back at that, you’re like, oh, there’s a lot of good things that came from that.

Brent: Yeah. Now, when the memory was fresher, I’d be like, wow, that was a really dumb decision I made.

Aaron: Yeah. Why did I do that?

Brent: But after some years, it’s seasoned, like this eudaimonic, looking back on it, like, you know, it’s, it’s, it’s not too bad.

Aaron: Gotcha. So it’s a more, eudemonic is more of a reflective approach to obtaining that satisfaction.

Brent: I really want to get into that in future episodes because I think that’s an important point and I’m not really doing justice right now.

Aaron: Sure.

Brent: Other than my parents just shaming me for not being grateful enough, why do you think gratitude would be a good thing to have?

Aaron: Yeah, I think, I mean, just in terms of what your state of being, you know, like gratitude obviously would probably elicit a lot of good positive chemical releases in your body, just the physical effects of it. I’m sure those are very well documented. I don’t have those studies, but I know, you know, it’s anything that we think or feel is eventually going to have long-term effects on us if we practice those or enter into those processes in the long term.

Brent: I don’t have those studies on me either, but I did come across a lot of research that gratitude improves your physical health. It improves your mental health and your well-being. One point I want to make though is that as we’re looking at with these cognitive biases, the ungrateful view is the distorted view of the world. We got the negative view bias, it’s everything’s dangerous. You have the tyranny of omission, you’re only looking at the negative things. You have the hedonic adaptation of this wonderful thing, but it doesn’t feel wonderful anymore.

Aaron: Right.

Brent: And so, if you’re ungrateful, your picture, your view, your perspective on the world is distorted.

Aaron: Right. I guess, could you see it, gratitude is also a positive distortion? I think so.

Brent: I think so.

Aaron: Like you’re interpreting how one, well, maybe not a distortion. Maybe it isn’t more trying to, uh, look at reality for what it is. Maybe that’s core being, being able to interpret route or reality closer to what it actually is.

Brent: I think so. I think there are some people that are whatever toxic positivity, and they are Pollyanna and they see things better than they are. But I think I’m guessing that statistically they don’t make up that many people. I think, based on our society. My feel for our culture and society is more people are leaning into the negativity and they’re being falsely negative instead of being properly positive.

Aaron: I would agree. For the most part, I think I’ve been into a lot more negative individuals compared to overly positive.

Brent: Overly positive. And to make it personal, whenever you run into those Pollyanna people, it really throws off the balance, because you’re trying to tell people to be more positive. You’re like, oh, like her. Like, no, no, not like her. We’re just trying to be a calibrated balance here. Maybe like 30% more.

Aaron: Yeah. Or are you a Lego? Like a Lego person? That’s what I, when I think of overly positive people, I think of Lego people.

Brent: From like the Lego movie?

Aaron: Exactly.

Brent: Oh, yeah. We’re gonna do this. Sorry.

Aaron: Just came to my mind.

Brent: Everything is awesome. Everything is awesome. Everything is cool when you’re part of the team. That’s okay. Breaking into song is part of our thing.

Aaron: Absolutely. I love that. Interlude with the Legos.

Brent: So, but having gratitude also makes for a more satisfying, enjoyable experience of life. It makes you look at life more accurately and you enjoy your experiences more. The thing is, is that, and so, these things are gonna happen anyway, so these negative things are gonna happen to you whether you try to create a positive interpretation or not.

Aaron: I guess the question is what allows you to positively interpret most situations in your life.

Brent: Well, we’re going to come with some practical tips that my friend Aaron sent me. So it’s going to be really cool. We’re going to get there in just a second. All right. But yes, that’s good. Just a little point.

Aaron: A little prompt there.

Brent: See that? He’s excited. See that? He’s excited. But real quick, I want to connect gratitude to some of our work on the Hero’s Journey framework.

Aaron: Gotcha, so yeah going back to.

Brent: Part of the problem is when you lack gratitude it can throw off your whole the things that we try to teach you about making your own story. You can end up clinging to comfort instead of accepting the quest. You can end up focusing on the pain and adversity instead of the satisfaction of growth which is that hedonic versus the eudaimonic again you’re focusing on the pain of the immediate and you’re forgetting about the long-term rewards for that.

Aaron: So, then yeah, so that negativity bias almost is inherently a retreat, a cause to retreat.

Brent: I think so, yeah, because you’re looking for danger everywhere.

Aaron: Right, okay.

Brent: A retreat or attack, that could be different.

Aaron: That’s true.

Brent: But generally, yeah, from a hero’s journey, you could retreat from the call of adventure that’s calling you out. Or if it was more intense, you might end up becoming the antagonist or the dragon attacking other people on their journey.

Aaron: Right, and I guess that goes back to how you’re seeing the situation.

Brent: Yeah. So, when you cultivate gratitude and you make more deliberate interpretations of your life events, you’re less reluctant to accept the shift in your story, and you’re less reluctant to step out as a protagonist. You become more willing to do the work that we’ve been encouraging people to do.

Aaron: As you’re saying, you’re more willing to step out as you develop this…

Brent: More gratitude.

Aaron… sense of gratitude. I’d like to hear more about that, how that happens. How do you see that propelling the protagonist?

Brent: I see it because gratitude is all about how you interpret your events, right? So if, you know, in two different cases, there’s the call to adventure, And then there’s the embracing the adversity. The call to adventure is part of how you go out and you start the quest, and the embracing adversity is how you grow. But if you don’t embrace the adversity, you don’t grow. So if all you see is this adversity, like the boot camp thing, if all you see is the pain and the suffering and the push-ups, and the squat thrusts, you know, and you don’t see, you don’t see the new development. You don’t see the new discipline. You don’t see the muscle tone. You’re reluctant to jump out and engage that story.

Aaron: So basically seeing adversity as a way, like you’re saying, to grow.

Brent: Yes.

Aaron: That there’s a purpose behind this and looking beyond the immediate pain and saying, hey, this is growing me and preparing me for something.

Brent: And so if you complete that thought, you become a little bit, you become grateful for this unpleasant experience. Not so, thank you sir, may I have another, not like that, but like. But you do, you become, if you interpret this as a positive thing, it’s a net positive thing. It’s not what no discipline is pleasant in the time, but it produces a good fruit.

Aaron: Right. It’s a mindset. It’s very much a mindset. I think I could just think of that. I think the gym analogy hits home to me a lot because I, I’m in the gym three or four days a week, so. Not a great, not a great experience.

Brent: I didn’t understand the gym analogy. I thought you said the gyminology, and I’m like, do you study gyms? I’m like, ooh, Aaron is a man of untapped hobbies. I didn’t even know this about him.

Aaron: Yes, I look at all the gym equipment all across the city. It’s a whole other study right there.

Announcer: Full Mental Bracket 00:24:58

Brent: All right, so let’s look at real quick, we like to use story examples here, so let’s quick look at a couple movies that explain gratitude real well. So a movie that we’ve talked about before is Groundhog Day. We talk about Phil Connors being locked in this loop of the same 24 hours for thousands of years.

Aaron: That was your estimate. From what I recall.

Brent: That was what the writer wrote.

Aaron: Was that episode one? You talked about that?

Brent: Yeah. Yeah. Well, it was six or seven. Anyway, I don’t know. We’ve talked about it several times.(

(See our previous coverage of Groundhog Day – here, here, here and here)

Aaron:  Through all the episodes.

Brent: The comments came back. We threw this out on the interwebs and the comments came back and it said, you know, some people said it was 30,000 years, and it’s like, and I looked it up, and that was true, so.

Aaron: Okay, so it’s 30,000.

Brent: Depending on which writer and who you quote, they’re talking about maybe he was locked in this loop for 30,000 years because he was such a terrible person, he had to. Anyway, the point I wanted to get at is that he starts this loop, and he dislikes everything around him. He’s in this tiny town. He’s a big city man in a tiny town. He hates it. He’s trapped with these little crew. He hates them. He’s, like, attracted to Andy McDowell, but he doesn’t respect her. He’s just trying to seduce people. He’s just trying to get his way.

Aaron: Very selfish.

Brent: Very selfish. So it’s everything that he doesn’t like in his life, but over this loop of the movie, he learns to appreciate it. He learns to be grateful for it. He learns to lean into it.

Aaron: I’m curious to know, like, at what point was he learning? Was it the…

Brent: Well, that kind of comes into the try-fail cycle.

Aaron: After he jumps off the cliff.

Brent: Yeah, well, see, that was the thing. He was got, you know, he would electrocute himself and drive off the cliff and he was really depressed. And then when he realized that wasn’t going to work, the fail in the try-fail cycle.

Aaron: So maybe after like 10 suicides later. Or a thousand, who knows?

Brent: Yeah, he just. I don’t know. But eventually when he realized that there was no way out. Except through. There’s no way out except through.

Aaron: Yeah. He tried to get out. He outed himself many times.

Brent: And then, but he, but he finally, by the end of the movie, you get the feeling he’s like, everyone loves him and he loves them. And he really finally appreciates where he’s at.

Aaron: Yeah. I think that was a lot of pain to get there.

Brent: I think so. Another example, and I re-watched this, I re-watched the movie Up. I didn’t realize until recently that I had never seen it a second time. This movie is so emotional that I’d only watched it once.

Aaron: I’d only seen it…

Brent: A gazillion years went by

Aaron: …when it came out. I’d have to review it to get a full, uh…

Brent: Well, I watched it the other day.

Aaron: …breakdown of it.

Brent: May or may not have gotten misty. I watched it the other day. And the thing is, is that, you know, there’s the whole opening segment is with Carl and his, his, his wife, Ellie, except for they meet as kids, right? So, they both, they have this whole dream in common.

Aaron: They remind me up is this where this old man goes up in a, in the house with the balloons.

Brent: Right. But the movie starts with the old man as a kid in sepia tone, black and white sepia tone, to make you know that this is back in the day.

Aaron: A long time ago.

Brent: So, he idolizes his adventurer. He wants to go on this adventure to South America. He runs into a girl who also idolizes this adventurer and also wants to go to South America. There’s this abandoned house that she’s put, she’s marked the adventure clubhouse. And he comes on in and he’s super shy and she’s super vocal and she basically adopts him and says, you’re part of my club now. So, what I hadn’t realized or I had forgotten is that they grow up and they get married and they move into a house and they fix up a house, but it is the house. It’s the Adventure Club house. The house that they played as kids became their honeymoon cottage.

Aaron: Morphed into their home, ok.

Brent: Yeah, they fixed it up. It became their whole life and she made paintings of They started saving money for the trips. She made paintings of the waterfall. Their whole life was focused on going to South America. He even bought tickets to fly her there.

Aaron: So, this was their life mission together.

Brent: This was their life mission. And then something would happen and they’d have to break the piggy bank and take the money. And then they finally got ahead and he bought these tickets. And then spoiler, she dies. And that’s all in like the first 10 minutes of the movie. And so the rest of the movie is like this guy, old and alone, what is he going to do?

Aaron: Yeah. Lots of time to think about. What’s next?

Brent: And so without going through the whole plot of the movie, that’s really the emotional arc is like, is he going to hold on and be depressed and resent what he didn’t get? Or how long is it going to take him to recognize what he has now?

Aaron: I think that’s just, yeah, a beautiful analogy of when we all reach a point in our life where we actually, for the first time, see that we have this decision that we can make. And sometimes we never get there with a lot of things, but to get to the point where you feel like you’re, I actually have a choice here.

Brent: And that’s the thing he, that’s the thing he came to. So like the whole movie goes on. He, he, he’s in, we’ll skip ahead. He’s in the, he’s in South America. His house is floating. He met his idol. His idol tried to kill him. This little boy’s adopted him. He’s the son he never had. They tried to have kids and they couldn’t. He found a dog that loves him. And all he cares about is his house, right? And then the bad guy sets his house on fire. And so he’s sitting there, and the house is like sagging, and then the kid’s in trouble, and the dog’s in trouble, and there’s a bird that’s in trouble, and he’s just sitting there sulking. And he’s like, he’s like, then you realize that it dawns on him, like all that stuff is gone. And these people that really care about me, they’re in all that now in trouble. And I got to pull myself out. I have to cut myself free from the past. And the scene was amazing.

Aaron: Yeah. I need to go back and see that movie.

Brent: I started yelling at my wife, are you seeing what I’m seeing? She’s like, what are you seeing? He’s like, how is the most physical way you can say to cut free of the past? He goes in his house, his house is too heavy, he can’t float, so he takes all the furniture that he had with his wife, tosses it out the door. The past is gone, house flies higher, he’s in the future. And he’s moving to this whole new family, this new adventure, this new thing. But it was nothing changed except for his attitude. The same information was there.

Aaron: So we’ve got this cutting free as a metaphor for us doing what?

Brent: Us to change our interpretation.

Aaron: Okay. So letting go of that negativity?

Brent: Yes.

Aaron: Or cutting free from it?

Brent: So, nothing changed. I mean, his wife was still dead. Right. His hero still hated him and tried to kill him. Everything was different. But suddenly he had this moment where he appreciated what he had. Instead of complaining and mourning what he’d lost, he suddenly found this appreciation for what he had or gratitude.

Aaron: Right. So yeah, it’s basically seeing every element of your life as somehow a gift.

Brent: Yeah, some of them are harder than others.

Aaron: And knowing what to let go of too. And saying, okay, thank you for that time. I’m no longer part of that part of my life is past.

Brent: I think when you say that everything in your life is a gift, I think that’s technically true, but also a little bit glib. Everything in my life is a gift.

Aaron: It’s a little cliche. And then my tire’s flat.

Brent: And then my tire’s flat. And then the car’s on fire. Aaron said it was a gift.

Aaron: I’m turning into a Lego man right here. You got to detach this here.

Brent: No, it’s okay. I’m not, I’m not fussing at you. I just, I don’t want our listeners to think that we’re like dismissing all their pain.

Aaron: No, and I don’t think that’s helpful when you say certain catch-all phrases like that. Unless you can really unpack them. Yeah, you can. Absolutely.

Brent: Your house blows up. Well, everything happens for a reason. Yeah, because someone left a bomb in my house. Stop it.

Aaron: Yeah, please tell me how that’s good.

Brent: I think a quote that I came across that really explains this change in information, this guy Alphonse Carr, who’s apparently quite famous in the 1800s, and he said, we can complain because rose bushes have thorns or rejoice because thorns have roses. And that hit me, I’m not much of a gardener, but it hit me, it’s the same information and just how you’re interpreting it. And that’s the trick, I think, to gratitude.

Aaron: And I think the trick is, again, we talk about how we choose to see things, but that can be glib in itself as well. It’s like, sometimes we don’t feel like we can choose. It’s like, we just automatically default to that negativity bias.

Brent: I’m glad you brought that up because I almost forgot to mention that. So, there’s something that Kahneman also brings up in his book. He talks about, the automatic processes of the brain, and then the deliberate and reflective process of the brain, which he calls System 1 and System 2. So these biases are all System 1. System 1 keeps you alive. System 1 is how you drive to work and don’t even realize that you’re driving.

Aaron: System 1 is quite dominant.

Brent: System 1 is fast and powerful and, whatever, 95% of the time does a great job, but every once in a while, you have to say, System 1, you’ve done a wonderful job, I don’t want to question your results, but I’m going to take that, and throw that back out for a second opinion. I think maybe my life doesn’t suck as much as you have implied that it does. Let me sit down here and deliberately reflect on my life, bring my fancy mathematical logical system two brain online, shift the gears.

Aaron: And so that’s partially why we’re here tonight is to help the listener figure out how do we grow that or tap into system 2.

Brent: Yes. So, for our Bracketeers tonight, we’re going to show you a couple times, a couple, three different ways, a couple, a couple, three. That’s not even a Southern thing. I can’t even blame it on Memphis. I just can’t, I just can’t talk. So, we’re gonna talk about three different ways that you can cultivate gratitude. And these are ways that you bring your system two online to correct and override your system one. Supplied to me by my friend, Aaron.

Announcer: This is The Full Mental Bracket – 00:34:21

Brent: So Aaron, you wanna talk to us about some of our mechanisms here?

Aaron: Yeah, so first of all, a little disclaimer. I’m still learning how to cultivate an attitude of gratitude or how to be a grateful person in my own life. So, I’m not in any way a master of this. So yeah, we’re all learning and going on this journey together.

Brent: And that’s one of the values that we continue to review on this show is that we don’t have it all together, and in fact we sometimes fail in public here on this show, and that’s what we’re trying to normalize for our listeners. We’re not the gurus that have all the answers. We have a compass that we think is probably the right direction, and we trip over our own feet as we do it.

Aaron: Absolutely.

Brent: And we let you guys learn from our trip ups.

Aaron: Yeah, and you can laugh, too, as we fumble.

Brent: Well, on this show, you better.

Aaron: A lot. Yeah, so I started, I guess, the first practical measure for developing gratitude and developing a lot of other things, but not just gratitude, but it’s just journaling, taking that time, which a lot of us don’t have in our busy lives today to sit down and actually reflect and write down thoughts and, and trying to reach back into and unpack or find those positive positive events that we automatically got rid of. Thanks to system. System one. Can we rediscover those and bring them back into the story to make that story full?

Brent: Exactly. The journaling is a way to bring your system 2 online and to really think about your life and reflect on it and to go deep and to overcome these biases that we were talking about.

Aaron: Yeah, so it’s, you know, even if you can just… Take five minutes, even if you don’t write something down, just five minutes in the morning or whenever you have a quiet moment to just start thinking a little bit more other than just thinking about the list of to-do’s. Toss the to-do’s, toss the what-a-coulda-shouldas and just like ask yourself, what happened today?

Brent: Well, I want to challenge you on one thing. You said that, you know, people don’t necessarily have time. And I believe that we feel like that.

Aaron: True.

Brent: But if you think about how much of this stuff we’re trying to chase the hedonic, we’re trying to chase this feelings where, you know, you’re buying something or you’re drinking something or you’re eating something or you’re chasing someone to try to get this thrill or this pleasure. If you took some time away from those things and dedicated them into something like this, it’s going to build your long-lasting purpose and satisfaction, and will actually not have that hedonic treadmill come back again and actually last longer, then this is time well spent.

Aaron: We’re talking about immediate versus deferred gratification.

Brent: You may not feel like you have the time, but you have time for whatever you prioritize. And if you were to prioritize this, you might find that it frees up a lot of things that you’re maybe wasting some time on.

Aaron: Yeah, I think it’s also just reaching back and getting access to, what did you call it, the eudemonic?

Brent: Yeah, the eudemonic.

Aaron: Eudemonic, sorry. That journaling is allowing you to experience that process.

Brent: Just imagine that you’re in Memphis and someone says that you’re possessed. They go, eudemonic! And then that’s exactly how you pronounce that.

Aaron: Eudemonic. Except for you’re not. We’re not accusing you.

Brent: Maybe I find out that maybe I’m pronouncing it wrong and there’ll be a caller will call in and say, you all are wrong.

Aaron: And let me know. For tonight, eudemonic. Right. Good. Uh, yeah. And then easier things, even easier practice, which I think a lot of us probably do unknowingly now is just, is thanking people as, as events unfold. Like, thank you, Brent, for allowing me to be here.

Brent: Well, I think that does, I think that does double duty

Aaron: In the moment

Brent: Because it not only acknowledges your gratitude to the person, but it reminds you of the things that you can be grateful of.

Aaron: And maybe it maybe allows those other things in the story to not be lost so quickly. Maybe it’s like a way of capturing them before the negative tick of negativity bias throws them out.

Brent: Because you’re being more proactive about it.

Aaron: Exactly. So you’re almost writing it in the moment.

Brent: It also strengthens your relationships and that the relational wealth is something we keep talking about here is the importance of strengthening relationships and building them up.

Aaron: Yeah, and just, yeah, thanking other people acknowledges their worth and that they’re important. That’s huge.

Brent: Sometimes you forget about it. You think, oh man, this is terrible, this is terrible. And you forget about, hey, my marriage is actually pretty good. My job may not be my favorite, but they pay me well. And you just, oh yeah, yeah, there’s a lot of things that I have to appreciate. And you just don’t even think about it.

Aaron: And I think thanking people, you know, often it feels like sometimes you’re in kindergarten when you think about these little practices, like, all right, all right, class, it’s time to thank, you know, it’s time to, but, you know, it’s having other people to keep you accountable and remind you to be grateful too.

Brent: I think if you normalize it.

Aaron: That’s another, probably another bullet point.

Brent: The thing is, I mean, I would, I would actually, when I was, I was a sergeant in the Marines, and I was still, I would be issuing orders, but I would say, please, I’d say, hey, can you grab that for me? Thank you. Yeah. Grab it for me, please. And I was equally, completely within my rights to treat someone as, as an, you, maggot, grab that thing over there. And some people did, but I’m like, there was no point for that. You know, maybe if you’re being belligerent or we were in a stressful situation, but if we’re just here, there’s no reason to not be. And it wasn’t any less manly. It wasn’t any less powerful. I think it got a little respect. Oh. That guy’s not a jerk.

Aaron: Respecting people. It means a lot.

Brent: I think so.

Aaron: I’m one of my, I don’t know if it’s a pet peeve or not, but like, I remember my dad, like when they would, we’d be at that dinner table, it would be like, he would point something out instead of saying, can you please pass the potatoes? It’s like, are those potatoes over there? It’s like, do you want some?

Brent: Oh, passive aggressive, man. That’s, that’s

Aaron: That’s, that’s a, that’s a, that’s off topic, but now I’m being ungrateful for my parents.

Brent: It’s all right.

Aaron: Sorry, mom and dad. Love you.

Brent: I’ll share you in the parental off-topic. My dad would do this thing, like it was important. It was rude to grab things, but he’d go, can you pass me that right there and touch it three times? And he could have grabbed it, but that would be rude. But he’d have you pass it to him.

Aaron: Dad, you’re touching the thing.

Brent: It’s like, yes. OK. Because anyway. So our last technique, mindfulness.

Aaron: Mindfulness, yeah, that really just means being present in the moment, which sounds like this abstract concept. It’s just being aware that you’re having this experience, it’s instructive, it’s important wherever you’re at, whatever you’re doing. And again, going back to that, like what am I supposed to learn? Just being mindful of what am I doing in this moment? What am I learning from this experience? How can I be grateful for whatever I’m going through? That’s a really kind of abstract description, but yeah, being present.

Brent: I’ve been doing some thinking about mindfulness because it’s everywhere. It’s like, mindfulness now, mindfulness now, now on tour, mindfulness, take to mindfulness and call me in the morning. And I was like a little, I had a grudge against it. But then it dawned on me…

Aaron: Yeah, because it’s such a vague… That word is overused, honestly.

Brent: But for our Bracketeers, mindfulness, as I understand it, which, as I understand it, is you are looking at the mind in operation. You’re not judging it, you’re not controlling it. So basically, your car is running, you open the hood, and you look at the engine. You go, hmm, there’s a lot of spinning things in there, and things are making noise and going and stuff. And you do that with your own brain. The problem with your brain is that you forget. You could drive in the car and you’re halfway down the driveway and you’re like, oh, wait a minute, I was just watching. And you’re like, oh, that was mindful. It’s like, I go back and just watch. And you watch your thoughts…

Aaron: Absolutely.

Brent: …and you watch how it happens. And as you do, you become more aware. You become more aware of

Aaron: what is actually happening in the moment. And I think I’ve read somewhere where it’s like, humans are the only species that where we can step outside of ourselves.

Brent: I believe that.

Aaron: I think that’s kind of what mindfulness is. It’s like, what is actually going on here?

Brent: Yeah, and that’s what makes it so difficult, is because as soon as I think of something, I want to take steps on it. But you’re like, no, you just watch your thoughts go by. And I’ll, Bracketers, I am not very good at this, I am terrible at this, but I do try from time to time, I try to be more mindful. It’s difficult. But it helps you with your emotional regulation. It helps you be less worried about the future. It helps you just be having a more satisfying life and to be more grateful.

Aaron: Yeah, and it pulls you out with whatever emotional experience you’re going through. You’re no longer part of that experience. You’re looking and you’re evaluating, why am I sad? Why am I being angry right now? And that automatically itself, I think, de-escalates whatever feelings you’re feeling immersed or trapped in.

Brent: I think you’re right. I think you’re right.

Aaron: Yeah.

Brent: All right, so we have come to our takeaways. So we would leave you with a couple questions, my dear Bracketeers. What events in your life have you not been finding value in? Are there things in your life that you just are automatically thinking that they suck and maybe you should re-evaluate that? What can you do to change those values? And is there a good thing in your life that you’re not appreciating enough? Maybe a relationship or an opportunity and you just realize that you have just overlooked it. Those are the questions that we have for you this week. Think about it. Get back to us with your answers. Contact us at contact at full mental bracket. You can follow us on the socials. We’re everywhere. We’re on YouTube. We’re on Spotify. We’re on Apple podcast. We’re on Instagram. We’re on TikTok for however many days it might still be around. We’re everywhere. Just find us. We would love to chat with you. Thank you and goodbye.

Aaron: Good night.

Announcer: Full Mental Bracket podcast hosted by Brent Diggs. Executive producer, Brody Scott. Art design, Colby Osborne. Interact with the show at fullmentalbracket.com. This is The Full Mental Bracket.

This is a Brody Scott production.

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