Happy Holidays. I'm Leo from actualized.org and in this special holiday edition

I'm going to talk about how to practice gratitude. Gratitude is a topic you hear talked about a lot if you've immersed yourself even a little bit in personal development literature or self-help books or seminars or even watching some YouTube videos or some Ted

videos. So a lot of people talk about gratitude nowadays and that's because actually

the positive psychology movement which has been really active over the last 20 or 30 years,

has been quite a lot of research about gratitude,

and they've done some actual studies and science on this stuff where they actually take people and what

they do is they force them to do a daily gratitude journal or to just think

about the things that they're grateful for in their life.

And if someone does that, is forced to do that for, let's say, 30 days, some of these studies

did it for a whole month, and then they query the person as to how happy they are in their life

at the beginning of that phase,

before they were doing any gratitude work.

And at the end of that phase, after 30 days of gratitude work,

what they discover is that you have about 20% increase in

overall happiness and satisfaction with life. So that's a pretty cool finding,

pretty popular finding, a lot of people talk about that finding so that being the case

you know one of the kind of one of the cliche things that people say in self-help is

practice gratitude practice gratitude

and what you should be grateful about and also some of the ways in which it doesn't work.

So one of the real advantages of

gratitude here is that there's a trap. There's a trap that we fall into

as we're going through our life when we're not doing personal development

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