That's the end.

Hello, it's Dr. Laurie Santos, your guest host for the week.

Welcome to Radiohead Space and to Thursday.

If you don't know, I'm a psychology professor at Yale and host of the Happiness Lab, a

podcast all about the science of happiness.

Today, I'm going to talk about how gratitude can genuinely make us feel better, and I'll

share some tips for how to put it into practice, even if we're not feeling all that grateful.

I think we can define gratitude as a sort of two-part process.

First, gratitude is about recognizing the good things in your life.

Oh my gosh, this is great.

You know, taste of coffee, the fact that the people I love are alive.

But gratitude also has a second part, which is a sort of attribution, which is to realize

that it's like, that didn't necessarily have to be the case.

The universe is giving you this wonderful gift that that blessing exists, and it's a

moment of thankfulness that you have it in the first place.

There's evidence that if you regularly engage in a practice of gratitude, if you take

time to experience things that you're thankful for, you wind up feeling better.

You wind up self-reporting more positive emotions and a deeper satisfaction with life.

And this could come even through the act of expressing gratitude to other people.

One of my favorite studies by Marty Selegman and his colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania

had subjects do what he calls a gratitude visit.

He tells his subjects, we want you to write a letter of gratitude to someone who's been

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