The Science of Gratitude & How to Build a Gratitude Practice | Huberman Lab Essentials
Date: 2025-10-23 | Duration: 00:34:45
Transcript
0:00 Welcome to Huberman Lab Essentials, where we revisit past episodes for the most potent and actionable science-based tools for mental health, physical health, and performance. I’m Andrew Huberman, and I’m a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. Today we are talking all about the science of gratitude. There’s now a wealth of data showing that having an effective gratitude practice can impact a huge number of health variables, both mental health and physical health, in positive
0:30 ways. However, in researching this episode, I was completely surprised as to what constitutes an effective gratitude practice. I think like many of you would have thought that an effective gratitude practice simply involves writing down a few things or many things that we’re grateful for, or thinking about those, or really making an effort to somaticize or feel some of the elements of gratitude while writing out that list or thinking about that list. It turns out that an effective gratitude practice doesn’t resemble that
1:00 at all. The neuroimaging data, the physiological data, looking at things like inflammatory markers, and other studies purely looking at the psychology and the long and short-term effects of an effective gratitude practice point to a completely different approach to using gratitude to positively impact health metrics. There are studies showing that performing a gratitude practice twice or three times or even just once a week can lead to a pervasive, long-lasting impact on
1:30 subjective well-being. People report feeling happier, more meaning, joy, even awe for their life experience simply in response to adding a gratitude practice. But there are additional benefits of a gratitude practice. There are studies showing that a regular gratitude practice can provide resilience to trauma in two ways. It can provide a reframing and resilience to prior traumatic experiences, buffering people against the negative physiological effects and psychological
2:00 effects of earlier trauma, but also inoculating them in many ways to any traumas that might arrive later in life. The other thing that a gratitude practice does is it’s been shown to benefit social relationships, but not just for the relationship in which you express gratitude. On the face of it, you might think, “Okay, if I express gratitude for somebody over and over and over, then I’m going to feel better about that person.” And indeed, that is one effect of a gratitude practice that’s called a pro-social or intra-social gratitude
2:30 practice. But there are now several studies, recent studies in good journals, pointing to the fact that a regular gratitude practice can also enhance one’s social relationships across the board: in the workplace, at school, with family, in romantic relationships, and even one’s relationship to themselves, which is really what the subjective feelings of well-being are. And for those of you that are coming to this conversation thinking gratitude practice is kind of wishy-washy or woo, and it’s going to involve putting your hand on your heart and feeling into all the amazing things that
3:00 you happen to have even when things are really terrible—that’s not where we’re going at all. So if you are of the mindset that a gratitude practice is kind of weak sauce, buckle up, because the data actually point to the fact that a gratitude practice is a very, very potent way in which you can steer your mental and physical health in positive directions, and that those effects are very long-lasting. Before we dive into the tools and mechanisms and scientific studies around gratitude, I’d like to just set the framework for the discussion. Gratitude is what we call a
3:30 pro-social behavior or a pro-social mindset. Pro-social behaviors are basically any behavior or mode of thinking that allow us to be more effective in interactions with other people, including ourselves. Now, pro-social is not just a name that we give these different tools and practices and mindsets. There are actually neural circuits in the brain that are specifically wired for pro-social thoughts and behaviors. So, without getting into too much detail just yet—we will later—we have circuits in the
4:00 brain that are what we call appetitive. They are designed to bring us closer to things and to bring us into closer relation to the details of that sensory experience. Now, that could be a delicious food that you’re eating. It could be interacting with a loved one. It could be interacting with a friend or anyone that you happen to like. It could even be in relation to yourself. And the neural circuits in the brain that are associated with aversive or defensive behaviors are actually antagonized, meaning they are reduced when the
4:30 pro-social circuits are more active. So, the framework here that I’d like to set is that we have this kind of seesaw of neural circuits in the brain: one set that are pro-social and are designed to bring us closer to others, including ourselves, closer to certain sensory experiences, because a lot of pro-social behaviors can also be geared towards things like pets or food or anything that we find we want to be closer to and want more of. Whereas the defensive circuits involve areas of the brain, yes, such as areas that are
5:00 involved in fear, but also areas of the brain and body that are literally associated with freezing or with backing up. So the way to think about gratitude is it falls under this category of pro-social behaviors which are designed to bring us closer to different types of things and to enhance the level of detail that we extract from those experiences. The key thing for today’s discussion is that gratitude turns out to be one of the most potent wedges by which we can insert our thinking and, as
5:30 you’ll also see, the physiology of our body between these two circuits and give a little more levity, if you will, to the side of the seesaw that’s associated with positive pro-social feelings. And if you keep imagining this seesaw imagery, what’s really beautiful about gratitude practices is that if they’re performed repeatedly—and not even that often, but repeatedly—then one can actually shift their neural circuits such that the seesaw that I’m
6:00 calling pro-social versus defensive behaviors can actually start to tilt. What this means is that we now know with certainty that a regular gratitude practice can shift the pro-social circuits so that they dominate our physiology and our mindset in ways that can enhance many, many aspects of our physical and mental health by default. So we don’t always have to constantly be in practice trying to be happy. Now I’d like to talk about some of the neurochemistry and neural circuits associated with gratitude and pro-social
6:30 behaviors. Numerous times on this podcast, I’ve talked about so-called neuromodulators. For those of you that might have forgotten or have never heard of neuromodulators before, neuromodulators are chemicals that are released in the brain and body that change the activity of other neural circuits. They make certain brain areas more likely to be active and other brain areas less likely to be active. These neuromodulators have names like dopamine, serotonin, acetylcholine, epinephrine, and so on. The main neuromodulators associated with gratitude and
7:00 pro-social behaviors tend to be serotonin. Serotonin is released from a very small collection of neurons in the brain stem called the Raphe (R-A-P-H-E) nucleus and a few other places in the brain. And the Raphe neurons send these little wires that we call axons out to numerous places in the brain, and they tend to increase the activity of particular neural circuits that lend themselves to more approach to
7:30 particular types of experiences. That makes total sense if you think about it. To have a chemical that under certain circumstances is released in the brain that triggers the activity of neural circuits that makes the organism—you—more likely to stay in an interaction with something or even lean in and seek a more detailed interaction with that person, place, or thing. And two main brain areas are activated by these serotonergic systems
8:00 when people experience something that makes them feel gratitude, and the amount of activation scales with how intensely the person experiences the feeling of gratitude. And those two areas have particular names. You don’t need to know the names, but for those of you that want to know, they are the anterior cingulate cortex and the medial prefrontal cortex. And of course, these brain areas are connected to a number of other networks in the brain. In fact, that’s how they get you or others to lean into certain experiences because when these areas are active,
8:30 certain thought processes get invoked. Those thought processes probably resemble something like, “Hmm, I’d like to experience more of this,” or “This feels really good.” And then they literally feed onto your muscles via the neurons, making you happy to stay stationary if you’re experiencing something you like or to move closer to something that you find attractive to you, literally. Many of you have probably heard of the medial prefrontal cortex because this is the area of the brain that is involved in
9:00 planning and in deep thinking and evaluation of different types of experiences: past, present, or future. And the reason it can be involved in so many different things and the reason it’s especially important for gratitude is that the medial prefrontal cortex sets context. It sets context and it literally defines the meaning of your experience. How is it that the medial prefrontal cortex sets the context of everything in your life? Well, it does
9:30 it in the following way. You have a number of circuits deeper in your brain that simply create sensations or they allow you, I should say, to perceive certain sensations. Let’s use the example of cold exposure, something that we sometimes talk about on this podcast for other reasons. If you were to deliberately place yourself into an ice bath, it would be uncomfortable. Even if you’re adapted to cold and so forth, the discomfort is non-negotiable. However, if you are doing it because you
10:00 want to or because you have knowledge that there are particular health benefits, the medial prefrontal cortex can then control areas of your deeper brain like the hypothalamus to positively impact the neurochemicals that are released into your system. Your knowledge that you are making the choice, that it’s you that’s deciding to put yourself through this discomfort, has been shown to create a very different and positive effect on
10:30 things like dopamine, on things like anti-inflammatory markers in your immune system, etc., compared to if someone pushes you into an ice bath, or if you are doing it because someone insists that you do it and you really, really don’t want to. So, there’s a very subtle distinction here. It’s just the distinction of motivation and desire or lack of motivation and being forced into something. If you take a mouse, for instance, and it runs on a running wheel, which mice really like to do, there are many positive effects on
11:00 reducing blood pressure, improvements in neurochemistry, etc., in that mouse. However, if there’s a mouse in the cage right next to it that’s trapped in the running wheel and it has to run every time the other mouse runs because the wheels are linked, well, then the second mouse that’s forced to do the exact same running experiences negative shifts in their overall health metrics. Blood pressure goes up, stress hormones go up, etc., because it’s not actually making the choice. The medial prefrontal cortex is
11:30 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. Now, how exactly the neurons in the medial prefrontal cortex do that is rather complicated and, frankly, not completely understood. But it’s somehow able to adjust the activity of other neural circuits that are purely reflexive, as we say in neuroscience,