I admire washing machine repairers
because there is something special about them.
When one comes over to my house,
I feel for this person,
because I have absolutely no idea how to do the things he or she can do,
an extremely important sense of recognition.
And when I feel this,
not only the washing machine is repaired,
but in fact I also live longer.
But how exactly do I live longer?
I present to you David, David Servan Schreiber.
David was a psychiatrist.
David Servan Schreiber
was my cousin.
And, a little over a year ago, he was taken over
by a type of brain cancer.
When he was 30 years old,
the first tumor was detected on him.
We couldn't exactly say that David was someone who,
statistically speaking, had luck on his side.
From then on, he mobilized
all of his knowledge, all of his energy
to try and find out how he could live,
not only as long as possible under these circumstances,
but also the best possible way.
So what we know about him
is that he changed his diet,
practised meditation,
and exercised every day.
But what we don't know, because he didn't make these things public,
is the amount of attention he paid
to all the details and the small things in his life.
Up to his last breath, David was
someone full of thanks and gratitude.
Gratitude is an emotion
of recognition that we feel
when we realize the flavour of the lives we're living.
It is, for example, a ray of sunshine on the deck,
the fragrance of a baby,
especially when it's our own child.
It's the act of pushing yourself to go out and learn new things
one evening.
It's, for us, the absolute pleasure
to have the chance to present to you what we are passionate about.
But why did David guide me into all of this?
We talked a lot about psychology together.
It's because there are
entire labs and departments that study
the circumstances and consequences of gratitude.
There's a gentleman called Prof. Robert Emmons
who works at UC Davis in California,
he's very fortunate,
for 12 years of diligent study and research in the field
of positive psychology
he has been trying to understand
how it works and the effect it can have on us.
And here's what he realized.
First of all, on a psychological level
when we know that we appreciate
all the small details
that surround you in your everyday life,
from the temperature in your room
to being able to arrive on time,
we feel happier,
we feel more connected with others,
we feel more alert and aware,
and we feel more alive.
And next, we have the secondary benefits
that deal with relationships.
Above all, being the fact that we feel
a lot less lonely.
This is because gratitude always comes from
something or someone
who is separate from us.
This is an emotion that makes us humble,
that makes us want
to take our turn to give.
But all of this is nothing.
The most shocking are the effects that were discovered
on the physiological level, or simply
how our body works.
Here I'd like to talk about a study that was conducted
in Minnesota in 1986.
A researcher hypothesized the following,
and asked
whether there was a link between
feeling grateful,
thus knowing how to appreciate things, and longevity.
So how do we study something like this?
We have to find people who live in the exact
same way, who eat the same things,
who breathe the same air,
who have the same job,
who have the same number of kids,
which is especially important with women,
with zero being an ideal number.
Furthermore, if everyone could be married to the same person,
that would be great.
And they found these people.
They found them in an abbey.
More specifically in an abbey
with 150 years old archives.
When these young women
arrived at the abbey,
at the age of 20, the first thing they were asked to do
was to write a letter that introduced themselves
and told their life story.
They did the same thing at the age of 40,
and at the age of 70.
We had 150 years of biographical letters.
We also had 150 years of medical records.
We passed these letters on to semanticists,
those who study diction and the content of vocabulary,
and asked them to quantify the nature
of words used that expressed
appreciation, optimism,
or gratitude.
And then we could correlate
the level of gratification of these women
with, not only their health,
but also their lifespans.
It was found that the more of these words
that expressed gratitude and appreciation
were used after the age of 20,
the longer the women lived.
We could quantify it to such an extent
that we know these women had a life expectancy
longer than their sisters by 7 years.
The same data comparison was conducted
with more current cases
concerning the middle class,
and the same results were yielded.
I'm like some of you here,
I was born and raised in Paris,
it's probably not the most appropriate thing
to talk about what's going well and what makes us grateful.
However, after having visited David so many times,
after having read all of these documents and articles,
I still wanted to try
and see.
I had to look at the hard evidence.
Martin Seligman, very influential
in the field of positive psychology and researcher at the University of Pennsylvania,
we definitely speak about him quite a bit today,
recognized the following:
In a day, it's enough to
identify 3 events,
moments, interactions,
tastes, sensations
that made us feel good
and that made us want to say,
"Thank you." --
to improve one's level of happiness permanently
after only 3 weeks.
I read this, I went home
relatively excited by this information,
sat down at the table with my husband and 3 kids,
who are between 8 and 14 years old,
and I told them that I read something crazy today
that says that if you can spot in a day
a moment, "here's a great moment"
in brief,
what I told them, was that
if you can spot 3 good things in your day,
you'll live longer,
you'll be in better health, and you'll be happier.
And we started to do so.
It's not easy for everyone.
It's not obvious.
Our immediate level of access to gratitude is a bit
different from person to person.
It was especially difficult for Léon,
the youngest of my kids.
He was under pressure,
he didn't even want to play.
One of my proudest achievements as a mom
is that today Léon is 14
and he can come down these stairs
and stand right in front of you to tell you all,
"Here, my 3 good things are this, this, and this."
My children have learnt this.
It's a way of doing things.
When we do this with people we know,
people we live with,
people we work with,
people who we don't know,
people who we've just met,
something very special happens,
because it's not a common
conversation topic.
If it moves you, it moves me.
When we listen to others talk about what made them happy today,
there's a rule we need to follow;
that is not to comment or criticize it.
When someone chooses to share their spot of happiness, we listen,
we absorb and generally,
we realize that we also have this event to appreciate
and we add it to our own lists.
This is one way to do it,
level zero.
And then we have level one.
If you don't necessarily want to talk about it,
in fact you can
start to keep a little notebook
on your night stand.
I like to call it a "book of happy things",
and in laboratories they call it a "journal of gratitude".
It lets you write down your sources of gratitude
before you go to sleep, and it's the last thing
you do before sleeping.
When you turn off your iPad,
you can pick up your little diary.
Dr Emmons has discovered
that when doing this is the last thing
we do in our day,
we sleep deeper,
for a longer time,
and if we suffer from a chronic pain
the pain weakens and wears off.
And the next level
is the letter of appreciation.
And here's what happens in our brains
when we associate ourselves
with feelings and emotions of appreciation.
It is impossible for our brains to,
at the same time,
feel resentment or anger.
And hence the moment when you sit down
and say, "I'm going to write to someone",
we can recollect our thoughts
to realize the wonder
that we have around us.
For one year I made no presents;
the only gifts I made
were letters that I'd written for my friends' birthdays.
I wrote them letters of appreciation.
I examined and re-examined
my friendships, my relationships,
and I suddenly became aware
of how fortunate I was.
This was a letter, in fact,
that let me say, "If you weren't in my life,
here's what I wouldn't become,
and here's what I wouldn't know."
It lets us get a grasp of the scope
and depth of the relationships
we have with others.
And so now what Martin Seligman did,
was that he sent these messages of gratitude
by visiting the receiver. You'd write the letter,
and instead of sending it, you'd take it to a meeting
with the recipient, wouldn't tell them anything,
why you came,
and you'd go and read him your letter.
I've done this once, I confess, not more.
It's hard,
and I needed quite a bit Kleenex during the experience,
quite a bit of Kleenex when I was getting feedback.
I wrote a letter of appreciation to my husband,
who's sitting here tonight,
and I've never said this in front of him, but I'll say this
even if he's here.
We've been together for 25 years.
In 25 years together, a list of complaints
would be very, very easy to write.
But that's not the point.
The point is in telling him, "If you' were not in my life,
if I had not met you, if I hadn't fallen for you that day,
here are all the things that I wouldn't have become."
And I did just that.
And I'll tell you a secret, sorry, Alex,
Alex reads on the toilet.
And when I sat down to write this letter
I realized that
without his pile of magazines
I would've never learnt so many things.
I owe it all to him.
I heard myself telling that to him.
I told him.
And here is exactly what gratitude does.
It's simply living the exact same life,
but better.
I haven't changed any characters,
I haven't changed any details.
And where it truly gets extraordinarily useful
is when things aren't going so well.
It's when life doesn't give us
what we want,
and when life gives us the opposite
of what we want.
When the time that we've spent and have yet to spend
with someone we love, is limited --
we realize,
in looking at things through this lens,
despite everything that's happening,
how fortunate we are.
For me, luck is to be there
with all of you today,
sitting patiently.
I sincerely thank you all.
(Applause)