?? The Small Miracle of Gratitude: On My Mind

Gratitude Is Just the Beginning

Thanksgiving might be behind us, but that doesn’t mean we can’t take the spirit that animates it with us for the other 364 days of the year. In fact, gratitude is perhaps our most powerful and profound emotion.

It’s our gateway to grace. It’s no coincidence that gratitude shares the same Latin root —?gratus?— as the word grace. So in addition to a day of gratitude, we can choose to live in a state of gratitude — and thus in a state of grace.

Gratitude is the greatest antidote to stress and anxiety. When you find yourself in that stop-the-world-I-want-to-get-off mindset, gratitude is the brake lever. It helps us reset and gives us perspective. We think of gratitude as a coda, an add-on, something that comes at the end. But in fact, gratitude is the beginning. And when we practice it, it sets off a chain reaction of positive benefits.

It’s something the ancients certainly knew. Cicero wrote that “gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues but the parent of all the others.” This wisdom has since been confirmed by a mountain of hard science, as the list of what gratitude can do is seemingly endless.

Robert Emmons, of the University of California, Davis, and Michael McCullough, of the University of Miami, are two of the foremost gratitude researchers. In one?study, for several weeks, one group of participants wrote down things they were thankful for. A second group noted things that had annoyed them. The first group ended up feeling more optimistic and happy about their lives. And they even exercised more and slept better. But it wasn’t because the first group had more things to be thankful for — it was the act of thinking about what they were grateful for that gave them such a tangible boost in well-being.

Martin Seligman, of the University of Pennsylvania — and one of the founders of the field of positive psychology — has shown that the benefits of a single gratitude exercise — in one?study, writing and delivering a thank you letter — can last for an entire month. Gratitude has also been found to lower levels of?stress?and?depression, and?improve?sleep. Researchers at the University of California, San Diego?found?that gratitude exercises can lower levels of inflammation, which improves heart health. In adolescents, gratitude has been?found?to reduce materialism and increase generosity, and lead to healthier eating. At the other end of life, gratitude has been?found?to reduce loneliness in the elderly.

If you always feel like you’re short on time, try working gratitude into your life through habit-stacking. This is the proven practice of creating a new habit by “stacking” it onto an existing habit. An easy method: Think of three things you’re grateful for while brushing your teeth or during some other part of your morning or evening routine. It’s a way of adding meaning to mundane moments — and without having to find any more time in your day.

So keep the spirit of Thanksgiving alive all year round by finding a way to give yourself the gift of gratitude. It’s a small miracle and it’s available to all of us, all the time.

Eating Well Can Be Both Affordable and Easy

I’m thrilled to announce that the?Thrive Global Cookbook?is now available for free. The aim is to share simple, healthy and delicious recipes that are affordable and easy to make.

Food is a big part of our mission at Thrive. How and what we eat is one of five daily behaviors we focus on — along with sleep, moving our bodies, managing stress and connecting with others — to improve our health. And of course, eating isn’t just something we do because we have to. Food is part of who we are, how we spend time with friends and family and how we connect to our culture. Many of my best memories from my childhood in Athens involve my sister, mother and me sitting around the kitchen table for long meals that always ended with walnuts dipped in Greek honey. To this day, I take every opportunity to create these cherished moments around the table with family and friends.

With over 60 breakfast, lunch, dinner, snack and drink recipes from renowned chefs and food experts, including Ina Garten, José Andrés, Daniel Humm, Diane Kochilas, Candice Kumai and Mona Vand, as well as dozens of creative swaps and tips for healthy eating, cooking and shopping curated by Tess Bredesen, Thrive’s Nutrition Director, the Thrive Global Cookbook helps readers plan and prepare easy-to-make meals with nutritious, budget-friendly ingredients.

And I’m grateful to SharkNinja for teaming up with the Thrive Global Foundation to give out kitchen appliances, like blenders, food processors and cookware, to make it easier for people who don’t have them to be able to prepare these great recipes. The cookbook, produced in partnership with Blue Shield of California Promise Health Plan, is free and available?here.

Giving Tuesday — and Every Day

With Giving Tuesday coming up, it’s a great time to highlight how giving isn’t just a nice thing to do — though it is — it’s also one of the most powerful tools for our health and well-being. Making that connection is part of the mission of the Thrive Global Foundation. Every year, Thrive gives each Thriver four Giving Days to give back and a $100?TisBest charity gift card?for the holidays that they can donate to the charity of their choice. Reading Thrivers’ stories of why they selected the charities they chose has been deeply moving. Many of our TisBest cards every year go to?Nashville Street Project, a nonprofit organization founded by Thriver Jeff Swafford to find housing and jobs for people who are homeless.

Giving and volunteering have been found to lower levels of stress, depression and anxiety. Of course we’re all busy, but one of my favorite studies found that by giving our time away in volunteering, we can give ourselves a sense of having more time in our lives, and it definitely helps put all our own problems and challenges in perspective. So on this Giving Tuesday, give a boost to your own well-being and to someone else’s — and then keep those benefits going by making giving a part of your life all year round.

Thrive Turns 8!

As we celebrate Thrive’s eighth birthday, we find ourselves at a point of transformational impact as we have expanded our mission to include improving the world’s health and productivity through science-backed behavior change. We’ve launched Thrive AI Health in partnership with the OpenAI Startup Fund to democratize the life-saving benefits of improving daily habits and address growing health inequities. And, adding to our B2B work, we’ve entered the B2B2C space, working with leading pharmaceutical companies to redefine the consumer experience by using daily behaviors to augment life-changing medicines. Because as I learned from a painful wakeup call in 2007 that inspired me to found Thrive in the first place, health is?also?what happens between doctor visits.

So to reflect on what we’ve learned so far, I’ve invited eight of Thrive’s leaders to share a lesson on our eighth anniversary. Together, they give a picture of how far we’ve come — and how much we look forward to accomplishing. You can read the eight lessons?here.

BEFORE YOU GO

How AI Can Make Us More Human

If AI is going to be more intelligent than we are, then what makes us uniquely human? It’s not our IQ — it’s something else. Isn’t it time we discover what that something else is? And how can we use AI to find our way back to our essential humanity? Those were the questions Baratunde Thurston and I discussed on his wonderful new podcast?Life with Machines. You can watch our full conversation on YouTube?here, or listen across podcast platforms?here.

Words Around the World

Words and concepts from around the world that teach us how to thrive

“Ikigai,” a Japanese word for what gives meaning to our lives. As researchers from the Tohoku University School of Public Health?put it, “Ikigai?does not merely reflect an individual's psychological factors (well-being, hopes) but also consciousness about his/her motivation for living, because it has a meaning akin to having a purpose in life” or a “reason for living.” And there are benefits to nurturing your?Ikigai?— studies?show?that having a strong?Ikigai?is a predictor of a longer life. So give yourself a gift this holiday season by finding your?Ikigai?and making time for it in your daily life.

Books of the Month

Both books I’m featuring this month explore the idea of how limits on our time can inform how we live. The first is?Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts, by Oliver Burkeman, the best-selling author of?Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. In his new work, Burkeman urges us to let go of getting it all done, accept “imperfectionism,” and embrace the nonnegotiable limits of our time?on?earth. As he writes, “the more willing you are wholeheartedly to acknowledge the hard limitations of human finitude, the easier it gets to do what others might dismiss as impossible.”

The second is about the thing that can teach us most about life: death. In?Memento Mori: The Art of Contemplating Death to Live a Better Life, Joanna Ebenstein urges us to embrace the life lessons of death. After all, it’s the most universal experience we all share. As The Onion headline?put it, “World Death Rate Holding Steady at 100 Percent.” And yet, we’ll do almost anything to avoid that reality — even though shunning death diminishes our life. “Our culture has given us very little to assist us in learning to tolerate this sense of vulnerability, mystery and the unknown,” writes Ebenstein. “By learning to live with our fear of death, we also learn to live with our fear of that which we cannot control, to sit with the mystery at the heart of life and still appreciate, and with great joy, the life we have been given.”

Best,

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