Robert A. Emmons

Number nine, a specific gratitude practice.

Psychologists Robert Emmons and Michael McCullough conducted a study where participants kept weekly gratitude journals.

Those people felt better about their lives and reported fewer physical symptoms than people who simply journaled about their complaints.

Number eight, setting your top three priorities before you do anything else.

There's this biblical idea, but we see tons of research now around the power of gratitude.

There's these researchers, Robert Emmons and Michael McCullough, who ran an experiment, and they had three groups, and they had one group write down in a journal all the kind of problems that they had in their life.

Just kind of negative journaling.

They had one group write down just some neutral things about their life, and they had the last group write down things that they were grateful for.

Carly often talks about widening the lens, and this has actually been scientifically tested.

So one of the classic studies that, that I talk about or reference in my talks was conducted by psychologist Robert Emmons and Michael McCullough back in 2003, where people were randomly allocated to different writing exercises.

One group wrote about things they were grateful for, and another group wrote about hassles and irritations.

And then there was a third group that wrote about fairly neutral events.