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Different people listening to the same story undergo the same variation in heart rate. In other words, the gaps between their heartbeats start to resemble one another in response to the same story.

The neurochemical, the anti-inflammatory and the neural circuit mechanisms that gratitude can invoke are equally on par with some of the effects of pharmacology, of things like high intensity interval training and exercise, and other things that we think of as kind of more potent forms of self-intervention.

Pro-social behaviors are basically any behavior or mode of thinking that allow us to be more effective in interactions with other people. They are designed to bring us closer to others, including ourselves. Whereas the defensive circuits involve areas of the brain such as areas that are involved in fear, but also areas of the brain and body that are literally associated with freezing or with backing up.

"Our possibilities of happiness are already restricted by our constitution. Unhappiness is much less difficult to experience. We are threatened with suffering from three directions; one from our own body, which is doomed to decay and disillusion, and which cannot even do without pain and anxiety as warning signals. Two, from the external world, which may rage against us with overwhelming and merciless forces of destruction. And three and finally, from our relations with others, the suffering of which from this last source is perhaps more painful to us than any other." Freud

Because defensive circuits are designed to keep us safe, psychologically and physically safe, that they have more robustness, or they can actually drive our behavior more easily.

We now know with certainty that a regular gratitude practice can shift the pro-social circuit so that they dominate our physiology and our mindset in ways that can enhance many aspects of our physical and mental health by default.

It's you that's deciding to put yourself through this discomfort, has been shown to create a very different and positive effect on things like dopamine, on things like anti-inflammatory markers, in your immune system, et cetera, compared to if someone pushes you into this discomfort. The distinction of motivation and desire, or lack of motivation and being forced into something.

The medial prefrontal cortex is the knob, or the switch rather, that can take one experience and allow us to frame it such that it creates positive health effects. And the exact same experience framed as something we don’t want to do, or that we are forced to do can create negative health effects.

Gratitude is a mindset that activates prefrontal cortex, and in doing so sets the context of your experience such that you can derive tremendous health benefits.

To really activate these circuits for gratitude in the serotonin and that probably the oxytocin system as well, and its prefrontal networks, one has to powerfully associate with the idea of receiving help, okay? The subjects are associating or experiencing empathy or sympathy for somebody else who received help.

Genuine thanks are what count. But receiving genuine thanks is also a strong variable in determining whether or not we experience real gratitude, or whether or not it's empty, regardless of the size of a gift.

The entire practice involves reading off these bullet points as a cue to your nervous system of the sense of gratitude. And then for about one minute, which is a trivial amount of time if you really think about it, or maybe two minutes, or if you're really ambitious up to five minutes of just really feeling into that genuine experience of having received gratitude or observed someone else receiving gratitude.

There are studies showing that a regular gratitude practice can provide resilience to trauma, in two ways; it can provide reframing and resilience to prior traumatic experiences. So buffering people against the negative physiological effects and psychological effects of earlier trauma, but also inoculating them in many ways to any traumas that might arrive later in life.

We might be wired that we have a greater propensity for unhappiness than happiness. But gratitude practices provided they are the effective ones and they're performed regularly, can shift those circuits, such that we are happier on average, even when we are not performing those practices.

A form of just expressing thanks, expressing gratitude is not the most effective way to shift these pro-social circuits in positive ways. It turns out that the most potent form of gratitude practice is not a gratitude practice where you give gratitude or express gratitude, but rather where you receive gratitude, where you receive thanks. Therefore, you have within you a very potent form of shifting somebody else's neurology.

Theory of mind is your ability to put yourself into the mindset of another. And in order to get activation of these gratitude circuits, one needs to put themselves into the mindset of another or to directly receive gratitude.

We can actually observe someone else getting help, someone else giving help. And that observation of our species doing that for one another, allows us to experience the feeling of a genuine chemical and neural circuit activation lift.

Regular gratitude practice could shift the functional conductivity of emotion pathways in ways that made anxiety and fear circuits less likely to be active, and circuits for feelings of wellbeing, but also motivation to be much more active.

Even one minute practice, but a regular one, has potential to positively impact neural circuits in the brain, anti-inflammatory markers in the body, and brain-heart breathing coordination.

Neural circuitry is very powerful and very plastic. It can be modified and it’s very context-dependent, but it’s not stupid. And when you lie to yourself about whether or not an experience is actually good for you or not, your brain knows. You can’t simply lie to yourself. You can’t simply say, “Oh, well, every experience is a learning experience”; or when a terrible thing happens, “Oh, good, I’m just going to say good”, and that your body will react as if it’s good for you. That’s a myth.

The human brain is oriented towards story. We have neural circuits that like to link together past, present, future, have different characters, protagonists, and antagonists. From the time we're very young until the time we're very old, story is one of the major ways that we organize information in the brain.

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