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Segment 19 - How Others Did It: UJ Ramadas

Now we're going to shift gears a little bit from sleep and talk to a good friend of mine. You Jerram does who? Uh he is the he's the co founder of the five minute journal. He and I share, uh, shares the same kind of glasses, I think. And he, uh, the same kind of smiling. Just look so happy there. You j I think is on Skype calling it from Toronto right now. Um a There. You Jay. How's it going? Hey, how are you doing? Can you hear me? All right. I can hear you. Fine. Where you based right now, I like to imagine that behind that screen behind you there's, like, the magic secret of the world. And you just covered it up because you can't let anybody see it today. You're good breeding mind. So you Jay is fascinating to me. I met you. We were talking via We're in a group of guys who are all like connected people who are bloggers and entrepreneurs. And we were chatting. They were chatting about, like, investment or something. And suddenly you disappeared and you went off the face of the earth.

And then I discovered that you were in a huge accident. Uh, this was pretty recently. Can you tell us about what happened? Yeah, well, it was in Indonesia, and I'm based primarily out of Canada about travel quite a bit. And, uh, people will remember last much or was pre crazy. It was the great Canadian winter of 2013 and I decided to just head out to Bali for three months just so I could work and do some cool stuff. And so I ran in a pretty bad ass, more cycle. And I was going pretty fast the place where I was going. No road, road signs, no lights, no divider. So I just keep on the car. Going over seventies, it was to be alive, and this is, like, less than a year ago. And look at you now you're just back smiling like a giant smile in the photo, and I found it. Amazing how I met you in person just a few weeks ago. And you just seemed like you didn't have a limp. You had? No, There's no like a sign that you were injured. It seemed like you were in one of most difficult accidents. That one could be in a motorcycle accident over and 1/3 of a nation outside of in an Asian nation and without, you know, perfect health care. And yet you managed to be there, be back on your feet and completely healthy. And I found that fascinating. And I feel like probably a lot of it might have to do with the fact that you're so grateful. You have this incredible background in gratefulness and in meditation, and it seems like I never saw a comment from you about anger or about sadness. It was always about the gratefulness that you were alive and the gratefulness that you made it on dime. Really excited to chat with you a little bit today about gratefulness. So your work you work on the five minute journal, right? Yes. The journal is a simple concept, right? So what we know in the last 20 years of positive psychology, we know we have brought together a lot of things that we know work, but what pisses me off and I think what pisses you off that's why we get along really well is because there's very little actionable content how to actually put this into work, how to how to make this effective. And if you if you really look at it and you combine it into an easy to use system, used a few things such as being able to lock something as soon as you wake up and right before you go to that, those two windows are very powerful prime ing the mind. And we could talk about that soon and very specific questions that allow you to to intentionality or how you want your day to go for how you want the rest of your week to go etcetera. And just by doing this literally six, you lost five minutes a day. You can significantly increase your happiness, and all of this is proving. So tell us a little bit about this idea of the Gratitude Journal. What does it mean, what you supposed to do and what results should it have? So there's a difference between the Gratitude Journal on a timer journal and time Generals like General Squared because they grabbed a journal typically only focus on gratitude. What is that idea? What does that mean? I got to the experience of counting one's blessings, right? So if you were to start counting your blessings, you know, in a little while delivering facts and gratitude. And what's beyond gratitude is the prime ng of the mind. When when you were you were planning and you're asking, according the fact that you're going to take action in the future or during that day to lead you towards happiness, you're planting a seed of your own happiness in your day, and that's that goes beyond grateful. It's because it actually proves to yourself the presupposition that I'm responsible for my own happiness. Yes, so the idea of the Gratitude Journal in the positive Psychology is sort of that they've measured over time when people are asked simply to write down each day three things that you do that you're grateful for in the morning that over time it leads Toa significantly increased happiness. Yes, so least significantly increase happiness. It's been shown to disprove the happiest five theory the Sagan, the happiness baseline theory. So there's there's this concept put out by Saudi and Lubarsky with how happiness about how everyone almost has like a baseline of happiness, just like wait, you don't do anything, Don't actualize. You don't eat well, your body will be at a certain right weight, and the same is apparently trooper happiness. Well, this the research of gratitude disproved that. Does it disprove it? Or does it? Is it kind of like you're able to just, like, you know, show everything the same thing? Is it like there's like a 50% of your level of happiness is set. Baseline is what I've heard and then, like you're able to adjust. 20 or 30% of it is based on context or situation, or less than that. And but 40% of ish is. Is it really the amount of yeah and gratitude journalists to be one of the ways that you're able to adjust your happiness? Yeah, I remember always looking at the study of the There's a very well known study of the people who of two groups of people lottery winners vs paraplegics and that they look at the graph of what happens as soon as they have an injury versus one of the lottery right? And so the group that had the lottery that won the lottery is extremely happy for the next few months, and the group that becomes paraplegic is extremely unhappy for the next few months, but over time they tend to relate to return to their baseline. But regardless of if they lottery winner may be unhappier than the person who was the person who became paraplegic. And I found that the Gratitude Journal is really powerful way to using the 40% of your ability to adjust your happiness. You're able, Teoh. You're able to modify it and really easily and systematically kind of increase your happiness over time. Yeah, you can't show. I don't believe that as as you go forward, right? So the brain is is always evolving, always learning. It's always growing, and I don't necessary. This is just my personal opinion. I don't don't necessarily believe in the 40% as a strict number because this is the compound interest, right? So as you as you move forward in time, your brain adapts and evolves and becomes more positive. If you're practicing these things and over time you can shoot past that number quite easily because you've accumulated that much of like pre conscious contact because you practice it for so long. That makes a lot of sense. Do you mind showing us the five minute journalist, the cover and then a couple pages on the inside. I think what it looked like has really a texture to its on. My favorite things about on the 1st 50 pages are are kind of like an introduction had its works. Why this works, what principles that make it work. Then there's a commitment. You like this. There's a commitment where you you choose to commit, to write it for five days in a row, morning and night. And there's a big reward and punishment so you can pick whichever one you want. Um, as you know, punishments more effective. But hey, whatever works right and actually write down, Sign it and, as you know, commitment, consistency. It builds and strengthens the rivers all to start that that action and usually once it started it is difficult stop because once they complete those five days, they see well, I do feel happier. You know, things are changing. I really like the first part of the contents to your things, like 40 or 50 pages, and I recall reading it, and I was like, Damn, he did a better job of summarising my entire my entire methodology or my entire understanding of habits that I have. It's like a really good like dissertation on happiness habits and positive psychology. Especially when I got to the commitment chapter. I was like, Nice. This is awesome. Could you show us one of the blank pages for each individual day? Sure, yeah, So here's what that looks like. Yeah, if you hold up, keep that for second. So at the top, it says there's usually the day and in some kind of quote or a weekly challenge. Then right below it, it says three things that I'm grateful for you. If you move it down a little bit, could you move it up a little? It says what would make today great and then a daily affirmation that you should keep it consistent over time? Uh, I am, And then you fill it out, typically the same thing each day. That's your morning routine on these, uh, and then the bottom is the evening routine. So this is saying amazing things that happened today, and what could I have done better? It's very simple, and you can easily understand it takes less than five minutes to fill this out, but the results have been shown over and over and over again that they lied to, like, a large shift and happiness. Just pretty cool. Anyone since you writing that down. I would actually love it right now. Anybody anybody was watching? Take a couple seconds. We will take a minute right now and just write down three things they were grateful for. Um, I think that that would be a really good way to spend a minute. In fact, I would love you to. Actually, I'm doing my hand. I'll do it. The journal. Great. Still at a new page. Just playing fair. When you finish writing, make sure you're doing this at home. Guys, it just takes one minute and will lead to greater happiness over time. Usually, one of the things that you told me that I thought was really interesting was about how to make the three things that you choose riel. So it's not just coming from your head, but from your heart. And I would love it if you could explain what What does How do you know when you're actually grateful for something? How do you know when that's a great question. So there's 22 aspects of gratitude, right? One is the cognitive aspect, and second of the affect aspect. There is a thinking, and there is a feeling. And so when you're thinking about something, where before thought moves quickly was fast, Um, the aspect moves much floor the feeling, and I'm pointing like I feel I feel in my belly. It's a physical feeling, the feeling just a little longer. And you have to wait for the feeling to kick in before you put pen on paper. So you're saying that the process of feeling grateful is to spend a little bit of time like query in your mind for what you feel grateful for. Then I let it and a little lower to sink until you don't just think it. But you feel that grateful Exactly. So I'll give you example of mine, asked me some time ago if you know I'm writing the final journal every day, but I'm writing the same thing every morning. Is that a good thing, or is that not a good thing? It doesn't matter what you write. What matters is what you feel. So what I do is I just close my advanced myself. What can I be grateful for right now? And I wait for the feeling the ticket? Absolutely they might might get. Then I put pen on paper, got my my three or had Lebanese. My hand. My three that I was grateful for today was that I had the opportunity beyond creativelive, which is awesome. Thank you guys so much for allowing me to be here. I was part of creative lie with the first with the first ever one, and I said to myself that I had to do creative live one day. Um, my second was that we live in an amazing time. After hundreds of thousands of years of humans existing, we get to live in a time where we have access to so much knowledge. So much s so much potential. And even today, there's so many people who don't have it is as well as we do. And we're lucky enough to be here, you know, in the US, being able to sit down and watch Creve live, live have Monday and Tuesday off and free to spend their time learning rather than doing. And my last one was was tracking devices, But I think that have been that even though it's kind of kind of funny, I think that tracking devices have been really powerful in my life because it helped me understand who I am. Um, I would love to know from someone in the audience, uh, what it's Ah, three things you're grateful for, Rice. Maybe. What are three things you're grateful for? Yeah, I wrote down. I've been really thankful toe meet a bunch of really cool people at this event. This has been a lot of fun. I was grateful for the really nice weather today that we got in San Francisco. Good way to start the day and then, ah, persistent thing I'm thankful for last night was a long day. Got home. I was really appreciate being able to check it with my wife at the end of the day and have a chat with her. It's something that I really grateful for. That's amazing. Thank you so much. Price. Um, the the idea of the gratefulness journal that you've done the five minute journal is really cool, because I think that it starts to prime your day in a way that's positive. You know it's very easy to wake in the morning. And you know, you're tired. You're stressed already. You're in a rush. Don't have time to do what you want to do. You have to grab food and rush out the door and get your report into your boss on time. And you start thinking from this negative perspective and you end up thinking this negative perspective the whole day. But your journal allows us to take a step back and really think about what the good things are in life. I love that. Um, do you tend to have some kind of recurring things that you're grateful for? I think there's I'm all over the place when it comes to grab, cheat, like whatever's on my mind, that's what usually shows up. But why? My top values his freedom and, um, I am so grateful to be to do what I want when I want with who I want is easily one of the top things I'm grateful for. That's great. Does anybody else wanna contribute there? But they're grateful for Oh, yeah, I love your family here as well. A fresh started saying they're grateful for delicious soup, heat and light in a comfy chair in my own office in my own house. And also they're very grateful, phenomenal, phenomenal, creative life learning as well. So thank you so much for that on red Scorpio. Sounds like she's had the plumber out for three days now, So she's just saying she's grow very grateful for indoor plumbing. Absolutely. You see, the things that we're grateful for doesn't. It doesn't have to be very difficult. It can be things like Sunny Days are something we're grateful for. But the idea of, from a psychological standpoint, it seems like the idea of being grateful for anything whatsoever starts to move us on. Positive path. Uh, yeah, what are the results you have from people who use the five minute journal? Well, one of things I hear quite often is that when people are looking back on their day, it's not the big things that matter. So they're really small things that you don't really pay attention to. But yet it affects you so profoundly, emotionally. And if you just take a moment to think about it, um, it's There's a small moments that make up all of all of most of life's good moments. It is. It is really the small things right, a little bit of sunlight when you're set, when it's cold, like it's just small things that make you so happy. That and when you start to look out for, I feel like that's what I noticed when I started doing the five minute journal. Is that crimes your mind? Yeah, and you start to look out for the small things. It's like, you know, it's It's the It's not the fact that you had a really large traffic jam and you couldn't get to work on time. It's the fact that, you know, you were able to take a cab and get out early and take a walk and be able to walk through the park and skip the whole traffic jam and towards the end, that's a weird example. But it's one of those examples that I noticed is like we're pretty lucky. I live in Boston and being able to walk to work on the days where it's where it's difficult eyes a very, very awesome thing that I just would even notice. It just becomes part of our daily routine. Just get habituated to it. I also like with the five in a journal how you put on your second section what are three things that would make today great. And I actually started using that as my to do list for a period of time when I was doing my to do list bets, I would say here that I would write them on base camp cause I have pretty committed to that, of course. But then I would write down the same three things. So whenever I didn't know what I needed to do, I had my five internal there and I opened it, and I actually talked to your co founder, Alex, a lot about this. There's a huge that one of the things that I'm most grateful from four from five Minute Journal was not the actual internals of the journal, but it was mawr of learning about how much my context affected my act, my ability to do the journal. I have two tables. One is right next to my one is right next to my couch right here, and one is far towards my desk towards the other end of my wall, and I used to leave my five in a journal right here, and I would do it every morning. And then one day, you know, I got up and I put it on that other desk and I stopped doing it just stopped happening. The difference and me having the journal here vs there was fascinating. I think that you guys do an incredible job of taking the five minute journal and breaking it down into Theodoli of a gradual journal and just breaking it down into Just do this. Here is what you need to fill out. It'll take you just a couple minutes. Fill up the pages and you'll be happy. That's it. You don't think you do a great job and really automating this process? Yeah, we put a lot of thought and working to it, and this is what I care about. Like I care about the Delta right change in behavior. I think that's what really gets me fired up. It's it's why I wake up in the morning. I'm pretty sure that's why you wake up in the morning. We'll be just fine. Great eyes. Any questions for you, Jay From the audience. I'd love Teoh, yet Mark had a question. Um, so sometimes when going through the gratitude practice, you think about some. Sometimes your mind gets stuck on an obstacle. And I know there's a lot of value and turning that obstacle into an opportunity and then being grateful for it. Is this something that you tend to do during a practice? Or do you just move past those opticals and find some of the smaller things that you could be grateful for? Well, anytime you're having difficulty accessing that affect the effort is a feeling right. You have to be able to actually feeling you can't actually feeling you're up against the higher obstacle. You're doing that. Just take a put away the LiveJournal, take a longer she Tapie piece paper and keep stored riding. Things were great before. And don't stop till you get the feeling because obviously you have a larger obstacle to me. Things aren't gonna cut it right, and especially if you're not such such a place. What you need to do, You have to do this because otherwise your mind is going to be submerged. But negativity you won't be able to access even feeling even remotely so Together, piece paper and keep writing until you actually feel in your entire body. And that will that will help you overcome that. I've uses practice several times. The answer. You know, it doesn't matter. 50 times 100 times. Just keep going. Thank you. Yeah, you are just a quick question. So I've done a gratitude journal before for 30 days, and it's made a really big difference in how thankful I wasn't just looking at the life that I hadn't really being thankful for it. Yes. So that's my quit. That's my question is, yeah, Is this Is it something that that you you keep keep doing or that you are ongoing practice throughout your life? Or is it something where you you start with a gratitude journal or five minute journaling? You move toe something else over time. Would you stop brushing your teeth out in 30 days? No. Right, So this is like a toothbrush for your mind. Just because you've done it for 30 day doesn't mean it's it's going to keep helping you clean out the negativity in between your teeth, Right. So it Zanon going packets like taking a shower like brushing your teeth. It's a mental practice, but you'll see you'll see a lot of return on investment. Yeah, the gratefulness is is an incredible concept. And positive psychology is a really cool new shift in in modern day psychology. Looking towards not how can we fix problems of the mind? And how can we take people who are happy and make them happier? How can we take you know, our society and help us improve each day? And I'm really grateful today that you, Jay, you were able to come and speak with us and talk with us. Thank you so much. Thank you. Yeah, absolutely. Definitely. Check out you Jay's Website at five minute journal five minute journal dot com. Uh, it's spelled out right? Five minute journal, dog. I direct if I ve Yeah, If I ve minute journal dot com you can grab one on the website. I believe. Are you working on a new new addition? Is there a new edition coming in our tradition coming out in a few months? Great things. Edition is totally awesome. So get it now. Well, it's still hot in your mind on, and there's only so many pages. So by the time the new one comes out, you'll be ready and primed to get the next one to Thank you so much. Awesome. Thanks for having me. Thanks. We'll talk soon.