Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: You.
Gratitude. It's a common bandit around term these days, and for good reason. It's got some heavy hitting science supporting its usefulness to our emotional, psychological and physical well being. Yep, it brings the goodness to all parts of life. So how can we employ it to help build our relationship? Well, that's what we're going to explore today as we look at the idea of starting a practice of gratitude with your partner.
You.
Hey, we're Kim and Roger, and we're here to show couples how to get the best out of their relationship so they can start living their dream life together.
[00:00:35] Speaker B: We're a West Aussie couple who are living the life of our dreams. We don't entertain the word should, we think about the future as a field of possibilities and we let joy be our compass.
[00:00:43] Speaker A: We've taken the simple idea of working as a team and applied it to our marriage and it's been a game changer, allowing us to work out what truly lights us up in life and to go after it together.
[00:00:52] Speaker B: From living in snowy Japan to starting our own house flipping business, we've achieved some big dreams. And most importantly, we feel fulfilled and are having the most fun we've ever had.
[00:01:01] Speaker A: Hear conversations from inspiring couples, thoughts from relationship experts, and tales from our own lives as we help you to gain the wisdom and skills you'll need to turn your relationship into a real team.
[00:01:10] Speaker B: These are relationship conversations for real people, by real people. So sit back, get comfortable, whatever tickles you, pickle, and enjoy living the team life.
[00:01:24] Speaker A: You okay? So today we are going to be talking about gratitude, which we've spoken a little bit about in previous episodes, but we obviously haven't dedicated an episode to it. And we're talking about how to practice gratitude together from a side by side sense. Today, this episode isn't aimed at saying, be more grateful for your relationship.
That's unrealistic. Often at the start of any sort of gratitude practice to just tell people to be more grateful for something they might be finding challenging or they had not practiced in being grateful for.
Like any new habit or new skill, it's better to take a lower goal, an easier goal, sorry, an easier target at the beginning. And we thought today we would come at this from the angle of teaching about the benefits of gratitude and the science, a little bit of the science behind it, and understanding that by practicing gratitude side by side, those benefits that you get, which we will go into, will naturally flow into you becoming more grateful for your relationship, even if that is not the gratitude specifically that you're practicing sound a bit convoluted right now, but we'll get there.
[00:02:50] Speaker B: No, look, I really like the distinction you made, sweetie, we're not telling you to be grateful. I think that can be really unhelpful, and I think even a bit toxic sometimes when you tell someone they should be grateful for something.
We don't know your situation in life. We talk about our lives. We are grateful for what we've got. But life can be tough sometimes. What we are saying is that the science behind practicing gratitude is in, and there are many benefits for your mental health. And by practicing it side by side with your partner, that also has many benefits for the individual and the couple. So we're not saying you have to be grateful, but what we are saying is that a practice of gratitude, or practicing gratitude can have a heap of benefits for you and your partner.
[00:03:36] Speaker A: Yes. So let's explain a little bit around what gratitude actually means and gratitude, from a more technical perspective, if we want to understand the technical definition, is about the appreciation of what someone receives or experiences, along with recognizing the source of that goodness. So we're grateful for what we are receiving or experiencing, along with acknowledging where that experience or where whatever we've received has come from.
And it really is about being thankful for the things that you have in the positive. You can say positive aspects. I don't want to put such a heavy connotation on it. It's about being grateful for different aspects of life, such as personal strengths that might not be super obvious, even being grateful for an experience, being grateful for things outside of your control, like the weather, a nice day, being grateful for someone showing kindness, a random stranger, being grateful that you got through a difficult experience. There are many ways to be grateful for something that has occurred in your life or something that has shown up in your life.
[00:04:57] Speaker B: To me, it's just like a way of viewing the world as well. You actually do get to choose how you view the world and how you make action, or how you go about living your life based on that. Now, that doesn't mean that bad things don't happen to you because you have gratitude or you see things in a positive light. Gratitude isn't dismissing the bad or wallpapering over the cracks or ignoring it. It's more about embracing the good, focusing what you do have instead of what you don't.
[00:05:29] Speaker A: Yeah, and I think that's a really good point. There's been a lot of discussion very recently around this concept of toxic positivity. Have you heard that?
[00:05:38] Speaker B: I have, yeah.
[00:05:39] Speaker A: And we certainly have experienced that, especially in the carer world, where we will describe some of the challenges we might have if someone asks us about our life and what it looks like, and particularly some of the challenges our daughter experiences being a disabled child in the world. And people will try and spin that into a really positive outcome, like, well, at least she doesn't have this. Or you must be thankful, though, that you live in Perth. And of course we are grateful for those things. But toxic positivity is about more about denying the validation of the experience the person is having. It's not about focusing on gratitude. So there is a difference between that and what we're talking about today.
[00:06:28] Speaker B: Yeah. And for me, again, from what I said, off the top, it's like, allow people to be grateful for what they have themselves. It's an inward process or something you can share with your partner. If you are telling someone to be grateful for something or thinking someone else should be grateful for something, that really doesn't help.
[00:06:48] Speaker A: That's not the practice of gratitude.
[00:06:49] Speaker B: That's not the practice of gratitude.
You're doing it wrong.
[00:06:53] Speaker A: That is that toxic positivity that people talk about. And it's an extreme term, but it can certainly feel like that in the moment when it might invalidate something that you share.
[00:07:06] Speaker B: Validation. I think that's a great way of putting. You're invalidating their experience because you're saying, yeah, because sometimes it's very hard for people. It's funny, we can really focus on the negatives when it comes to ourselves, but you approach someone else with a negative and they really struggle with it. So it's like when someone says, oh, how's your day? You're sort of forced to go, oh, it was great. Even though it wasn't.
[00:07:31] Speaker A: No one goes, I don't want to go down that rabbit hole right now.
[00:07:33] Speaker B: Okay.
But what we're saying is, no, I.
[00:07:38] Speaker A: Don'T actually want to go.
All right, let's move on. We've made the distinction, and I think you put it really nicely there, Roj. Gratitude and the practice of gratitude is about your own practice. This is not about putting it onto someone else. So let's dig into that a little bit. And why? Because we've said at the start of the show, Roger has said that there is research behind this, and let's dig into a little bit of why gratitude is so impactful and what sort of impact it has. So in the research that's out there, there's kind of two parts to it. There's research around what the actual practice of gratitude itself does in the moment. So when you have those thoughts of gratitude, what that activates for you and what that does for you, and then there's research around the flow on effect, which relates to shifting someone's perspective in life. So when we practice gratitude more consistently, what that actually does to our mindset and the way our mind approaches life, which is just such a cool idea. So in terms of the first factor, which is the Practice itself, there is a plethora of research that shows that by cultivating these positive emotions, which is what gratitude is, that you can significantly improve your psychological functioning. So that's your mental well being.
And one of the things that gratitude actually does in terms of your actual body, which is just amazing. So from a physiological perspective, is it lowers the level of stress hormone like cortisol, and it increases the activity of the parasympathetic nervous system. Now, our parasympathetic nervous system puts simply, this is the good stuff. This is your rest and digest. So when we activate this part of the body, it's when our body gets to relax and heal and do what it needs to do to stay well and healthy. And so we want to be activating our parasympathetic nervous system. We want to be lowering our cortisol levels and our stress in our system. And by actually just in the moment practicing gratitude, you do that to your system. That's the physiological response that it has, which is just amazing.
Another thing that shows up or occurs when we practice gratitude is that by expressing gratitude, they've found that it activates the brain regions associated with reward processing, empathy, and social bonding. So when these neural activations occur, these can precipitate feelings of joy and connection, so they can increase the likelihood of those feelings coming up for you. So if you say, I'm grateful for something, the knock on effect of that in that moment can be that the parts of the brain that are activated actually cause feelings of joy and connection in the moment. And that connection piece is really lovely and important when you are sharing that gratitude with someone you love.
[00:10:58] Speaker B: Yeah, I love that, sweetie. So if you're sitting there going, or you're talking to your partner or someone else, and they're going, oh, gratitude. That all sounds good in theory, but it's a bit, what do you say? Woo woo, woo, woo, woo woo. Or it's a bit nap or cliche, or isn't that a bit pseudosciencey? No, the science is in with this. They've done a heap of studies, a lot of controlled studies, where people are writing in gratitude journals versus those who don't. People were writing letters of gratitude versus those who don't. And they've even done studies on bosses who say thank you to their staff and have increases in performances.
So while before we were.
[00:11:43] Speaker A: That's a reception of gratitude.
[00:11:45] Speaker B: Yeah. So while before we were saying, don't tell people what they should be grateful for, you can still tell someone you're grateful for them and actually has a positive benefit for you and for them as well.
[00:11:56] Speaker A: So that actually looks at both the boss and the recipient employee. So for the boss being grateful to the employee, they get the benefit of gratitude.
[00:12:04] Speaker B: Well, the boss gets a double win because, one, he's practicing gratitude.
And then the employees that they're receiving gratitude so they feel better about their jobs and so they perform better, and then, of course, they're performing better, making more money for the boss. So the boss is getting an extra kick at the end. So it's a win win bundle of goodness.
[00:12:25] Speaker A: So moving on to the second part, which I mentioned briefly of the science around the benefits of gratitude. And that second factor is looking at the way your perspective shifts. They describe this as something called positive cognitive bias. And so gratitude interventions have been shown to promote this positive cognitive bias, which is literally what it sounds like cognitively. You are biased to look for the positive things in life, and you become more attuned to these positive aspects, so you're seeking them out.
Think about it in this way. If you're in a crappy mood and you're having a bummy day, do you notice more of the good stuff or the bad stuff? You generally notice more of the bad stuff, and it irks you to a higher level. And the reverse happens if you are practicing gratitude and you go through your day, you start to notice if you're being thankful and feeling good in life and having those feelings of joy, you start to notice even more things you could be thankful for and feel good about and experience joy from. So that's that positive cognitive bias that the research has shown. And this helps individuals to really just experience life overall in a more favorable light in terms of what feelings that spurs across the board higher levels of happiness and satisfaction, which is pretty profound.
[00:13:55] Speaker B: In a couple of weeks, we've actually got Hugh van Karlinberg and his wonderful wife, Penny Moody coming on the show. And most of you will know who Hugh is because of his work with the Resilience project, the books, the massive school program he's got.
And when he goes on his shows on the road. And in his book and what he talks a lot about, he talks about his time in India and this boy called Stunzan. And I think it was such a great way to, I guess, talk to what gratitude really is and the impact it can have on people, because I think this is something moment, he said, changed his life forever. So, of course, most of you will know the story. If you don't, I'll quickly run through it. Stunzan was a young schoolboy living in India who was in one of Hugh's class when he was doing volunteer teaching work in India. And one day, Stunzan took Hugh to their playground. And this playground was old, metal, rusty. Half the things didn't work. I think they had a chain to swing on or something like that. Compared to a playground you might see in the western world, or even just Australia, it would probably have that tape around it where the council wouldn't let kids.
[00:15:08] Speaker A: It wasn't a nature playset.
[00:15:09] Speaker B: It wasn't a nature playset that you see. But Stunson was so proud of it, and he just wanted to show Hugh because he was so proud of said to, he said to Hugh, and this is where this saying comes from. And it was hashtagged around. You'll see sports stars with it written on their wristbands. Dis.
[00:15:29] Speaker A: Look at diss, which was him saying this.
[00:15:32] Speaker B: He was saying, like we would say in Australia, how good is this? And he's saying, know that came a bit of a catch cry or that embodied that gratitude. And he actually even asked Hugh, it's like, do kids in Australia, do they get play equipment like this? As in, I hope they do, because that shows a bit of empathy and compassion as well.
[00:15:55] Speaker A: It's just the most beautiful story. And I have definitely had moments where I have looked out at the ocean on a run or just, it's usually weather based, a beautiful sunny day and said this.
And it is so powerful in your body and in your mind to really take in how grateful we are for what we do have, the positivity that flows through you, the joy for the life that you do have, even on a tough day, this moment, this thing is something that I'm lucky to have, and it really does impact your sense of being, your sense of joy in the world significantly. And it was such a great story. It stuck with me, and obviously, it's.
[00:16:49] Speaker B: I think it stuck with a lot of Australians.
[00:16:51] Speaker A: And that's why it's part of his platform.
[00:16:52] Speaker B: That's why the resilience project and his podcast, the imperfects is so popular. And that catch cry dis, it resonates with so many people because it encapsures the story of this young boy who, compared to probably most kids in Australia, has very, very know, I think his shoes were worn, they weren't big enough for him. And he was just like, how lucky am I? He was so grateful. And I think that was a huge game changer for Hugh and his life. And that's what he brought to Australia, to kids in Australia, to tell them this story, to show them that you can practice gratitude. And the reason he did this was because he wanted them to improve. He wanted the kids of Australia to have improved mental health.
[00:17:37] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. And that's how powerful gratitude is. It does that. It's one of his three tools that he teaches in the resilience project because it has such a significant impact. Yeah, it's a wonderful story about a child who, and I just like thinking about what that does for stunzen in his life as well.
When you are grateful for the playground you have, what else does that fill you with? What else are you grateful for so that you focus on what you do have and where you can go. And it kind of sparks in my mind, the idea of opportunity.
Does opportunity also have like a gratitude lens over it? Are we looking for the opportunity as well? Do you know what I mean? Like, I wonder, do we look for opportunity more? And we haven't looked at the research on this at all, but I'm just thinking about Stunzen. Do we look for opportunity more when we sit in the gratitude space?
[00:18:34] Speaker B: Well, if you know that you're going to feel better mentally, you're going to feel better emotionally. As you said, it changes your body makeup, it changes the neurons up, parts.
[00:18:44] Speaker A: Of your brain that really powerful.
[00:18:47] Speaker B: If it's doing all this positive, being grateful for things in your life, for certain parts of your situation, then, yeah, I think it's only going to have more beneficial impacts in terms of how you see the world in general. In terms of opportunity, it's so easy to be negative.
I feel it's a lot easier. And I think we're wider humans to be negative. And so being positive, being grateful for things can be really powerful.
[00:19:15] Speaker A: Yeah, it's a skill. It needs to be practiced. Exactly.
[00:19:18] Speaker B: But do you know it's also a skill that you can practice side by side with your partner as well.
[00:19:23] Speaker A: Well, let's jump into that, Roger. And what we sort of wanted to bring to the table today around some of the benefits of doing gratitude side.
[00:19:30] Speaker B: By side a lot of the experts know one of the first things you should do is start a gratitude journal and do that daily. Now, I'm not someone who really tends to write in a journal. I find it really difficult. Kim does. Kim writes in a journal almost daily. But for me to be able to, it is really important to not just think about being grateful, but either saying or writing down works really well as well and is proven. So for me to be able to bounce that off Kim and say to her, hey, Kim, this is the things I'm grateful for. And we do this every morning. Every morning, Kim and I, as we're having our coffees, as part of our morning mindset and our routine, one of the questions we ask each other is like, what are you grateful for? What's your attitude of gratitude? And we tell each other. So for me, that's really important as well, because we get to know each other better through it.
[00:20:17] Speaker A: Yeah, getting to know each other is certainly a lovely part of it. It's getting to share as well. I think more specifically in the gratitude as well. So when I give something, I'm grateful for my own gratitude. And the feelings I get from that seem to be spurred into you. You also take that moment to enjoy that gratitude.
It's a shared benefit in that moment, if that makes sense, because I'm highlighting something, and I know we said at the start, you can't tell someone to be grateful for something, but when you are sharing your own feelings of gratitude for something with someone you love and you're in an intimate relationship with, it can spark a gratitude from them as well.
[00:21:03] Speaker B: Yeah. So is there prompter questions? That's what we're talking about. Because I probably wouldn't go around saying I'm grateful this, I'm grateful for that, although I'm more inclined to now because for two, three years we've been doing our attitude of gratitude in the morning. So I do look at the world a bit more positively. But I know I've got a safe sounding board in you to say. I'm positive I'm grateful for whatever it is in our life, for where we live, for the great weather, for our beautiful daughter, even for you. Although I will have to admit, I'll say I'm grateful for Kim about once a week, and I get Roger, I'm grateful for you maybe once a month, but that's okay. The practice actually isn't about saying you're grateful for each other. The practice is just sharing what you're grateful about to each other.
[00:21:51] Speaker A: Yeah, it's about sharing your own personal gratitude. And by sharing your own personal gratitude, the intimacy that's fostered between you, the other person gets the knock on effect of the gratitude. They become grateful often for what you are grateful for. They also get the shared experience, the shared feelings. Those things all build emotional intimacy as well. And all of a sudden, sharing your gratitude moment together has actually become a way for your relationship to grow together, for your relationship to become more intimate together. It's a beautiful opportunity for you guys to both become aware of what each other are grateful for and to share in the joy of that gratitude together, to share in those positive emotions we spoke about at the beginning together. And when we share an experience together or a feeling together, it bonds us. It bonds us more tightly.
[00:22:44] Speaker B: Yeah, those chemicals, oxytocin, will actually start to come out in us. And guess what? You're communicating straight away. You think, oh, communication is so hard. We don't communicate. If you share with each other some information, and this is like important information, this is about what lights you up. This is about how you see the world, just not the operational day to day of the house. You're communicating with your partner. And there's actually research out there that says people who, couples who share their gratitude, what they're grateful for with each other, are also more likely to feel safe, to share problems with each other because they'll feel safe that they can express themselves and they communicate better.
[00:23:26] Speaker A: I love that. That's such an important one. Okay, so let's just share with everyone how they could start this practice side by side. I think the number one way we would recommend starting this, and we say this all the time because we love James clear and atomic habits.
It's such a powerful program for change, using habits to make change. And so we would say habits, stack this. It's honestly going to be the easiest way to get started with this as a new habit. And what we mean by that is stack it onto something you already do as a habit. If you guys go to bed at the same time, do it. Then. If you guys make breakfast together at the same time, do it. Then if you guys have a coffee together sometime, do it. Then find something in the day where you guys spend two to five minutes together every single day at that same moment and make that your gratitude moment. And literally start with just one thing.
Hey, today I was grateful for a.
Hey, babe, today I noticed b. And that's it. Start the practice, both of you offering one gratitude, and you'll be off and running.
[00:24:33] Speaker B: That's 100% right. If you feel you can't carve out the time, like you're too busy, you don't have the time, have it, stack it. What do you already do? As Kim said, a coffee in the morning, a glass of wine at dinner? Or maybe it's just before you go to bed every night. Babe, what are you grateful for? Or start, hey, babe, do you know what I'm grateful for? The light fixing you chose.
All right, Kim, what was your gold nugget from today's episode?
[00:25:01] Speaker A: I think for me, it was the broader concept of not forcing people to be grateful for their relationship, but understanding that by practicing gratitude together in their relationship, there are so many positive flow on effects for the relationship. As we said, in terms of sharing and bonding, increase in actual gratitude practice because you get your partner's gratitude practice. At the same time. These are things that are so powerful for a couple in terms of relationship growth. And it's such a beautiful way, like you said, to communicate. And communication is so important if we want to increase our emotional intimacy in the relationship. So there's really no downside to gratitude. There's only a ton of upside, and we see a great flow on into that relationship space.
[00:25:49] Speaker B: For me, the science is in if you practice gratitude, you will see benefits in your mental health and in your life. If you practice it with your partner, you will see benefits in your relationship.
You're amazing. You've just spent quality time on your relationship.
[00:26:08] Speaker A: Feel like you're on a roll. If you want more living the team life relationship insights and conversations, head over to Kim and Roge.com where you can find all the show notes as well as tons of other relationship goodies.
[00:26:19] Speaker B: And if you like today's episode, please hit subscribe or let another couple know where they can find us. It'll make them happy, and it'll make us really happy.
[00:26:27] Speaker A: Until next time, keep on living the team life.
