The Nine Good Things Exercise
- Difficulty
- Starter
- Time to result
- ~days to results
- Steps
- 5
- Confidence
- —
Gawdat's counter to the negativity bias. The brain, left uncontrolled, defaults to scanning for what is wrong, because it is a survival machine built to detect tigers — and it keeps scanning even when there are no tigers, substituting bosses, partners and headlines. His claim is that the baseline of life is fine roughly ninety-nine per cent of the time: most of us live our whole lives on solid ground, healthy most days, safe most days, with negatives appearing as dips out of an otherwise okay baseline. So when the brain flags one wrong thing, he deliberately instructs it to produce nine right things about the same situation. The mechanism is not positive thinking — it is forcing the scan to report the actual proportion of good to bad.
Origin
Extracted from Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal
How to run it
- 1
Catch the flag
Notice the moment your brain reports something wrong — a missed detail, an inconvenience, a slight. That report is the trigger for the exercise, not something to argue with.
- 2
Acknowledge the one bad thing once
State the problem plainly and let it stand. Gawdat does not deny the negative; he treats it as one true data point that the brain has already logged and does not need repeating.
Watch out Repeating the complaint is how the same event gets regenerated into a mood. Say it once.
- 3
Demand nine true good things about the same situation
Not nine good things about your life in general — nine about this specific situation. The constraint matters: it forces the brain to re-scan the exact event it just judged, which is where the distortion lives.
Pro tip Say them out loud or in sequence with 'and'. Gawdat strings them: and it's sunny, and there's a cafe downstairs, and I have your number.
- 4
Hold the count until you actually reach nine
The first two or three come easily and are usually generic. The value is in items five through nine, where the brain has to look at parts of the situation it skipped on the first pass.
Watch out Stopping at three leaves the ratio roughly one-to-three, which still reads as a bad event.
- 5
Re-rate the event
With ten data points instead of one, decide what the event actually was. Gawdat's point is that the event never changed — only the sample your brain reported did — and that the choice of which sample to act on is yours.
In the wild
Gawdat ran the exercise live on the way to this recording. He was sent a car, arrived downstairs, and realised the address had not been in the calendar invite — his brain immediately said 'oops', something is wrong. So he asked for nine others: they were kind enough to send a car, it is sunny and not raining, there is a beautiful cafe downstairs he now wants to try, he has Ali's number and can simply text to say he is here. By the ninth, the event had resolved into gratitude rather than irritation, without anything about the situation changing.
→ A logistics failure was experienced as a wonderful morning instead of a team's mistake.
Gawdat mentions in passing that he has a slight sore throat during the interview — the kind of thing the brain reports as today's wrong thing. His counter-frame is proportional: it happens to him roughly twice a year, which means his voice is fine for the other three hundred and sixty-three days. Applied as the exercise, the nine good things are the days the throat works, the fact that he can still record, that it does not stop the conversation, that it is temporary and self-resolving. The complaint is true and also statistically trivial.
→ A real physical negative gets sized correctly against the baseline instead of dominating the day.
Common mistakes
Listing generic blessings instead of situational ones
Reciting 'I have my health, I have my family' does not touch the event your brain just flagged. The exercise works by re-scanning the specific situation, so the nine items must all belong to it — otherwise the original judgement stands untouched alongside a separate gratitude list.
Using it to suppress a real threat
Gawdat's other rule is that negative emotions are threat alerts worth verifying. If the flagged thing is a genuine present-day threat, the correct move is action, not nine good things. The exercise is for the ninety-nine per cent of alerts that survive verification as noise.
From the transcript
“i ask for nine other good things about the situation”
“if you leave it uncontrolled its tendency its instinct is to look for what's wrong”
“the event is exactly the same but it's my choice to look at it as a wonderful event or as a negative event”
From the episode
The Happiness Expert Making 1 Billion People Happier - Mo Gawdat
Mo Gawdat