Emotional Success: The Power of Gratitude, Compassion and Pride

"I should disclose that Dave DeSteno is a colleague of mine at Northeastern University. I only moved to Northeastern University about seven years ago, but Dave DeSteno has been doing this work on positive emotions – gratitude, compassion, and so on – for a number of years. Maybe it’s just my particular background, but I was always very sceptical of the positive psychology movement, even though it includes some of my closest friends and colleagues. Maybe I’m an old curmudgeon at heart. So I have been really captivated by the persistent findings in research about the ways in which emotions like gratitude and compassion – and I would add awe – are really beneficial. I love scientific findings that cause me to question my own beliefs and values. “If you curate your experiences, eventually your brain will automatically make those emotions with ease” One of the arguments that I make in my book, based on my understanding of the neuroscience of how the brain is working to make emotions, is that it’s very beneficial for you to cultivate experiences right now, in the present, to seed your brain to more easily in the future make beneficial emotions, emotions that will help you in your life. Some of those will be pleasant, and some of those will be unpleasant; but the argument that I make, based on neuroscience, is that if you cultivate experiences that are unfamiliar to you, curate your experiences by putting in a little effort, eventually your brain will just automatically make those emotions with ease when you need them. Like driving. Dave’s basic argument is that if your brain learns how to make gratitude and compassion, and you start to do it automatically, then you’re not having to employ effort, attention, or what he would call ‘cognitive strategies’ to do the right thing and get along in life. You’re wiring your brain to automatically make better decisions, with little effort, if you learn to make gratitude, compassion, and so on. Yes. The reason why those journals work, is that you’re basically training your brain to automatically make that emotion. I explain the nuts and bolts of it in my book. Gratitude is a very powerful game changer. So is awe, the emotion of awe. Buddhist philosophy also really emphasises compassion. There is scientific evidence that these emotions really are helpful. When I pick up a popular book on positive psychology, my first impulse is to have my eyes roll back in my head. But with Dave’s book, my reaction was that my eyes widened, and I leaned in, and I read the book very quickly with great interest. I could nitpick about some of his metaphors, like one very popular notion in our culture: that the mind is a battleground between cognition and emotion, or rationality and feeling. That’s just a fiction, it’s just a myth. Brains aren’t structured that way, they don’t work that way, despite the fact that scientists keep using it. But to me that’s a minor point in a tapestry of much more interesting and important findings. Dave’s book is full of real, scientifically backed advice that can be helpful to people."