Two words that can change your life | Tanmeet Sethi | TEDxRainier

when I was a child my mom would give me ginger and turmeric instead of cold medicine when I was sick and when we were in India and I was sick she would take me to our family's homeopathic doctor I'll never forget him he was this old old man with black frame glasses and silver hair and he sat at this humongous wooden desk behind him were shelves and shelves of tall clear glass bottles filled with white pellets no labels on anything and no matter what my complaint was he would first ask me about my bowel movements but after crouching over his ledger and taking notes he would creakily turn his chair around and pull out magic white pills of his choosing for me and I would challenge my mom on how any of these treatments worked and I was left too satisfied without a scientific explanation but I grew to appreciate and honor these remedies and even later learn the science behind them now I combined the best of all worlds for my patients as an integrative family physician so in addition to high-quality training and medical school and residency I studied nutrition the wisdom of plant medicine the ancient knowledge of Ayurvedic medicine the art of meditation I teach my patients how to use food as medicine how to harness the power of their mind and how to optimize their own unique biochemistry and genetics to heal and I have big visions to transform medical education so I created and direct an integrative medicine fellowship I write chapters and textbooks I teach in lecture around the country and yes an overachieving first-generation Indian woman but I'm here today to offer you one of the world's simplest medicines one that sat before my eyes the entire time it's available to anyone and as powerful as any treatment or pill it consists of two words your parents taught you to say as a child thank you those two words thank you are the simplest doorway to gratitude but now if you're groaning or wincing because I've said gratitude and thank you you're not alone I used to be so irritated by the words thank you they felt overused and empty to me I was made to say them repeatedly as a child thank you thank you so much no thank you for those amazing socks and then I felt continued to obligated to say them along the rules of polite society I mean there's a whole industry of cards that say thank you so we don't have to mouth the words ourselves right but these words have more power than we realize they teach us how to actively practice gratitude and not just when things go right especially when things go wrong even gravely wrong a studies show that people who practice gratitude are happier they exercise more they sleep better have stronger immune systems but the neuroscience has only recently evolved to give us an understanding of how and why neuroscientist from UCLA and the University of Montreal have shown how gratitude can work like antidepressants by increasing the levels of dopamine and serotonin the neural chemicals in our brain that make us happier and want to connect with others gratitude can work like a pill and it seems the more we make these chemical the more our brain is signaled to find things to feel good about so the more we practice gratitude the easier is to find things to be grateful for again I think of it as exercising our gratitude muscle my favorite study was published just this year out of us C's brain and creativity institute they used functional MRI imaging to show how gratitude works in the brain they showed that when we feel gratitude we stimulate parts of our prefrontal cortex that modulate stress and pain and they're the same parts of the brain that light up on MRI as our pain decreases when we're with someone we love gratitude can send a signal of safety to the brain during a painful experience and then we can see our stress or our pain differently and when we change our brain we change our experience I see this research play out all the time in clinical practice a patient of mine who had been suicidal many times in the past year explained how using gratitude made her feel safe during such a horrible and lonely time she would ask herself can I say thank you to just this moment not my whole life but just this moment yes she said she could and that's how she would get to the next moment and then uh sure in a new day gratitude fundamentally changes our relationship to pain it removes our resistance to it you know that resistance right when you're sad and you stuff it deep down so no one will see you cry or when you're jealous and you try to distract yourself it's natural to resist pain think about it when we touch a hot stove we want that evolutionary instinct to move our hand away but we live in a society that tries to run away from anything uncomfortable we escape into work or we self-medicate with alcohol drugs food and our resistance is directly related to our suffering for any left brain people out there there's even an equation to describe the relationship S equals P times our suffering equals pain times resistance the P is the pain we all have and often we can't change it but the more we wish it would go away the more we fight it the higher that our for resistance goes and the more our suffering is multiplied now this works both for emotional as well as physical pain one of my most skeptical patients with chronic back pain told me how saying thank you to her back pain allowed her to stop tensing her abdominal muscles against the pain allowing her sit in a more neutral curve offering pain relief it's better than ibuprofen she told me saying thank you for her was better than a pill so when we say thank you to this moment we're saying yes to this experience without all the extra layers of suffering all the extra layers of why me not again when will this end and what happens when we only see the pain we take care of it you stub your toe you immediately hold it comfort it your friend is in pain you hug them nurture them when we admit that we are sad or in pain we aren't stuffing it deep down into a crevice of our heart or mind it's out in the open to manage so how do you put this into practice to start I ask my patients to do a simple practice from research studies of finding one thing to be grateful for each day for a month and it can never be the same thing so with gratitude practice we remind ourselves of the good that lies next to the difficult and every time we do this we're exercising our gratitude muscle for the next day or I'm just suggesting why not we say thank you to our pain what if I get difficult feedback after a presentation maybe a TED talk runo after I go home and cry I can say thank you there may be an important lesson for me to learn about myself here or this one just happened to me my daughter who's only in second grade told me she didn't want me to come into her school for her birthday party it's just different this year mama she said I said thank you as she pulled on my heartstrings and then I was able later to say thank you for showing me how self-assured you are or what if my son's medical condition worsens and I say thank you and some days that could be thank you for the love you've given me and other days it could just be thank you for this chance to see that my own heart is breaking so that I can be gentle with myself and I had to learn this the hard way on a bright sunny September day eight years ago I was pregnant with our third child when my husband and I received news that transformed our lives forever on that day our second son almost three years old at the time was diagnosed with Duchenne's muscular dystrophy DMD is a progressive neuromuscular disease that causes muscle weakness and wasting it gives no muscle in the body mercy affecting everything from the legs to the heart and the lungs there is no cure as a physician I knew all too well what lay ahead after the diagnosis I was desperate for a way out of my anguish I tried prayer but that didn't sustain me I tried reading all the self books you could think of I tried gratitude for my many blessings and in my usual overachieving style I even started a foundation to find a cure but none of it was working so I picked up the phone to call one of my most trusted mentors who I knew would have some wisdom for me Deborah was my most influential teacher in mind-body medicine a brilliant integrative psychotherapist who had taught me the foundational work I do with all my patients and sure enough she had an answer for me to find gratitude in this situation and I'm not kidding I was like really serious that's all you got I tried that already I told her I need something more powerful but she explained the doctor had it all wrong not gratitude for the good things in my life she said gratitude for my son's illness now that made me angry how can you ask a mother to be grateful that her child will suffer like this but she persisted even if you don't believe it and have to fake it she said you have to do this and I was desperate so I gave in but my physicians mind that understood the diagnosis had very little faith so I went to my son's bed every night after he fell asleep and I said thank you for this illness but I wasn't feeling very thankful at all so I tried other things thank you for this life thank you for this path that we will walk together I said those things night after countless night through even more countless tears and slowly something shifted first I felt a physical softening I wasn't saying it through gritted teeth then I noticed I wasn't as resistant to being there I started to stroke his hair as I said it I started to lay there longer I even started to look forward to it and maybe just the act of trying to be grateful was working its magic on me because my resistance to this life was softening slowly but surely this nightmare situation started to feel like a life of meaning a challenging life but one full of meaning gratitude had created a buffer a safe space in which I could take a breath with my pain instead of fighting against it so even in the midst of my emotional turmoil small things and even joy had room to grow now this is the hard part you see before I practice gratitude in this way in all my despair all I wanted to do was push my son away because all he represented to me was pain and none of us want pain right I feel so shameful and scary to say that out loud mothers aren't supposed to feel that way we're supposed to love our children unconditionally but I had met a condition that felt too large to bear until gratitude cracked me open saying thank you open me to this experience to my life to my son's life not as I had hoped and dreamed it would be but as it is and no medicine I had ever learned about had ever done that we all suffer we all have pain but what if we change the way we relate to pain what if instead of resisting it we say thank you to it what if we allow those words to open the door to gratitude because every time we say thank you to our pain we remove our resistance and that space can be filled with joy and each time we even try our gratitude muscle gets stronger and we become more resilient saying thank you is real medicine thank

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 143,157

Rating: 4.825861 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, United States, Health, Activism, Behavior

Id: HHTmiHB6aXk

Length: 16min 47sec (1007 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 17 2016