My mom got me started on this. We’d go someplace cool and see some extraordinary site and she’d say, “Aren’t we lucky to be able to be here and see this?” When she sat with me as a little kid and we said our prayers together, they were always lists of things we were thanking God for. And she could find beauty that she was grateful for in everything from her backyard garden to our dog’s loving licks.
The British Journal of Healthy Psychology just published a study that pooled 24 independent samples covering 6,967 people made up of a cross-section of ordinary adults, university students, and people living with chronic illnesses including fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome, and cancer.
In all three groups, they found that the people who scored highest on gratitude were also the people who were doing the best in life, regardless of the challenges they faced.
Dr Amy Baraniak, the chairperson of the BPS’s Division of Health Psychology, noted:
“This study demonstrates the potential for gratitude interventions across a breadth of populations including clinical and non-clinical samples. As a non-invasive, low-cost and straightforward approach, it has the potential to have a significant impact on population health.”
People who scored highest on gratitude were also most likely to eat well, engage in regular physical exercise, get enough sleep, and handle stress well, the constellation of behaviors and habits that are both signals of good health and things that explicitly promote good physical and mental health.
Gratitude, it appears, was the main common denominator. And gratitude is something that if you don’t regularly practice you can easily learn and incorporate into your daily life.
When the researchers dug into why this would be, they came up with something they called the Temporal Affective Self-Regulation Resource model. It’s a fancy way of saying that gratitude — and, uniquely, only gratitude — alters three things in our lives: how much good feeling we carry, how we handle bad feelings and adversity, and how vividly we can imagine positive futures for ourselves.
While all three are vitally important, that last one is the key for most people.
One of the most useful exercises in NLP is called Timeline Therapy. Bandler and Grinder discovered that when you ask people to describe the time-line of their lives, most people “see” the future in front of them, the past behind them, and the place they’re standing as the present.
Some people, however, have their timelines all twisted around. When I was teaching NLP to therapists back in the 1990s, I met one guy whose past was actually in front of him and his future behind him; he described himself as “paralyzed by fear of the future” because every time he tried to “look forward” to the future he had to peer through all his past traumas and fears.
Timeline therapy involves intentionally straightening out your timeline, usually through an exercise of laying it out on the floor, future ahead and past behind, as the therapist walks you through the exercise. Entire books have been written about it, so I’ll keep this short, but the bottom line is that unless you feel that you’re worth the actions or success or achievements you hope for in the future, you won’t imagine them in your future self. And what you can’t imagine is much, much harder for you to achieve.
So gratitude isn’t just a reward for a well-lived life; it’s the thing that helps make you willing to build a well-lived life.
The Haudenosaunee got there first and shared their observations with early Americans. The Ohén:ton Karihwatéhkwen (“Thanksgiving Address”) roughly translates as “the words that go before everything else.” Every meeting started with statements of gratitude, rather than an agenda or goal-setting. I’ve been in multiple meetings over the years with aboriginal and indigenous people and seen this over and over.
While we westerners sometimes do a closing benediction, most older cultures open every event with a statement of gratitude. Gratitude to the elders present, to the gods for this life, to the soil and land and animals for their food, to the children for their promise. Sometimes these statements — which are often joined by the entire group — can run as long as an hour.
They do this because they know that if you don’t ground yourself in gratitude, you can’t govern wisely or decide anything worth deciding until you’re in “right relationship” with everything that keeps you alive. That goes for everything from the plants outside to the mountains and the stars and the moon.
While they consider gratitude a precondition to pretty much everything, we tend to treat it as a self-care accessory to be half-heartedly invoked when it seems appropriate or as a form of flattery to get something out of somebody else.
This study found that gratitude journals and lists are a “genuinely low-resource” approach to getting people moving in the direction of healthier behavior, both physically and mentally/emotionally. And spiritually, I’d add. It’s free, no prescription required, and science is just now catching up to it.
So, tonight, before you go to sleep, name three things for which you’re grateful and the person or nature that’s responsible for each. And make them specific: instead of “I’m grateful for my health,” try “I’m grateful my knees still work and my mom walked me to school every morning for six years.” Specificity and attribution are keys.
Let us all know in the comments section how it works out for you! :)
Oh this. This is so important and true. I am grateful that my eyes still see well enough to read such wise words.
Thank you.
It also works at the group or organizational level. About 25 years ago David Cooperrider and Ron Fry at Case Western University developed a technique called “Appreciative Inquiry”. The secret sauce of that method for change in organizations is starting with positive experiences of the group in a very explicit exercise. The positive experiences are not always related to the subject of the meeting. The shift this creates is to counter the natural “Amygdala Hijack” in our brain where we end up in a flight or fight response to a stimulus of change. The thinking part of the brain is slower so getting it activated gives a group the space to have those difficult discussions without the flight or fight responses getting in the way.
The French have this down to an art form in the way they negotiate. I can recall many a conversation, usually over red but not white wine for some reason, where we first socialized and solved all the world’s interesting dilemmas before getting down to business. If you know that you will be a little careful with the red wine!