Dan Harris

Recently, as part of a Good Morning America segment, I went to a junior high school in Schaumburg, Illinois, where they are endeavoring to counteract these pernicious trends. As the superintendent told me, its not enough to teach kids math and reading; you have to teach them how to be successful humans.

One of their principal tactics? Gratitude.

Gratitude is one of the most misunderstood-and yet deeply useful-concepts trending today. For example, if you think taking a selfie in front of your private jet and posting it with #BLESSED is a way to practice gratitude, youre doing it wrong. Its not about showboating. Nor is it about maniacally focusing on the positive and pretending we live in a problem-free world. Oh, and its also not a way of using thank-yous as a form of interpersonal manipulation. (One of my favorite cynical takes on the concept is Gratitude is the expectation of future favors.)

Done correctly, gratitude is radically simple: Its the deliberate attempt to not take the many good things in your life for granted. Whats more, science suggests gratitudes linked to better mental health-and, if practiced regularly, more exercise.

To put this gratitude campaign into action in Illinois, the school recruited Shawn Achor, author of a best-selling book called The Happiness Advantage, which argues that gratitude at any age can boost energy, improve sleep, reduce depression, and increase both optimism and social connection-two of the greatest predictors of long-term happiness.

Achor, who manages to be relentlessly chipper without being annoying, is a happiness researcher with degrees from Harvard. When I interviewed him in the school library, he rattled off rapid-fire, and often oddly specific, statistics. For example, he told me that gratitude correlates with a 23 percent drop in headaches, backaches, and fatigue.

The push for gratitude is not merely academic for Achor. Notwithstanding his seemingly congenital congeniality, he has suffered from bouts of depression. The core of his message is that happiness does not have to rely solely on our genes or our environment; it can be a choice. His work suggests that we can create happiness hygiene habits.

If, for just two minutes a day, we got someone to think of three things that theyre grateful for, or if we expressed our gratitude once over the course of the day to somebody else...we train our brain to become more optimistic and positive, says Achor. And if we keep the pattern going, it actually allows us to make the choice of happiness an easier choice.

Achor has a series of gratitude hacks that anyone can do-even seventh graders. Since the results have been impressive at the school-it went from the 73rd percentile of academic achievement scores nationwide to the 96th percentile-I decided to spend a week test--driving two new daily habits to see how they could pay off for me.

First, everyday, I wrote a thank-you email to someone I felt really deserved it. Second, every night as my head hit the pillow, instead of engaging in my habitual rumination about whatever problems needed to be solved, I spent several minutes thinking about three new things that had happened during the day for which I was grateful.

Achor says these gratitude practices work by building new mental muscles that scan for the positive. Basically, this practice knocks us out of our default mode. Our brains evolved to have a pronounced negativity bias. Why? According to Achor, its because early human life was precarious, and we needed to be on the lookout for things like saber-toothed tigers. However, this threat-detection wiring doesnt always serve us well in a modern context, where our brains unnecessarily revert into ancient freak-out mode when, say, were dissatisfied by our lack of Instagram likes.

But, you might ask, can gratitude really help everyone? What if you live in a refugee camp, or are battling a life-threatening disease? How is it possible to feel grateful then?

Achor says that when he first got into this research, he thought happiness might be too hard for certain people. But to his surprise, hes found happiness in every environment, from cancer wards to prisons to combat zones. We could find meaning in the daily activities that can move us forward, he says. And I think happiness could remain an option-wherever we live in the world.

For me, after just one week I found that Achors gratitude exercises genuinely helped. Every time I sent an appreciative email, I received a warm response, dropping a nice hit of dopamine into my in-box, which is otherwise a source of diabolical overwhelm.

The real winner, though, was the nightly routine of contemplating three new positive developments in my life. I found the ritual bleeding out into the rest of my day, forcing me to occasionally pull back from my relentless rush to cross things off my to-do list. It contributed to a goal Id been pursuing for years through my daily meditation practice-trying to cultivate a sort of nostalgia for the present, rather than constantly ruing the past or projecting into the future. All my life, Id heard the exhortation to stop and smell the roses, but no one had ever actually told me how to do it. Achors hacks were a way to operationalize one of my favorite expressions: These are the good old days.

To be clear, this dose of gratitude did not stop me from worrying and strategizing about all the things that I need to worry and strategize about. Another of my favorite expressions is The price of security is insecurity. I still believe that to be true. Its just that I found gratitude to be a nice corrective when I was taking my worrying too far.

I want to be super clear about this: Being grateful is definitely not the same as being complacent. Heres one more saying I love: Everything is perfect. But it could use a little improvement.

As I write this column, it has now been several months since I first met Shawn Achor in that middle school in suburban Chicago.

I ultimately dropped the thank-you emails, because I found that creating the time to craft a new note every day added stress to the already Sisyphean task of managing my digital tsunami.

The nightly gratitude ritual is still going strong, however-and I suspect it is here to stay. I find it incredibly rewarding to have a practice that orients me toward the positive stuff I might otherwise simply experience and expunge.

I dont know whether it has contributed to a 23 percent drop in headaches, backaches, and fatigue, but I do know that it feels damn good, and that it is also shockingly effective at putting me to sleep.

How can we make gratitude operational in our lives? A few exercises you can do while brushing your teeth or going to bed:

<ul><li> Three Good Things: Happiness researcher Shawn Achor suggests taking two minutes a day to think of three new things youre grateful for and why. Better yet, write them down so you can go back and look at them at the end of the week. Itll train your brain to become more optimistic. We unlocked a great meditation by Jeff Warren called Gratitude Before Sleep. Check out 10percenthappier.com/menshealth and the 10% Happier app to get the meditation for free. </li><li> A Gooey Message: Write a two-minute email or text praising or thanking a different person each day-a high school English teacher, a spouse, or a colleague, Achor says. Keep it short. He says it can transform not only your level of happiness but your social connection, which has cascading health impacts. </li><li> Gratitude Jar: Anytime anything good happens, jot it down on a piece of paper, fold it up, and put it in a jar. Its a visual cue: You can see in time how the jar gets full and be reminded of the positivity in your life. </li><li> The Doubler: Think of one positive experience each day. Bullet-point three details you remember about it: what you were wearing, what you said. Your brain in that moment is reliving the experience, Achor says, in essence doubling that memory. Do it for 21 days in a row and you start to see a trajectory of meaning in your life. -D.H. </li></ul>

We are living in an era of increasing unhappiness. Diagnoses of major depression in the United States went up 33 percent from 2013 to 2016. Loneliness abounds. Anxiety affects 8 percent of children and teens. Hospitalizations for child suicide ideation or attempts rose for all age groups-including 5- to 11-year-olds-between 2008 and 2015.

Why Saying "Thank You" Is Good For You

But then I realized that Ive had something of an evolution on the subject over the past few years.

It began with a rather obvious case. One day in February 2012, I was sitting backstage at our studio in Times Square after having anchored Good Morning America when I got a call from my wife. I knew immediately from the thickness of her voice that something was wrong.

Bianca was 11 weeks pregnant and had gone to the doctor for some prenatal testing. Before the doctor performed the procedure, though, the nurse had done a routine ultrasound. They could see it right there on the monitor: The babys heart had stopped beating.

We talked for a few minutes, and then Bianca asked me to make sure I notified our friends and family. Which I did, straightaway. As soon as that was done, I paused for a second, during which the following thought arose: Dummy, cancel all of your meetings and go spend the day with your wife.

I texted Bianca that I would be home soon, armed with movies, food, whatever she wanted. As I buzzed around the supermarket, collecting flowers and also her favorite cheeses, bread, and cookies, I felt an undercurrent of invigoration beneath my own sadness and disappointment. Focusing on her felt good.

When I walked in the door, we hugged. She cried a bit. Then we overate and watched movies.

All in all, while the miscarriage itself was horrible for us, the aftermath significantly deepened our relationship.

This is not, however, an eye-opener story, in which the value of taking a mental health day became radiantly and permanently clear to me. In the subsequent years, even as we successfully had a child, and even as my career as a meditation evangelist took off, my schedule, ironically, got way more intense. I now work seven days a week, often putting in 12- to 15-hour days, as I balance my day job at ABC with my side gig as a mindfulness writer, podcaster, and entrepreneur. All that work and yet I so often feel haunted by the suspicion that Im not doing enough, or might be falling behind.

Chipping away at this mentality has been extremely difficult for me. Fact is, it can be hard to overcome your conditioning. I remember one time, while covering the 2004 presidential campaign, I got deathly ill after standing out in the freezing rain during the Iowa caucuses. When I returned to the job after a few days in bed, one of my bosses told me that missing work was not a good look for me.

For the past year or so, Ive been hard at work on a book about kindness-with a major emphasis on how to be kinder to yourself. In the course of my research, it has really hit home that bearing down isnt always the most fruitful way to get stuff done. I am experimenting with taking time to give my brain a break. Not just in extreme situations, such as when my wife had the miscarriage, but also in regular life. I am seeing immense creative and energetic benefits when I can get myself to walk away from work and allow myself to spend a day watching TV with my wife or playing with our kid. I dont know that I can say that these mental health days lead to breakthroughs all the time, but sometimes they do. And they definitely make my life way less miserable.

In sum, its okay to chill sometimes. Not only is it okay, but itll probably make you better at what you do. Its supremely counterproductive to keep pushing when you have nothing left to give.

If youre a type-A striver, I am writing this column as a permission slip for you. But mostly, I am writing it for myself.

Take a Mental Health Day. Trust Me, It Helps.

Full disclosure: My approach to work was forged in the Hobbesian, hierarchical world of television news in the 1990s and 2000s. While my workplace-ABC News-has become immeasurably more humane in recent years, I nonetheless retain an unfortunate amount of the militant, suck-it-up ethos that was drilled into me as a younger man. Which is why, when the editors of this magazine asked me to write about the benefits of taking a mental health day, my initial reaction was: Youve come to the wrong gu...

She thinks I am being ridiculous about my gut-and she has a point. By any measure, I am slim. I eat reasonably carefully and work out at least six times a week. Yet I miss the visible ab musclesI had in my 30s. I miss more than that, actually. Now in my mid-40s (wait, is 47my late 40s?), I notice that I am increasingly criticizing myself for looking old and bedraggled. So why, considering this noxious little stew of narcissism and body dysmorphia, would you listen to me about aging gracefully? Because while I do perseverate about this stuff, the amount of worry-and the way in which that affects my behavior-has improved dramatically. Heres a comparison:

About ten years ago, I was in the throes of a balding crisis, an omnidirectional freak-out that bled into every area of my life. I was on a flight home from an incredible journey to report on an iso-lated indigenous tribe in the Brazilian Amazon. Instead of savoring the experience, I locked myself in the lavatory and spent ten minutes scrutinizing my hairline and engaging in a robust bout of what the Buddhists call prapanca, or mental proliferation. My mental movie went something like this: Baldness --&amp;gt;Unemployment --&amp;gt; Flophouse in Duluth. This prapanca made me irritable and miserable. Just ask my wife, Bianca, who caught me staring in our bathroom mirror many times during this period.

These days, my gut panic aside, I am much better at seeing my self-centered anxiety crop up and then letting it go. While writing this column, I askedBianca whether I am handling my belly/aging concerns more successfully than the balding crisis. She chortled and said,Theres no comparison.

What made things better? Part of it was the combined effect of marriage, maturation, and meditation (which has become a daily practice and also an active side hustle). But another important calming ingredient has been something that may strike you as supremely counterintuitive: contemplating death.

Somehow death has become taboo in our society. As the meditation teacher Greg Scharf has observed, in a youth-obsessed culture, dying is the ultimate in really bad taste. Yet it is inevitable-even for you. (And even for those <a href="https://www.menshealth.com/health/a19536960/dave-asprey-biohacking-tips/" id="244a4441-c25a-346f-aed9-c14b216d82d3"> tech titans in Silicon Valley who are reportedly spending billions to solve death </a> . Good luck with that.) Theres a fitting line from the Mahabharata, the great Indian epic: What is the most wondrous thing in the world? The answer: All around us people can be dying and we dont realize it can happen to us.

Every great spiritual tradition has recommended that in order to live fully, the best practice is to contemplate death. How to do this? The Buddha recommended meditating while staring at decomposing bodies. Because of how deeply impractical that proposal is, my wife and I opted for a more feasible alternative: A few years ago, we signed up to become hospice volunteers.

I was assigned to a small, eight-bed hospice on Manhattans Upper East Side. Once I got over my initial jitters, I learned lessons that ranged from the inspiring to the deeply comforting. For example, I noticed that for many people who are close to the end, fear seems to recede. I recall chatting with a former college professor who told me that as death neared, he felt less like a separate ego and more like apart of a larger, unfolding system. Yes, I thought, theres nothing wrong or unnatural about death. Nature is in constant flux-and we are nature.

I also found that spending time in a hospice provided a massive dose of perspective on my workaday problems. I experienced this most poignantly through my relationship with a patient named Ronnie, a former construction worker from Harlem with chronic lung and heart problems. When he was first sent to the hospice four years ago, he was given three days to live. Instead, he defied the odds and thrived. Every week, Ronnie and I eat snacks, crack wise, and play video games. (Ronnie sees no irony in the fact that he spends hours killing zombies while sitting in a hospice.) Onetime, I was telling him a story about how I had been worrying about some issue in my life-and that I had then remembered Ronnie and stopped myself. Without even interrupting the game, he turned to me and said, with utter nonchalance, Yeah, you have no problems.

Working in a hospice is not a panacea, however. I often end up getting in a cab afterward, checking email, and becoming wholly caught up in my own nonsense again. And I still believe that there is actually some upside to my egoistic self-flagellation: A certain amount of awareness of my midsection can provide a healthy motivation to get to the gym.

But on the 85th time I find myself musing darkly on my hairline or waistline, I now sometimes have the wherewithal to ask myself: Given my limited window on earth, is this how I want to be spending my time? Yes, it makes sense to work hard and strive, but whats the point if youre not enjoying the ride?

Aging gracefully isnt some Yoda-style imperturbability. Your insecurities and peccadilloes remain; you just learn to manage them more skillfully.

I usually wrap up these columns with something witty, but due to the weight of this issue I will forgo the cute and put it to you bluntly: Given the undeniable reality of your finitude, how do you want to live?

What to Do If You're Terrified of Getting Older

My wife proudly flashed her phone in my direction the other day to show off a pictures hed recently taken of me holding our young son in a swimming pool.I promptly grabbed the device and used my fingers to zoom in on my belly, whose size and general flabbiness I have been loudly and repeatedly bemoaning of late. I knew you were going to do that, she tskd.

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Dan Harris

Articles written by the author

Why Saying "Thank You" Is Good For You

Take a Mental Health Day. Trust Me, It Helps.

What to Do If You're Terrified of Getting Older