Why Being Grateful Makes Us Feel Great (A Thanksgiving Re-run)

It's Thanksgiving - a good time to think about gratitude and being selfless. Concentrating on the things we have to be grateful for is a great way to boost your happiness. So thank the people who've done good things for you, and think of ways you can help others too. This circle of gratitude – the science suggests – will also make you a better friend to one of the most important people in your life… your future self. In a re-run of a 2020 episode, Dr Laurie investigates this effect with Northeastern University’s Professor David DeSteno – author of “Emotional Success: The Power of Gratitude, Compassion and Pride.” See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.

• 0:04Speaker 01

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• 0:32Laurie Santos?

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• 1:15Laurie Santos?

  and a ton of other fantastic things about the mind. Listen and subscribe at schwab.com/podcast or find it wherever you listen to your shows.

• 1:31Laurie Santos?

  Pushkin.

• 1:34Laurie Santos?

  Hey, Happiness Lab listeners. Here in the US, Thanksgiving season is just around the corner. And that means it's a time of year to connect with an emotion that's super important for feeling happier: gratitude. Many of us associate gratitude with things like thank you cards or toasts around the dinner table. But research shows that gratitude can also be a powerful tool for reaching our future goals. How can gratitude help your performance, you ask? Well, to answer that, I'm turning back to one of the episodes we did all the way back in 2020. In this throwback episode, I talk to my friend David DeSteno. David is a professor of psychology at Northeastern University, the host of the How God Works podcast, and the author of Emotional Success:

• 2:17Laurie Santos?

  The Power of Gratitude, Compassion, and Pride. David's work shows how the simple practice of gratitude might be the very habit you need, not just to feel happier, but to be nicer to your future self. I hope you enjoy this episode. Have a happy Thanksgiving, and here's to being a bit more grateful.

• 2:36Laurie Santos?

  Most of the time, I like to think I'm a relatively nice person. But if I'm being completely honest, there is one person out there that I do tend to screw over, constantly. Now, mind you, I don't intend to be a jerk to this person. I mean, I actually care about her a lot, so I'm not purposefully out to get her. But I do inadvertently wind up making her life a lot more difficult.

• 3:02Laurie Santos?

  I've roped her into doing all kinds of things she didn't want to deal with. I've cheated her out of money. I've made her pick up the pieces whenever I miss a work deadline. And I've even forced her to eat healthier while I get to pig out. This poor girl winds up being the collateral damage in nearly every bad decision I've ever made. So who is this easy mark? That person I'm constantly sabotaging? She is Future Laurie. She's me, just in the future. Tomorrow Laurie, or next month Laurie. And let me tell you, from her perspective, right now Laurie is a real bitch. To be happier in 2020, I need to stop screwing over Future Laurie.

• 3:44Laurie Santos?

  That's the only way I'm going to form better habits and meet my new decade goals.

• 3:50Laurie Santos?

  But how do I stop sabotaging my future self? What can we all do to avoid instant gratification and take better care of our tomorrowselves? Our lying minds give us a quick answer to this question: We need willpower. I bet you still have the intuition that gritting your teeth is the way forward. But that "just force yourself" kind of willpower tends to disappear as soon as times get rough, deserting us in the very moment we need it most. But what if I told you that science teaches us an easier way to kick ourselves into goal mode, one that makes delaying gratification to protect our future selves a total breeze? Sound too good to be true? Well, it gets even more shocking, because my favorite thing about this willpower supercharge

• 4:33Laurie Santos?

  strategy is that it doesn't just help you achieve your future goals, it can also make you happier in the process. So if you're ready to harness some self-control and feel better, then join me, Dr. Laurie Santos, for the next installment of The Happiness Lab 2020.

• 4:55Laurie Santos?

  I wanted to learn more about this strategy that helps you achieve your future goals and feel good. So I dropped a line to my friend David DeSteno. Are we rolling?

• 5:04Speaker 03

  Here we go. I'm David DeSteno, professor of psychology at Northeastern University and author of Emotional Success: The Power of Gratitude, Compassion, and Pride.

• 5:15Laurie Santos?

  So Dave, one of the things I love about your book is that it really discusses in a lot of detail the limits of willpower. I think in the book you actually call it a candle in the wind. So why is willpower so fragile?

• 5:26Speaker 03

  Well, let me, let me give you some examples of why I say that. So we tend to use willpower when we're trying to pursue a long-term goal, you know, something that has a big reward in the future, but might be difficult in the moment, or require some effort on our part to persevere toward, you know, whether you're trying to study, to do well in school, or on an exam, exercising and eating right, saving money rather than buying the new iPhone. And we tend to try and use willpower to overcome our desires for more immediate gratification. And if it's something that we consider even more important, you know, this time of the year, we can think about New Year's resolutions, right? 8% of New Year's resolutions are kept till the year's end. 25% are gone in

• 6:06Speaker 03

  the first week or two of January. And so we're doing something really wrong, right? If pursuing our long-term goals, we all know, leads to success, yet our failure rate is that high. And there's a lot of reasons why willpower is weak. For most of our history here on earth as a human species, the future was very uncertain. I didn't know if the food I was looking at was going to be here tomorrow. I didn't know if I was going to be here in two months. But now the world is a lot more certain, and it's just that our mental calibration hasn't, hasn't caught up to that certainty. If you're always using willpower to kind of tamp down desires for what you want in the moment, then your body is in kind of a perpetual state of stress. You're always trying to tamp down one desire

• 6:51Speaker 03

  to persevere towards something in the long term, to not eat something you want, but to exercise. That is a problem. Worked by Greg Miller, who's a psychologist at Northeastern University, was looking at this in terms of students in high school and college who were studying for exams. What he found is when you train kids in these cognitive strategies to build willpower, to build grit, to kind of suppress their desires, yeah, they perform better. But there was actually premature aging to their DNA because of the stress, which if you extrapolate out means, yeah, I'm doing better, but I'm not going to be around as long to enjoy the fruits of that, of that success. But the other problem is oftentimes we choose not to invoke willpower

• 7:35Speaker 03

  in the first place because we're really good as humans at engaging in rationalization, right? I deserve the extra scoop of Ben and Jerry's. I've been good this week. I deserve to spend money on myself, or whatever it might be. And if we go that route, we're not going to engage in willpower in the first place. We're going to give ourselves the easy way out.

• 7:54Laurie Santos?

  This looks pretty bad for New Year's resolutions, right? Like this, this one thing we usually rely on willpower is not going to save us. So if not willpower, if not pushing ourselves, you know, what can we do?

• 8:03Speaker 03

  You know, economists talk about this problem as they use a fancy term, which is called intertemporal choice, which basically means, do I want an immediate gratification now? Or am I willing to forego that so that I can have a better gain in the future? And if you think about why we as a human species have the ability for self-control, right? Self-control didn't evolve so that I could save for my 401K. None of it existed for most of our evolutionary history. What mattered for our success was the ability to be a little bit selfless as opposed to selfish. That is, to cooperate with others, to be fair, to be honest, to be generous. Those are the traits that allowed us to be good partners

• 8:47Speaker 03

  and valuable partners to other people. And what underlie those abilities are what I call moral emotions, things like gratitude, things like compassion, things like authentic pride, not arrogance and hubris. They tend to make us more willing to be selfless, to cooperate with others, to engage in self-sacrifice, to be willing to tamp down our desires for immediate gratification. And people often ask me, Lori, you know, Dave, if I want to be a success, should I be? A nice guy or a nice woman? Or should I be kind of a selfish jerk? And by that, I mean, should I cooperate and work fairly with others? Or should I basically exploit others and be very self-interested?

• 9:30Speaker 03

  And the answer, what science shows is, you know, I say, well, what's your timeframe? Right? And if you want to be a success in the short term, yeah, you can be a jerk. You can be selfish. You can exploit others. Individuals who are self-interested, who exploit other people's, rise very quickly. But over time, they begin to fail because no one wants to cooperate with them. No one wants to work with them. And individuals who are selfless, who have the ability to control their desires for immediate gratification and selfish behaviors, do well in the long run. And so a lot of what I argue in this book and in my work is that we are not using the emotional tools that we have in our arsenal to help us succeed in the long run.

• 10:14Speaker 03

  We're relying on these weaker tools of kind of tamping down emotional responses via willpower that researchers shown are pretty fragile.

• 10:23Laurie Santos?

  So let's zoom in on one of these tools in particular. You mentioned gratitude. Like, what is gratitude?

• 10:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, so gratitude is the emotion that we feel when someone gives us something of value at some cost to themselves. A present or financial assistance. It can be, you know, a shoulder to cry on. It can be someone who's going to help us and mentor us. The important thing about it is that we feel that the benefit that this person is giving us, we couldn't achieve very easily on our own. And they're doing it not to help themselves, but at some cost. And it's not a feeling of indebtedness in the negative sense, but a feeling of this person really helped me and I value that and I want to go above and beyond to pay them back. That feeling is gratitude.

• 11:10Laurie Santos?

  I mean, gratitude sounds awesome and it increases happiness. But, you know, at first blush, it doesn't seem obvious that this emotion has anything to do with willpower. You know, that feeling grateful isn't going to help me eat healthier or get to the gym in the morning. But like, what's the connection there?

• 11:24Speaker 03

  Well, the beautiful thing about gratitude is, and any emotion really, is while we feel it, it kind of sets our expectation for what we should value and what we should do next. Why would you have an emotion that's only focused on the past? Right? If you're feeling an emotion that can't change anything you do in the future, it's a waste. Even metabolically, why would the brain want you to waste its time feeling something? And so I tell people gratitude is really about the future. It makes us value long-term goals more than immediate gratification.

• 11:56Laurie Santos?

  You may still doubt the idea that gratitude is more powerful for protecting our future selves than good old fashioned willpower. But there's some super cool scientific results to back it up, ones that we'll hear about right after this break. The Happiness Lab will be right back.

• 12:14Laurie Santos?

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• 12:58Laurie Santos?

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• 13:43Laurie Santos?

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• 14:27Laurie Santos?

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• 14:33Laurie Santos?

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• 15:15Laurie Santos?

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• 15:27Laurie Santos?

  What's the biggest obstacle to being kinder to our future selves? To getting more exercise and stopping procrastination and saving more money? Turns out, it's our lying minds. We tell ourselves that all we need is a bit more willpower, that our self-control will save us. But as we've seen, when push comes to shove, our rationalizing minds will just say it's okay to screw over our future selves, just this once. But what if we tried a different strategy? What if we harnessed an emotion like gratitude? One that naturally primes us to protect our future selves? This was exactly what researcher David Distino set out to test. He devised an experiment to see whether people could be nice to their future selves in the face of a tempting reward.

• 16:08Speaker 03

  So in our lab, we bring people in. We have them answer a bunch of questions of the form, would you rather have $10 now or $30 in three weeks? Right? And to make it real, we tell them, we're going to pick one of your answers and honor it. So if you said, I'd rather have $10 now than $30 in three weeks, we gave you $10. If you said, I'd rather have $30 in three weeks, we'd send you a check in three weeks. And what we found, right, is that most people tend to be pretty impatient. That is, they discount the value of future rewards a lot. So for example, our average subject said they would take $17 now rather than $100 in a year. Another way of saying that is, they viewed $100 in a year as worth $17 now.

• 16:51Speaker 03

  And I don't know about you or your listeners, but if you don't need that $17 to survive right now, then passing up an opportunity to quintuple your money, given what the banks are paying, is not the greatest decision. When we made people feel grateful, right, suddenly, how much they discounted the future, how impatient they were to get that money in their hands changed. These folks suddenly viewed $100 in a year not as worth $17 now, but as worth $30. So we'd have to give them at least $30 before they passed up the opportunity for $100 in a year. And what that means is, they're discounting the value of a future reward less. And if you take this and you extrapolate it out to the real world, to decisions that matter, you know, other people have found

• 17:37Speaker 03

  People who experience gratitude are more willing to exercise for better health. They're more willing to save their money rather than spend it on impulse buys. They're more willing to work harder for long-term goals. And so what we see here is just by changing the emotional state you're in, how much you value the future changes.

• 18:01Laurie Santos?

  And so that raises the question of, you know, how did you, as this clever experimentalist, get people to experience gratitude? You know, how do you make people more grateful in the lab?

• 18:09Speaker 03

  One way we do this is we have them doing this task on the computer that's designed to be god-awful boring.

• 18:16Laurie Santos?

  Psychologists are good at that.

• 18:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly.

• 18:19Laurie Santos?

  The god-awful boring task.

• 18:20Speaker 03

  God-awful boring. And right as they think they're about to be done, the computer is rigged to crash or to look like it crashes on them. And then the experimenter comes in and says, oh, I'm sorry, you're going to have to do this all over again. Let me go get the tech. And of course, people are not happy. We have somebody else in the lab who our subjects believe is another subject taking the study, but it's actually an actor who works for us. And this person will get up and walk over to them and say, oh, this is terrible. I'm pretty good with computers. Let me see if I can help you. And so, you know, she starts futzing with the wires and surreptitiously hits a key that starts a timer and lo and behold, bang, the computer comes back on. And 95% of our subjects are incredibly grateful for this.

• 19:05Speaker 03

  5% of them think somehow they fixed it themselves, but for the most part, they get excluded. But for the most part, people are very grateful because they don't want to do this god-awful task over again. And in that way, what we can find is that the people who are actually experiencing gratitude in the moment, compared to people who are feeling neutral or people who are feeling happy, and that was important because we wanted to show it wasn't just that you were feeling positive, but that it was something really particular about gratitude. What gratitude makes you do is engage in self-control. And as I said, evolutionarily speaking, that's so you're willing to be less selfish. But if you think about it... When you feel gratitude, there's one person besides strangers

• 19:50Speaker 03

  or people you meet on the street or friends who you can help that's important to your own future goals. And that is your own future self. And what we find is when you're feeling grateful, yes, you're willing to sacrifice for other people, but you're also willing to sacrifice for your own future self. And that's how you can pivot the power of gratitude from just being this emotion that has kind of a moral cast, to do the right thing, to repay debts or to behave morally, to actually help your own future self achieve her or his own goals.

• 20:19Laurie Santos?

  I wanted to talk a little bit about some of the specific domains in which gratitude helps because I just find these data totally fascinating. So in your book, you show that gratitude doesn't just help you on financial decision making. It can also help you like at your job.

• 20:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, it just depends what your job is. So you know, Adam Grant has this great data where he shows that people who are working in a call center and talk about a thankless job, you're calling people up for fundraising, asking people to donate money. When gratitude is expressed in those offices, people's productivity goes up 50%. And not only do they work harder, but they're actually happy about it. They feel good about it. And so there's no stress there. When you're a doctor, right? If you're feeling gratitude, it makes you more willing to invest the effort to do the right thing. And so you're more willing, the data show, to engage in greater thought in terms of your diagnoses.

• 21:14Speaker 03

  And so gratitude in whatever the realm is that we're talking about, by giving you more patients, by giving you and nudging you is going to improve the outcome. And while it's doing it, it's going to solve two other problems for you. And this is something else that I really want to talk about is that it does it in a way that's better for your mind and your body in terms of your physical health and your mental wellbeing.

• 21:39Laurie Santos?

  And so talk about the mental wellbeing part because one of the things we're trying to do is to help people find strategies that can allow them to achieve their goals, but in doing so can make them happy in the moment too. And that's really the amazing thing about gratitude is it doesn't just help you exercise more and save more. It feels good, unlike willpower.

• 21:57Speaker 03

  That's right. So David Brooks likes to talk about that there are two types of virtues people have. Resume virtues, which are the virtues like being dogged, working hard, having grit, trying to get ahead. And eulogy virtues, things like being fair, being generous, being kind. And the eulogy virtues are the ones that ultimately we want to be remembered for. They're the ones that draw other people to us, that give us the relationships that help our lives. And so if we're pursuing our own success in whatever realm it might be, you know, as I said, for millennia, the way to do that was to have good character, to be fair, be generous. It used to be that eulogy virtues and resume virtues were the

• 22:41Speaker 03

  same, there was no difference between them. But because of the way we structure our lives now, we can pursue success in a very atomistic manner. That is, you know, we can just be dogged. And if we earn enough money, we can meet all of our needs. We don't have to have other people around us as much. But that leads to a not very fulfilling life, and it's a very stressful existence. When you choose to pursue success by cultivating emotions like gratitude, by virtue of what you're doing, yes, it's going to give you the self-control, to pursue your goals, to have patience, to persevere in the face of difficulty. But it's also going to change your relationships, right? When we feel gratitude, not only do

• 23:25Speaker 03

  we work harder, but we show more appreciation to others around us. It makes us behave more loyally. It makes us behave more compassionately toward other people. And so we build that social safety net that are there to buttress us. And so, you know, when you look at gratitude, people who feel more gratitude, yes, they exercise more, yes, they save more, yes, they get ahead in life more. But they also sleep better at night. They also have better blood pressure. They show less stress reactivity than do people who don't experience gratitude more often. They even have better cholesterol. How and why these things are intertwined is an interesting story, having to do with the stress and do they exercise more because

• 24:08Speaker 03

  of that gratitude, et cetera. But gratitude really is a buffer. It helps us pursue our resume virtues and our eulogy virtues at the same time.

• 24:17Laurie Santos?

  What's so striking about this, though, is that I think if you asked people, people often think those resume virtues and eulogy virtues are in conflict, right? Like, you know, to boost up your resume, you gotta, you know, stop fearing for your fellow man.

• 24:30Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 24:31Laurie Santos?

  But it's just the opposite. So so much of this podcast is about the idea that our minds are leading us astray, right? We have this bad intuition about what gratitude's gonna do. Like, it makes us weak, you know, it's gonna make us help others rather than getting ahead in life.

• 24:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, and part of that, right, is, you know, I think our resume and our eulogy virtues, we think of them as distinct, but for most of our evolutionary history, they weren't. And we're kind of told that, you know, the way to succeed is to be self-interested. But if you actually look at the data, it's not true. You know, I think we're being sold a bill of goods, you know? It is, in the short term, right, the faster way is to kind of be self-interested. But in the long run, it is people who experienced gratitude, who experienced compassion and empathy, that do really, really well. You know, my friend Bob Franks, an economist at Cornell, and he wrote this great book called Success and Luck.

• 25:22Speaker 03

  And he talks about the illusion that people have, that the way that any of us succeeded was through our own self-determination. And I'm not saying that doesn't matter, of course it does, but there's a lot of luck along the way. And if you think about what a lot of luck is, is it's not really luck. It's people opening doors for us. It's people supporting us in our hours of need and helping us out, and us doing the same for them, right? That's what a lot of luck is, not all. When people do that for us, we feel gratitude. And when we feel gratitude, it makes us not only want to pay those people back, but to pay it forward to other people. So, for example, in our studies that we were talking about, when we make people feel gratitude

• 26:03Speaker 03

  in the lab, and then they leave the lab thinking the experiment is over, and we have a stranger approach them who asks for help. They'll help the stranger, too. And the reason why is when you feel gratitude, it makes you want to help someone else. The brain is nudging you that way because in the long term, that's a successful strategy. And so the beautiful thing about gratitude is it makes us pay it forward and it creates kind of an ongoing cycle. And so I think people often feel that gratitude can be a sign of weakness, but really gratitude is an emotion of power.

• 26:37Laurie Santos?

  And so hopefully the listeners are sold on this idea that becoming more grateful is a good thing. But then that raises the question, how do you do that? What can listeners do to improve their sense of gratitude?

• 26:48Speaker 03

  One strategy is simply doing daily reflections, thinking for a few minutes about what it is that you're grateful for in life. Lots of people do gratitude diaries. The trick there is we all have the two or three things that we're incredibly grateful for in our lives. But if you think about the same things over and over again, they're going to lose their power. You're going to habituate to it. It's going to become boring. And so think about little things. Think about the person who gave you their seat on the bus or the subway. Think about the person who gave you directions, who let you in on the highway, someone who held the door for you. And you might say, Dave, really? Is that going to work? It does. So I told you earlier about the way we induce gratitude in our lab, where we have these

• 27:32Speaker 03

  big shenanigans we go through where computers crash on people. But when we simply ask people, reflect on something in your life that you're grateful for, whether it's something somebody did for you, your parents, a friend, the universe, if you believe in God, God, whatever it might be, those simple reflections produce the same exact effects. And so it may sound trite, but it's not cultivating gratitude daily in your life. We'll do this through reflections. Another way is to engage in something called the reciprocity ring. This is great if you have an office and you're trying to create a culture of gratitude or a classroom, or even for families at home. Have everybody take a Post-it note and write on the Post-it note something they need help with.

• 28:14Speaker 03

  Then on a board or on the refrigerator or wherever it might be, stick up those Post-it notes in kind of a circle. Now, everybody take a different color Post-it note. And write your name on it and go up and stick it next to a post-it note that's up there already where a person's requesting help. So you're saying, ah, John says he needs help with this. I, Dave, am going to help him with this. Right? And then what you do is draw lines or tie strings or tape whatever you might be. And what you'll see is connections in this circle. And then, most importantly, go give that assistance that you said. And what this does is, is a few things. One, it shows that asking for help is okay and offering

• 28:55Speaker 03

  to help is okay. And by you actually helping the person who you said you were going to help, that person feels gratitude. And what our research shows is when that person feels gratitude, it increases the probability very dramatically that they're just going to go and offer help to someone else. And it's a way of creating kind of a norm and a culture for gratitude in your family or your classroom or your workplace.

• 29:17Laurie Santos?

  Have you used this in your lab or in your own family?

• 29:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, I, you know, before I started doing this research, I wouldn't say I wasn't, you know, ungrateful person, but I don't think I thought a lot about gratitude in my life. But what I realized through doing this work is that you can curate your own emotional life, right? Emotions don't just happen to us. We can curate what we feel by, by taking time to think about what we want to feel, by paying attention to the people that help us as opposed to the people that annoy us. And so what I've begun to do in my own daily life now is to do that, is to, is to focus on when somebody does something for me or someone helps me, to not say thank you and quickly move by that, but to focus on it for a few minutes, to curate the emotions that I feel are important

• 30:04Speaker 03

  and valuable in my daily experience as opposed to the ones that aren't. And what happens when you do that is it begins to change the lens through which you automatically view your life. So that suddenly gratitude isn't something that you're trying to curate, but it becomes a lens that you pick out things with daily in life. And I think it, you know, it becomes a habit in some ways. And the beautiful thing about gratitude is, as opposed to habits, is, you know, if I have a habit to save money, that works for saving money. If I have a habit to study, that works for studying. But if I have a habit to experience gratitude, that's going to bleed over into making me better able to pursue my long-term goals in any realm. And I, I would, you know, encourage your listeners to, to try and

• 30:48Speaker 03

  create gratitude as a habit.

• 30:52Laurie Santos?

  After talking to Dave and hearing about his work, I've decided on a personal goal for this new decade. I'm going to stop sabotaging Future Laurie. I'm going to stop assuming that willpower will save me. Instead, I'm going to harness the power of my moral emotions. I'm going to work harder to become a bit more grateful, starting now. So here goes. I'm so grateful that Dave and so many other scientists took time out of their busy schedules to share these insights with us. I'm so, so thankful that we all have a fresh start with this new decade to make a bunch of positive changes that we want to see in 2020. And I'm so, so grateful for you. Thanks so much for listening to this podcast. And thank you for being a part of this journey to use science to live a little bit better.

• 31:37Laurie Santos?

  And finally, I'd be super grateful if you joined Future Laurie for our third bonus episode of The Happiness Lab 2020.

• 31:53Laurie Santos?

  The Happiness Lab is proudly sponsored by Amica Insurance. You know what they say. If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. So go with Amica and get coverage from a mutual insurer that's built for their customers. One that looks after what's important to you together. Auto, home, life, and more. Amica helps you protect what matters most. Visit amica.com and get a quote today.

• 32:20Speaker 04

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• 32:36Speaker 05

  Zepbound is a prescription medicine used with a reduced calorie diet and increased physical activity to help adults with moderate to severe obstructive sleep apnea, OSA, and obesity to improve their OSA. Zepbound is approved as a 2.5, 5, 7.5, 10, 12.5, or 15-milligram injection. Zepbound contains trisepotide and should not be used with other trisepotide-containing products or any GLP-1 receptor agonist medicines. It is not Not known if Zepbound is safe and effective for use in children. Don't share needles or pens, or reuse needles. Don't take if allergic to it. Or if you or someone in your family had medullary thyroid cancer, or if you've had multiple endocrine neoplasia syndrome type 2. Tell your doctor if you get a lump or swelling in your neck. Stop Zepbound and call your doctor if you have severe stomach pain

• 33:20Speaker 05

  or a serious allergic reaction. Severe side effects may include inflamed pancreas or gallbladder problems. Tell your doctor if you experience vision changes before scheduled procedures with anesthesia. If you're nursing, pregnant, plant to be, or taking birth control pills. Taking Zepbound with a sulphonal urea or insulin may cause low blood sugar. Side effects include nausea, diarrhea, and vomiting, which can cause dehydration and worsen kidney problems.

• 33:44Speaker 04

  Talk to your doctor. Call 1-800-545-5979, or visit zepbound.lily.com.

• 33:51Speaker 00

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.