Transforming Your Brain with Gratitude Practice

For decades I’ve known about the supposed benefits of Gratitude Practice. Quite honestly it never really resonated with me. I can make up a lot of stories about why that might be – there’s seemingly few opportunities to feel grateful when you’re raised in poverty in a dangerous inner city housing project – poverty is a neurotoxin – too much threat-detection circuitry dominating my neural real estate. That’s a good story. I’ve got any number of others.

According to noted USC neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, however, an effective gratitude practice strengthens the neural circuitry in two key areas of the brain, the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) and the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC). Coincidentally, these are the same areas that show up with robust circuitry in long term meditators! Also, this is the same wiring associated with the so-called Pro-Social circuitry in the brain – the areas of the brain that move us towards people, places and things, as opposed to the brain’s threat-detecting, defensive circuitry which moves us self-protectively away.

The Untold Retold Story

Turns out my avid study of neuroscience is beginning to generate a new story when it comes to gratitude and practicing it. That new story, interestingly, begins with a wild story about … stories! The Stanford Medical School neuroscientist, Andrew Huberman recently pointed out this research in his own podcast on gratitude.

If I ask you to listen to a recording of any of these short accounts – say, the 4th/last story – of people helping people, while you’re doing so your heart will beat at a variable rate. All hearts beat at different rates at different times. That rate changes depending on what you’re doing. Slower beat-rates when you’re resting or relaxed; faster rates when you’re active, stressed or in danger. Your heart rate varies (HRV) based on the needs of your body and your respiratory patterns.

With respect to Story #4 above, if, on different days, at different times and in different places, I ask any number of your friends to listen to the same account, their hearts will beat at a variable rate just like yours. No big surprise.

 

What IS surprising, however is that if I make a trace recording like the one above of HRV for each participant listening to Story #4, those variability tracings will PERFECTLY overlay onto each other! Everyone’s HRV is affected in similar ways, by the same plot points in the same story. But more importantly: my brain is impacted the same beneficial way if I read or listen to the same story over and over! Thus the essence of an effective Gratitude Practice must be grounded in narrative – a story that emotionally activates our “gratitude circuitry.”

And so, here is the critical variable of an effective Gratitude Practice: select an authentic experience of you or someone else receiving kindness or of you or someone else being kind to someone and you feeling grateful in the aftermath. What matters most is that it genuinely activates the emotional experience of feeling grateful in your body and brain, and you have access to a written or auditory file of the story. Listen to or read this story for two or three minutes three times a week and you will end up increasing the strength and connectivity of your resting state heart/brain circuitry and lessen the strength of your so-called “resentment circuitry.” And remember this neurobiological guideline: whatever we pay attention to tends to increase – a story to truly be grateful for.

Prosocial versus Self-Protective

Finally, since learning about the unrivaled power of the granular elements of Contingent Communication (CC) to foster secure attachment relationships (as opposed to insecure or fragmented and disorganized), my relationships have noticeably changed. Because CC has this power to grow robust neural networks in the developing brain of children (as well as the delayed developing brain in many adults!) – especially the aspect of learning to “respond in a timely and effective manner” – my own Gratitude Practice has begun paying attention to stories of this happening more and more in my daily life (also, paying attention to when it doesn’t happen – like when people don’t call or simply don’t show up for a meeting or I get “ghosted” on Social Media). I’m repeatedly attending to many more of the former and doing my best to simply notice, and then let go of the latter. This element of my Gratitude Practice feels like it’s working well for me.