Transcript - The Science of Being Thankful With Michelle Palmer Jones and Paula Felps

Follow along with the transcript below for episode: The Science of Being Thankful With Michelle Palmer Jones and Paula Felps

[INTRODUCTION]

[0:00:04] PF: Thank you for joining us for episode 545 of Live Happy Now. November is National Gratitude Month and gratitude just happens to be one of our favorite things to talk about. I’m your host, Paula Felps, and this week, I’m joined by social media manager, Michelle Palmer Jones, to talk about some of the emerging research on the benefits of gratitude, what we’re doing at Live Happy to observe National Gratitude Month, and how you can win some Live Happy merch just by telling us about your gratitude. Let’s have a listen.

[INTERVIEW]

[0:00:34] PF: Michelle, thank you for coming back on the show.

[0:00:37] MPJ: Hey, Paula. Glad to be back. Thanks for having me.

[0:00:40] PF: Well, as we know, as now all our listeners know, because they just listened to the intro, November is Gratitude Month, and that is something we always love to talk about here at Live Happy. Since our listeners are just getting to know you, we’d love to hear, how do you practice gratitude in your daily life?

[0:00:56] MPJ: Yeah. It’s not always easy. We’re all just so busy with work and personal life. There are some days that I find myself in front of my laptop, and I’m hunched over for hours. I have to remind myself that there are very important things going on around me, and I do not want to miss them. I have to intentionally get myself up, and I like to grab the dogs and go for a walk.

[0:01:20] PF: Oh, I love that.

[0:01:21] MPJ: Yeah, it’s the best. I take deep breaths, focus on breathing while I’m out, and I take a look around at all the beautiful landscape around me. The rolling hills right now, the leaves are changing color, which is fun. The neighborhood cows. Yes, I said neighborhood cows. For me, there is truly nothing better than nature that makes you appreciate life around you. But you know what makes me the most grateful? That I’m even able to do that in the first place. Working from home, I do not take that for granted. It’s the best, a flexible work schedule. I can get up between meetings and walk the dogs. That itself is a practice of gratitude, I think. Paula, I know gratitude, something you talk about a lot, one of your favorites. Why is that?

[0:02:07] PF: I do. Yeah. I’m kind of a gratitude junkie. I’ve probably over talked about gratitude, but –

[0:02:12] MPJ: Never.

[0:02:13] PF: It is. It’s become like the guiding principle in my life, because I grew up in a not happy and not a lot of things to be grateful for situation. When I was working through that years later, it was really dark times for me. Gratitude was the thing that started pulling me out of it. I would like, okay, what is the one good thing I can find out of all of this situation? That’s what I would start to do. I had a great therapist who had me say like, “Okay, but what did you learn from that? What can you do with that?” That started me on that path to gratitude. Somehow it evolved into just being able to truly look for the good in every situation. It’s become like an innate little practice that I have. Whereas, I may not be good at mindfulness. I may not rock meditation. Gratitude is something that’s easy. It’s accessible to me at any time and it truly resets me.

[0:03:11] MPJ: Oh, I love that.

[0:03:13] PF: That’s why everyone is subjected to a lot of words about gratitude. What you said, I thought really resonated with me is about, it’s recognizing what you’re doing. A lot of people get up and take their dogs for a walk in the afternoon. You are doing it almost as an act of worship. It’s like this moment of gratitude, this observation and reflection. That mindset makes such a difference in how you’re approaching it.

[0:03:43] MPJ: Oh, absolutely. On days that it’s raining, or I don’t get out, or I’m back-to-back meetings, I absolutely can tell a difference in my behavior, my stress level, how I interact with people that afternoon. It is. It really does make a huge difference.

[0:04:00] PF: Yeah. What I love about practicing gratitude is that it does become a habit. It’s something you have to do make yourself do at first. Then, the more you do it, it just becomes this habit. Throughout the years, I know you’ve been following us for a long time. Throughout the years, we have looked at gratitude through so many different studies and different lenses. This week, our newsletter is going to have this great story from our editor, Chris Libby. It looks at some of the new research that’s coming out about gratitude. Because when we first started Live Happy in 2012, gosh, that sounds crazy, there was a lot of research that hadn’t caught up to where we are now. Now he’s really gone through some of the new research. I know that you’ve looked at that story, you’ve looked at some of the things that have come out. I wondered if there was anything in particular that any of these new findings that really resonated with you?

[0:04:55] MPJ: Yeah. I really liked the study that Cornell did. I think COVID really changed the game on gratitude, where we were taking a lot of things for granted before a global pandemic really taught us a lot, right? I have a lot of friends with kids who are in their first semester of college right now. I know that they’ve just been talking so much about how hard the transition has been from home to college life. Cornell recognized that too in young adults and saying, they’re particularly vulnerable when it comes to mental health. They found that practicing gratitude was pretty effective in helping with mental health in young adults.

They created this app, and instead of a top-down approach like, this doctor, or clinician, or whoever says, “This is the best way to practice gratitude and you should journal, or what have you.” They had the students actually design it, which seems like a pretty novel concept, but really smart. Then they based all of the things in the app on what the students said resonated most with them, or what was realistic for them in their actual daily lives. They sent these prompts and they used push notifications, something super simple and asked these users, how are they feeling? They used all these very specific categories for the gratitude entries and gave it a little bit of structure.

Then ultimately, they got all of these really great findings about the people who were using the app in this way, versus they had a control group and the engagement levels and how they felt more positive about the world in general. I just thought that was so great, because obviously, college students are on their phones. So, they’re like, let’s meet them where they are. We’ve got this mobile app. And created it with the user in mind, instead of somebody telling them how to practice gratitude. I thought that was fabulous.

[0:06:56] PF: I love that, because it’s twofold. For me, one is we’ve talked so much about the loneliness crisis, about the crisis with young people. Young people are showing signs of loneliness and unhappiness at unprecedented levels and adults are trying to solve that. But oftentimes, they’re trying to develop that solution outside of the young adults. This, I love the fact that they brought them in and let the young adults lead the study, lead, how do we make this work? What is it that you need? I do also love the fact that they let them embrace tech, because we do talk a lot about we need time off our screens, technology is really not good for us.

Amy Blankson is such an expert in digital devices and how we can use them wisely and how we can use them for our benefit. This is such a great example of that. That if we can learn to harness some of the power, some of the positive psychology methods, and in this case, learn how to use gratitude as a tool on your phone, then it can completely benefit us.

[0:08:02] MPJ: Oh, yeah. I think a lot of the new research that Chris explores, it has to do a lot with young adults. There’s a lot of research right now and things that have changed with a focus on that demographic, which is really interesting.

[0:08:18] PF: Yeah. I wonder if that’s because of the, say, the World Happiness Report. I think 2023 was the first time I really waved the flag of like, uh-oh, young people are not doing well. I see that these studies really came out in 2024 and some early 2025. It is encouraging. I love the fact that they are using gratitude as a mechanism for overcoming a lot of the problems that we’ve been talking about.

[0:08:44] MPJ: Makes a lot of sense. What about you, Paula? What study did you like?

[0:08:48] PF: Well, I went away from the college students. I went to the other end of the spectrum. This is a study I had written about when it first came out in July of 2024. It was from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. It was about older adults. It showed a statistically significant association with increased longevity when they practiced gratitude. This was really astounding how it showed that gratitude is not just a psychological mechanism, but it really does tie into our physical health. It improves our lifespan. They really leaned into this study on nurses that had been done. From that, they looked at how it affected our cardiovascular health.

When we think about all the things that affect our heart health, we talk about stress, we talk about environmental stressors, we talk about the foods and all the things that are undermining our heart health. It was just amazing to me to think something as simple as gratitude could have such an incredible effect on our hearts.

[0:09:49] MPJ: Amazing. I love that.

[0:09:51] PF: I mean, think about that. If that’s the way that we can offset it, how much better is that than taking a pill?

[0:09:57] MPJ: Yeah. Get on those gratitude practices immediately and every day.

[0:10:01] PF: Get on the gratitude treadmill.

[0:10:03] MPJ: Better than Cheerios.

[0:10:05] PF: Oh, my gosh. Yes.

[0:10:09] PF: We’ll be right back with more of Live Happy Now.

[BREAK]

[0:10:17] PF: Now, let’s hear more about gratitude.

[INTERVIEW CONTINUED]

[0:10:21] PF: I know this is a weird time for gratitude, just because there is a lot going on. For me, even it’s difficult, you get on news sites, or you get on social media, and there is just a lot that makes us start feeling that there’s less and less to be grateful for. In my mind, that makes it even more important for us to give it a place in our life and to make it more intentional.

[0:10:46] MPJ: Yeah. What do you say when people say, it is really hard right now to find things to be grateful for?

[0:10:53] PF: First of all, they’re not wrong.

[0:10:55] MPJ: No.

[0:10:56] PF: But they’re also not entirely right, because I do come from that place of there is always, always something to be grateful for. That is not overlooking the fact that we live in really dark, very difficult times. For me, that’s where the whole idea of gratitude in disguise is what I call it, but that comes to mind. For me, that’s finding the appreciation amidst difficult challenges. Even when it’s hard, we know that gratitude isn’t going to fix something, but it can help us find some moments of calm, no matter how bad that storm is. It won’t solve the things that are going on in this world. But if we can get in a better place about it, it can at least help us get through them with a clearer head, with a happier heart, and like we just talked about, better heart health, and it can buffer us against the stresses.

One of the things that happened to me very recently, you know about this. I was on our property and I was on a literal slippery slope. I had a fall. When I told people I was going to have a great fall, that is not what I meant.

[0:12:10] MPJ: Not what you had in mind.

[0:12:12] PF: No. I didn’t know that was on my bingo card, but it was. I went down hard and immediately knew that bones were broken. What was interesting to me is how just as immediately the gratitude mechanism kicked in, where I was like, okay, that is a broken arm, but it’s my left arm. I’m right-handed. This is, we’re good. Then the second thought was, okay, I can get back to my house from here, and my partner is home. If it wasn’t Monday, that might not be the case, but I can do this. It’s like, even as all these other negative things were going on, there was a lot with this little gratitude machine kicking on in my head that was saying, “Oh, but look at this. Look what’s good about this.” Reflecting on that.

Afterwards, I was, first of all, very surprised I responded that way. Then secondly, I thought, wow, that really is that does show when you start putting it into practice, your brain really does want to gravitate toward that. I really did want to find what was good in that situation. I think it truly, truly helped me, because the next few days were a little bit – were pretty rocky.

[0:13:20] MPJ: Yeah. I mean, I think that broken arms aside, things going on in the world around us right now, it’s easy to complain about. It’s not even something terrible happened to me. I mean, that too, and is understandable, when your first reaction is, oh, no. Gratitude hopefully comes later. Maybe doesn’t always. Going to the grocery store right now is expensive. Traveling is near impossible right now. Just don’t look at your investments right now. All of those little things are, I guess, that’s not so little, but it is really hard to find gratitude when all that’s happening. Isn’t that why it’s called practicing gratitude? It takes very deliberate, intentional thought. It takes time. It takes patience, which is really hard sometimes, and a reframing of the headspace, too. When I go back and think about those things, again, I have to think what a privilege is it to be able to put food on the table every night. What a privilege that I can even entertain the thought of traveling over the holidays to go see family, that I could even consider retirement in 20 some odd years, hopefully. That’s an absolute blessing. That reframing, that practice.

It’s not surprising to me that when you broke your arm, that your swap to gratitude happened so quickly, because you’ve been putting in the work. And as they say, practice makes perfect. You’ve been practicing this all along, so that when something pretty outrageous happened, you weren’t like, “This is the worst thing ever and I am never going to recover from this and this is my downfall physically, mentally, all of the things, ultimate downfall in life.” You were very quickly able to reframe that.

[0:15:19] PF: Thank you. Yeah. That’s a great way to look at it. One thing that I do know about you is that you are an action person. Whereas, I might be more like, I’m going to think my gratitude, you are the person that gets out there and shows that you care. Can you talk about that, how taking your gratitude beyond yourself and doing things like volunteering, or advocating, or serving on boards, or just showing up for others, because you are someone who really does show up for your friends. How does that make your gratitude practice even more real?

[0:15:56] MPJ: Yeah, I wonder if that’s a Virgo thing.

[0:15:58] PF: Maybe so. My best friend’s a Virgo. It could be.

[0:16:01] MPJ: Yeah. It could very well be. I think for me right now, showing up for others is the big one. I’ve had to be very intentional about this with my family, because we do not live close by to each other. Paula, you know this. My grandmother is about to turn 97-years-old. My mom has been taking care of her day and night in the hospital for the last two weeks. My mom is physically showing up for her mom every single day. I’m not able to do that for my mom in the same way. However, I’ve taken on this sort of caregiver role for my mom, even though she’s an entire plane right away. I check in on her every morning with either a phone call, or a FaceTime. I make sure I have at least half an hour to really get to the meat, the nitty-gritty with her about what’s going on.

I always tell her how proud I am of her for advocating for my grandmother, which is not easy. I mean, it’s on her. She’s the one who has to be there. I have to check in on my mom. What does she need? How is she doing physically, mentally? I think about how grateful I am that my grandmother has my mom advocating for her as she deals with all the doctors and coordinating all the care. It’s a lot and it’s stressful. I in turn, I see her doing that and I feel like it’s my duty to be there for my mom the way she is for hers.

[0:17:35] PF: That’s beautiful. I love it. I love how you are just passing it on and the trickle-down effect of gratitude.

[0:17:43] MPJ: Yeah. When you see others, I’m sure it’s very hard for my mom right now to think about gratitude when she’s dealing with phone calls and emails and visits and driving back and forth to the hospital. I think that that’s probably a very difficult time in her life to think about how grateful she is, but being able to have those phone calls where she talks about how grateful she is for her children and where she’s stuck in between this – she’s the daughter caring for her mother, but then seeing, having that conversation with her daughter, I think she’s seeing both sides of it. That’s why I think having those very intentional conversations and checking in with each other, I think it just makes everybody a little bit more grateful.

[0:18:34] PF: I think you’re right. You and I had talked about how some of the things that we’ve been learning about gratitude and how we really wanted to hear what our listeners have to say about gratitude. You had a really good idea of something that we’re going to put into action. Do you want to tell us what that is?

[0:18:53] MPJ: Sure. I hope that our listeners are following us on Facebook and Instagram, because every Monday morning for the month of November, we’re posting what the Live Happy Team is most grateful for. Then we’re asking our fans and followers to comment and do the same. You can find us on Instagram @MyLiveHappy. On Facebook, search Live Happy. Look for our little orange logo with the LH and the smile underneath and make sure you comment.

[0:19:19] PF: I think you have some lovely Live Happy merch for some of the people who respond.

[0:19:25] MPJ: We do. We have some giving plates, which are pretty fabulous. There’s nothing better than getting a little treat and talking about the trickle-down effect of you’re making someone’s day and then they’re making someone else’s day. I think that’s the special thing about the giving plates. Yeah, let’s give some away, because that’s the perfect thing for the month of November.

[0:19:48] PF: I love it. They can look for us on Facebook and Instagram, tell us about their gratitude this month and then shazam, maybe they will get a giving plate in the mail.

[0:19:59] MPJ: Enter to win.

[0:20:00] PF: All right. Well, Michelle, this is – It’s always great talking with you. Thank you so much for sitting down with me today. I wish you a fabulous gratitude month.

[0:20:09] MPJ: Thanks, Paula. Appreciate you having me. Hope to talk to you soon.

[END OF INTERVIEW]

[0:20:16] PF: That was Michelle Palmer Jones, talking with me about the benefits of gratitude. If you’d like to learn more about gratitude, check out this week’s Live Happy newsletter, or visit us at livehappy.com and click on this podcast episode. Be sure to follow us on social media and share your own gratitude practice to be entered in a drawing for Live Happy’s giving plate and other merch.

That is all we have time for today. We’ll meet you back here again next week for an all-new episode. Until then, this is Paula Felps, reminding you to make every day a happy one.

[END]

In this episode, you’ll learn:

How gratitude improves mental health in young adults through tech-based interventions.
The link between gratitude and increased longevity in older adults.
How to practice “gratitude in disguise” during difficult times and emotional challenges.

Follow Live Happy on Social Media:

Facebook: @livehappy
Instagram: @mylivehappy
Twitter: @livehappy

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