Engineering Management for the Rest of Us

by Sarah Drasner

was shocked at how much better I felt. As I mentioned earlier, your brain has a negative bias, and it takes some work to retrain ourselves to see all the good around us. Neuroscientists have found that a practice of gratitude can actually alter your brain chemistry.21 In The Happiness Advantage, author Shawn Achor discusses the Tetris Effect. That is, if you start thinking about something a lot, you begin to notice it everywhere. And applying that to a gratitude practice can allow you to see what you might be grateful for that you could otherwise miss in the day-to-day. Achor writes: “When our brains get stuck in a pattern that focuses on stress, negativity, and failure, we set ourselves up to fail. The Tetris Effect teaches us how to retrain our brains to spot patterns of possibility, so we can see—and seize—opportunity wherever we look.”