And sometimes if you want to say thanks, you have to really say thanks. Our dear friends Jacques and Karen came to visit for a weekend at our country house, and they arrived with amazing hostess gifts—rich-tasting olive oil and luscious honey that they had lugged back from a vacation in Greece. Having a wide circle of devoted friends (not just because of the great gifts they bring), they had stayed for part of their trip with a couple they knew from London who owned a summer home on the Greek island of Crete. The long-planned visit occurred at just about the time that their host, Mark Sebba, announced his retirement from the online luxury retailer Net-a-Porter.
“If you need an example of gratitude in the workplace, it doesn’t get better than what happened to Mark,” Jacques said as we all swirled spoons into the amazingly wonderful honey. (We planned to pour it over yogurt, but couldn’t wait.)
Company founder Natalie Massenet, a former model and fashion journalist, appreciated all Sebba had done to help her turn her idea into an online powerhouse. Wanting to say a very public thanks, she’d planned a black-tie farewell dinner. But testimonials are standard fare in business, so Natalie orchestrated a more elaborate and memorable send-off.
“Mark thought he was just coming to work,” Jacques said with a chuckle. “Since it was his last week, he might have expected a cake from Natalie—but nothing like this.”
“This” was a cross between a carnival and a rock concert, as thousands of employees across three continents and various time zones gathered into a grand production to say thanks. As Sebba stepped off the escalator into the large open-space office, throngs of his London-based employees greeted him, some cheering and waving signs, others standing on their desks and dancing. A hip-hop singer in a flowing blue gospel gown called out, “Welcome to your world!” and with a bouncing chorus behind him belted out a music-video-quality pop serenade. Acrobats flipped, samba dancers shimmied, and a steel-drum band played in celebration. Lyrics of the popular Aloe Blacc song “The Man,” revised for the occasion, included:
It’s time to say job well done!
You’re the best you’re the greatest one!
Go ahead and tell everybody . . .
He’s the man, he’s the man, he’s the man!
A large video screen flashed live to Hong Kong, Shanghai, and New York, where other employees at offices and distribution centers joined in the well-choreographed farewell, singing and waving their arms with all the spirit and feel-good appeal of a Coke commercial. When Sebba finally got to his desk, Natalie Massenet smiled and handed him a cup of black coffee.
While the celebration came with a high price tag, even more impressive was the time and effort the employees devoted to making it work. With the time difference, some of those in outlying offices arrived in the middle of the night. Massenet posted the six-and-a-half-minute video on YouTube with the title: “Amazing surprise for the world’s most loved CEO.” She sent it to all her employees, inviting them to share the link but not mention that it came from Net-a-Porter since she didn’t want it to seem like a publicity stunt. The idea of a company head showing extravagant thanks was so appealing that the video soon had more than a million views.
Expressing gratitude with gospel choir and singing global workforce is as wonderful as it is rare. But maybe bosses, owners, and various executives are starting to get the message that at work, gratitude works.
PART THREE
SUMMER
GRATITUDE AND HEALTH
Nature always wears the colors of the spirit.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
A sad soul can kill you quicker, far quicker, than a germ.
—John Steinbeck
CHAPTER 9
The Powers of Vitamin G
Grateful to learn how gratitude can affect our immune system and improve general health
Happy to find that gratitude can lower stress levels
Amazed to find gratitude helping my headaches
After cold and rain through much of May (which I didn’t complain about, of course), the first weekend of June was full of sunshine and warmth. At our house in Connecticut, the change was so dramatic that I suggested to Ron that we switch immediately from heat to air-conditioning. “Or we could leave on both,” I joked to my husband, who generally preferred having on neither.
He headed out to the garage to start moving the stored outdoor furniture back to the deck, and I followed to help.
“It’s really a one-man job,” he said, lifting a table that looked like it needed more than one man to move.
“You don’t need me?” I asked, trailing behind him and carrying nothing.
“I always need you,” he said, panting slightly from the heavy weight. “For example, it would be helpful right now if you mentioned how grateful you are to have a strong husband.”
“That’s tonight’s journal entry,” I said cheerfully. “Very grateful to have a manly man around.”
When he put down the table, he came over and gave me a sweaty hug. Though he joked about my year of living gratefully, we were getting along better—and having more fun together—than we had in ages. My positive attitude had changed our general mood. Knowing I’d be looking for the good in whatever he did (and not to criticize), Ron had relaxed. Before the year started, our relationship had been fine but a little frayed. Like most long-married couples, we had stopped noticing each other. Now I was paying attention and so was he. We still had arguments now and then, but we got over them quickly. In the past, we often took three days to resolve a disagreement. Now with a deep reservoir of grateful goodwill, we took three minutes.
After I’d devoted the first month of my project to being grateful to my husband and saying thanks for what he did, Ron had joked, “This has been nice, but when do I get my wife back?” But now that appreciating him was the new normal, he didn’t want that old wife back at all.
Ron had also started to use my living-gratefully approach with some of his patients. He tried it first with a basically healthy but grumpy older woman who came regularly to his office, full of complaints and worry. At the end of one visit, after prescribing what he should and helping how he could, he gently said, “Before you go, let’s spend one minute on reasons you have to be grateful.” She had been startled. But with a little more prodding, she got the idea—and managed to say she was grateful that she could still take walks (even though her feet hurt) and visit with her grandchildren (even though she couldn’t lift them). “Those are both good things to remember,” Ron said. With that little nudge, her mood improved, and she left feeling generally better. Ron is more insightful about patients’ needs than any doctor I know, and I liked that he’d now slipped gratitude into his black bag of tricks.
With his approach in mind, it occurred to me since gratitude was now making me happier, maybe it could also make me healthier. Emotions always affect our physical state. We get simple proof of that every day—our hands tremble when we’re nervous and we can feel our faces flush (or turn beet red) when we’re embarrassed. And how about that pounding heart when you’re scared? Numerous studies have looked at how negative emotions affect health, and anger and stress have been implicated in everything from diabetes (stress alters insulin needs) to asthma attacks (distressing emotions could trigger bronchial constriction).
But what about the other side? If negative emotions make us sick, could positive emotions like gratitude keep us healthy?
I’d already discovered from Dr. Martin Seligman that writing a gratitude letter (and delivering it in person) could lower levels of depression for as much as a month. Other researchers have found that keeping a gratitude journal can lower blood pressure and improve sleep patterns. Wanting to know more, I called Dr. Mark Liponis, the medical director of the famed Canyon Ranch health resorts and an expert in what he called “integrative medicine.” His approach involved integrating every part of the body and mind and connecting a positive approach t
o a healthy life. We had a cheerful conversation and he invited me to come visit, so a few days later, I took a very pretty drive up to the Canyon Ranch in Lenox, Massachusetts.
After the guard at the gate showed me where to leave my car, I walked across the idyllic grounds toward the restored 1897 mansion that now includes a spa and health center. Other than a few chirping birds, the surrounding scene was completely quiet and serene. Two women in terry-cloth robes smiled as they strolled by a flowering garden, and for a moment, amid the rolling lawns and clear fresh air, I felt like I had stumbled into the sanatorium in Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain (minus the tuberculosis, of course).
I paused at an expansive patio that had chairs arranged for contemplating the peaceful vistas of distant peaks. (Mann’s mountain?) The tranquil environment seemed designed to make even the crankiest overachiever relax and appreciate the view, both literal and metaphoric. I’d arrived in gratitude heaven, without the dying part.
I went inside the mansion, and peeking into the dining room, I felt healthier just reading the menu, with choices like marinated tofu, salads with garbanzo beans, and a burger made with veggies, gluten-free oats, and pumpkin seeds. Instead of prices, it listed calories. A staircase led up to the health center, which felt more like a gracious corporate suite than a doctor’s office.
Dr. Liponis came out almost immediately to greet me. In his mid-fifties, he was fit and handsome, his sport jacket and open-necked shirt the right cross between casual and professional. He brought me back to his office, which had the same stunning view that I’d seen outside.
“I love that you’re writing about gratitude,” Dr. Liponis said, his eyes lighting up. “Keeping perspective is a big part of staying healthy. You can’t be optimally healthy if you’re not happy.”
As the head of medicine at Canyon Ranch in Lenox as well as the locations in Tucson, Miami, Las Vegas, and soon in Southeast Asia, Dr. Liponis regularly treated the worried well—people who were healthy but would like to be healthier. He explained that they were often disturbed about something that occurred in the past, which made them depressed, or worried about something in the future, which produced anxiety.
“Thinking about the past or future are really the only two ways people can be upset by the world,” Dr. Liponis told me.
So when people consulted with him, he asked them how they felt that moment, right now. And before they could launch into grudges, worries, or frustrations, he tried to give them some perspective.
“Let’s start by making sure all the limbs are attached,” he said, patting himself all over for an example. “Okay, I’ve got two arms and two legs. That’s a good start. I can see out of two eyes, and I’m breathing and not in any pain. I ate today and I’m not starving. With all that—holy cow, I guess I feel pretty good!”
I laughed, but I liked the point. Instead of worrying about the past or fretting about the future, we could all do ourselves a favor by taking stock of the present. Two arms, two legs, and eyes that could see (with contact lenses for me). But what was the connection between that positive perspective and good health?
According to Dr. Liponis, many of the mysteries about our health revolve around the immune system. He told me that one of the biggest discoveries of the last decade was how pivotal a role inflammation plays in modern illness—including heart disease, cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, stroke, and many others. Inflammation was a stress response of the immune system, caused when the white blood cells rushed to handle what they perceived as a problem.
Throughout most of human history, infections were the biggest health problems we faced. The immune system developed to fight those, and it got a lot of practice, since not too long ago, the person who could get over typhus, tetanus, diphtheria, and dysentery would survive and pass on his genes. Others would not.
You can see the immune system in action when, for example, streptococcus bacteria get into your throat, causing the ever-common strep throat. You notice inflammation, redness, and swelling at the site as the white blood cells rush over to gobble up the bacteria. They call their buddies to help make antibodies and release the necessary chemicals, and blood flow to the area increases. The numbers can be staggering—as many as 150 billion white blood cells circulating under stressful circumstances, three times as many as normal. The chemical interactions lead to redness and swelling, and it’s not just your throat that hurts. You may get a fever and feel achy all over, since when the immune system is revved up, there’s a system-wide response as well as a local one.
The white blood cells fight the infection but leave inflammation in their wake—which scientists are now discovering can be dangerous in itself. Dr. Liponis pointed out that patients who have been hospitalized for pneumonia have double the risk of a heart attack in the next six weeks because of the inflammation from the infection. “There’s a very different list of what’s killing Americans now than there was eighty years ago. Now we’re dying from the white blood cells attacking us instead of the germs,” Dr. Liponis said.
But here’s the really interesting part. It now turns out that the immune system may respond to emotions. Worry, anger, or fear send those same white blood cells out on patrol, and even though they don’t have anything specific to attack, they leave a trail of dangerous inflammation. Feeling gratitude could actually counter that effect—and keep our immune systems from spiraling out of control.
“The hormones released when you feel gratitude, love, and compassion are very different from those released with worry, anxiety, or fear. Gratitude may be an antidote to many of those negative responses,” Dr. Liponis said.
But how could my immune system know that I wrote in my gratitude journal or appreciated my husband? I had an image of these nice little white blood cells saying, “Oh, she’s happy! No need to patrol!” My anthropomorphized chemicals made a lot of sense to me, but fortunately, scientists had looked for other explanations.
Dr. Liponis said that the string of physiological responses that unite health and emotion had been best described by a neuroscientist named Candace Pert. As a young graduate student at a lab in Johns Hopkins University, she discovered the first opiate receptor—a surface on certain brain cells to which only a specific molecule could attach. The huge breakthrough led to an understanding of endorphins—what she called “the body’s own pain suppressors and ecstasy inducers.” Her boss won the Lasker Award, which often leads to a Nobel Prize, for the discovery in 1978, and instead of being a good girl and standing quietly on the sidelines, she raised a fuss, pointing out that she deserved to be recognized too. She went on to numerous prestigious positions, including at the National Institute of Mental Health and Georgetown University. She was only sixty-seven when she died in 2013. I wish I could have met her.
Endorphins and other chemicals like dopamine, serotonin, and adrenaline are called neurotransmitters because they send messages of emotion across the brain. But Pert and her colleagues eventually realized that instead of being limited to the brain, receptors for messenger cells exist throughout the body. She described the proteins, or peptides, that flood our system as the “molecules of emotion.” They circulate to share information. And here’s what’s startling: The white blood cells throughout the body have surface receptors, so they grab on to those circulating peptides. If you’re upset, the white blood cells (essentially) figure it out because receptors on their surfaces get the message. Then they swing into action.
There used to be good reason for the immune system to be tuned in to our emotions. Worry or fear signaled that you felt at risk of being hurt, so when those worry hormones circulated, the immune system prepared to protect and defend. That early alarm to gear up would be a good and possibly lifesaving move if “hurt” means being attacked by a spear, but not so valuable if it’s a result of being unfriended on Facebook. Most of our modern anxieties (Will I get the raise? Will my son get into college?) don’t benefit from white blood cells rushing around on
high alert. But the cells go on their mission anyway, leaving inflammation in their wake.
Gratitude’s first role in keeping us healthy may simply be as a direct antidote to the negative molecules of emotion. When the gratitude, love, and compassion hormones circulate, the white blood cells get the message that the coast is clear and everything is okay. They can turn off their response. “The white blood cell numbers go down and the number of inflammatory molecules goes down and people feel better,” Dr. Liponis said.
Gratitude keeps the immune system from going into unnecessary overdrive. But sending out those gratitude hormones once won’t have a big effect—you’ve got to make it your steady state. Dr. Liponis had once referred to love as vitamin L, so I told him that I would now think of gratitude as vitamin G.
“Yes, vitamin G! Take it on a regular basis!” he said.
Though the shelves of CVS aren’t yet stocked with vitamin G, Dr. Liponis tries to pop a (metaphoric) perspective pill every day. “I’ll be feeling sorry for myself about one little thing, and I’ll stop and remember that it’s all relative. I remind myself all the time that I’m the luckiest guy on earth. The luckiest guy on the planet.”
In case he forgets, he keeps an e-mail address at luckiestguyonearth .com.
Dr. Liponis realized that his perspective could change dramatically, depending on the people around him. When we met, he had just returned from a trip to Singapore, planning Canyon Ranch’s foray into Southeast Asia. Spending his time with “a group of bajillionaire CEOs,” as he described it, Mr. Luckiest Guy on Earth started to wonder why he worked so hard and would never have what they did. “It’s so warped! You start thinking you deserve everything. Being in a group like that takes on a life of its own.”
The Gratitude Diaries Page 15