I’m
terrible at gratitude.
How
bad am I? I’m so bad at gratitude that most days, I don’t notice the sunlight
on the leaves of the Berkeley oaks as I ride my bike down the street. I forget
to be thankful for the guy who hand-brews that delicious cup of coffee I drink
mid-way through every weekday morning. I don’t even know the dude’s name!
I usually take for granted that I have legs to walk
on, eyes to see with, arms I can use to hug my son. I forget my son! Well, I
don’t actually forget about him, at least as a physical
presence; I generally remember to pick him up from school and feed him dinner.
But as I face the quotidian slings and arrows of parenthood, I forget all the
time how much he’s changed my life for the better.
Gratitude (and
its sibling, appreciation)
is the mental tool we use to remind ourselves of the good stuff. It’s a lens that
helps us to see the things that don’t make it onto our lists of problems to be
solved. It’s a spotlight that we shine on the people who give us the good
things in life. It’s a bright red paintbrush we apply to otherwise-invisible
blessings, like clean streets or health or enough food to eat.
Gratitude is the mental tool we
use to remind ourselves of the good stuff.
Gratitude doesn’t make problems and threats disappear. We can lose jobs,
we can be attacked on the street, we can get sick. I’ve experienced all of
those things. I remember those harrowing times at unexpected moments: My heart
beats faster, my throat constricts. My body wants to hit something or run away,
one or the other. But there’s nothing to hit, nowhere to run. The threats are
indeed real, but at that moment, they exist only in memory or
imagination. I am the threat; it is me who is wearing myself out
with worry.
That’s when I need to turn on the gratitude. If I do that enough,
suggests the psychological research, gratitude might just become a habit.
What will that mean for me? It means, according to the research, that I increase
my chances of psychologically surviving hard times,
that I stand a chance to be happier in the good times.
I’m not ignoring the threats; I’m appreciating the resources and people that
might help me face those threats.
If you’re already one of those highly grateful people, stop reading this
article — you don’t need it. Instead, you should read Amie Gordon’s “Five Ways
Giving Thanks Can Backfire.” But if you’re more like me, then here
are some tips for how you and I can become one of those fantastically grateful
people.
Gratitude increases your chances
of psychologically surviving hard times.
1. Once in a while, they think
about death and loss
Didn’t see that one coming, did you? I’m not just being
perverse—contemplating endings really does make you more grateful for the life
you currently have, according to several studies.
For example, when Araceli Friasa and colleagues asked people to visualize
their own deaths, their gratitude measurably
increased. Similarly, when Minkyung Koo and colleagues asked people
to envision the sudden disappearance of their romantic partners from their
lives, they became more grateful to their partners. The same goes for imagining
that some positive event, like a job promotion, never happened.
This isn’t just theoretical: When you find yourself taking a good thing
for granted, try giving it up for
a little while. Researchers Jordi Quoidbach and Elizabeth Dunn had 55 people
eat a piece of chocolate—and then the researchers told some of those people to
resist chocolate for a week and others to binge on chocolate if they wanted.
They left a third group to their own devices.
Guess who ended up happiest, according to self-reports? The people who
abstained from chocolate. And who were the least happy? The people who binged.
That’s the power of gratitude!
The power of gratitude.
2. They take the time
to smell the roses
And they also smell
the coffee, the bread baking in the oven, the aroma of a new car—whatever gives
them pleasure.
Loyola University psychologist Fred Bryant finds that savoring positive experiences makes them stickier in your
brain, and increases their benefits to your psyche—and the key, he argues, is
expressing gratitude for the experience. That’s one of the ways appreciation
and gratitude go hand in hand.
You might also consider adding some little ritual to how
you experience the pleasures of the body: A study published this year in Psychological Science finds that rituals like prayer
or even just shaking a sugar packet “make people pay more attention to food,
and paying attention makes food taste better,” as Emily Nauman reports in her Greater Good article about the research.
This brand of mindfulness makes intuitive sense — but how does it work
with the first habit above?
Well, we humans are astoundingly adaptive creatures, and we
will adapt even to the good things. When we do, their subjective value
starts to drop; we start to take them for granted. That’s the point at which we
might give them up for a while—be it chocolate, sex, or even something like
sunlight—and then take the time to really savor them when we allow them back
into our lives.
That goes for people,
too, and that goes back to the first habit: If you’re taking someone for
granted, take a step back—and imagine your life without them. Then try savoring
their presence, just like you would a rose. Or a new car. Whatever! The point
is, absence may just make the heart grow grateful.
If you’re taking someone for granted, imagine your life without them.
3. They take the good things as gifts, not birthrights
What’s the opposite of
gratitude? Entitlement—the attitude that people owe you something just because
you’re so very special.
“In all its
manifestations, a preoccupation with the self can cause us to forget our
benefits and our benefactors or to feel that we are owed things from others and
therefore have no reason to feel thankful,” writes
Robert Emmons, co-director of the GGSC’s Gratitude
project. “Counting blessings will be ineffective because grievances will
always outnumber gifts.”
The antidote to
entitlement, argues Emmons, is to see that we did not create ourselves—we were
created, if not by evolution, then by God; or if not by God, then by our
parents. Likewise, we are never truly self-sufficient. Humans need other people
to grow our food and heal our injuries; we need love, and for that, we need
family, partners, friends, and pets.
“Seeing with grateful
eyes requires that we see the web of interconnection in which we alternate
between being givers and receivers,” writes
Emmons. “The humble person says that life is a gift to be grateful for, not
a right to be claimed.”
The web of interconnection in
which we alternate between being givers and receivers.
4. They’re grateful to people,
not just things
At the start of this piece, I mentioned gratitude for sunlight and
trees. That’s great for me—and it may have good effects, like leading me to
think about my impact on the environment—but the trees just don’t care.
Likewise, the sun doesn’t know I exist; that big ball of flaming gas isn’t even
aware of its own existence, as far as we know. My gratitude doesn’t make it
burn any brighter.
That’s not true of people — people will glow in gratitude. Saying thanks
to my son might make him happier and it can strengthen our emotional bond.
Thanking the guy who makes my coffee can strengthen social bonds—in part by
deepening our understanding of how we’re interconnected with other people.
My colleague Emiliana
Simon-Thomas, the GGSC’s science director and another co-director of our
Expanding Gratitude project, puts it this way:
"Experiences that heighten meaningful connections with others—like noticing how another person has helped you, acknowledging the effort it took, and savoring how you benefitted from it—engage biological systems for trust and affection, alongside circuits for pleasure and reward. This provides a synergistic and enduring boost to the positive experience. By saying ‘thank you’ to a person, your brain registers that something good has happened and that you are more richly enmeshed in a meaningful social community."
By saying ‘thank you’ to a person, your brain
registers that something good has happened.
5.
They mention the pancakes
Grateful people are habitually specific. They
don’t say, “I love you because you’re just so wonderfully wonderful, you!”
Instead, the really skilled grateful person will say: “I love you for the
pancakes you make when you see I’m hungry and the way you massage my feet after
work even when you’re really tired and how you give me hugs when I’m sad so
that I’ll feel better!”
The reason for this is pretty simple: It
makes the expression of gratitude feel more authentic, for it reveals that the
thanker was genuinely paying attention and isn’t just going through the
motions. The richest thank you’s will acknowledge intentions (“the pancakes you
make when you see I’m hungry”) and costs (“you massage my feet after work even
when you’re really tired”), and they’ll describe the value of benefits received
(“you give me hugs when I’m sad so that I’ll feel better”).
When Amie Gordon and colleagues studied
gratitude in couples, they found that spouses signal grateful feelings through
more caring and attentive behavior. They ask clarifying questions; they respond
to trouble with hugs and to good news with smiles. “These gestures,” Gordon writes,
“can have profound effects: Participants who were better listeners during those
conversations in the lab had partners who reported feeling more appreciated by
them.”
Remember: Gratitude thrives on specificity!
Spouses signal grateful feelings
through more caring and attentive behavior.
6.
They thank outside the box
But let’s get real: Pancakes, massages,
hugs? Boring! Most of my examples so far are easy and clichéd.
But here’s who the really tough-minded grateful person thanks: the boyfriend
who dumped her, the homeless person who asked for change, the boss who laid him
off.
We’re graduating from Basic to Advanced
Gratitude, so pay attention. And since I myself am still working on Basic, I’ll
turn once again to Dr. Emmons for guidance: “It’s easy to feel grateful for the
good things. No one ‘feels’ grateful that he or she has lost a job or a home or
good health or has taken a devastating hit on his or her retirement portfolio.”
In such moments, he says, gratitude becomes a
critical cognitive process—a way of thinking about the world that can help us
turn disaster into a stepping stone. If we’re willing and able to look, he
argues, we can find a reason to feel grateful even to people who have harmed
us. We can thank that boyfriend for being brave enough to end a relationship
that wasn’t working; the homeless person for reminding us of our advantages and
vulnerability; the boss, for forcing us to face new challenges.
“Life is suffering. No amount of positive thinking exercises will change this truth,” writes Emmons in his Greater Good article “How Gratitude Can Help You Through Hard Times.” He continues:
So telling people simply to buck up, count their blessings, and remember how much they still have to be grateful for can certainly do much harm. Processing a life experience through a grateful lens does not mean denying negativity. It is not a form of superficial happiology. Instead, it means realizing the power you have to transform an obstacle into an opportunity. It means reframing a loss into a potential gain, recasting negativity into positive channels for gratitude.
That’s what truly, fantastically grateful
people do. Can you?
This story originally appeared on Greater Good, the online magazine
of the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley.
