Hello and welcome to the Being Well podcast my name's Forrest Hanson.

In our last episode we began talking about the strength of gratitude,

particularly focusing on thankfulness. Today we're going to concentrate on the aspect of gratitude

that is taking pleasure, fully appreciating the good things that happen in life.

I'm joined, as always, by Dr. Rick Hansen, so Dad, what did you mean by taking pleasure?

The reason I focused on it is super pragmatically in that in our effort to develop greater

resilience inside as an engine of greater well-being inside I'm looking for anything that will help. And one of the things that helps tremendously, which

people actually routinely don't use, is letting themselves have an experience of pleasure.

In terms of the primal machinery architecture of the nervous system,

animals, including big complicated animals like us,

that have moments of pleasure,

experience immediate stress relief.

And I find it poignant and ironic that so many people in the developed and developing parts of the

world that have many opportunities every day to experience one kind of pleasure or another,

don't slow down for that four second pit stop and actually refuel themselves right then and there.

So I thought it was a great thing to focus on,

plus it tends to be motivating when people start doing it

because it's pleasurable.

Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah.

So it's not about the, as you describe it in the book, the million dollar moments, it's just about those kind of everyday occurrences where something small and nice happens, we take an extra second to focus on it.

Yeah, it's a little bit like people saying, whoa. happens when we take an extra second to focus on it.

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