The riches of gratitude
Thanksgiving has a lot to recommend it, even from a selfish point of view.
As psychologist Daniel J. Levitin has written, “gratitude is an important and often overlooked emotion and state of mind. Gratitude causes us to focus on what’s good about our lives rather than what’s bad, shifting our outlook toward the positive.”
Psychology, he said, “has found that people who practice gratitude simply feel happier.”
Gratitude motivates, as those who feel themselves blessed or generously treated tend to have more compassion for others and more desire to share.
Gratitude, Levitin found, “alters brain chemistry toward more positive emotions, and oils the pleasure circuits of the brain.”
Fancy that. Being grateful brings pleasure.
And neither the gratitude felt, nor the reason for feeling it, has to be of great or epic magnitude, Levitin said. “It can be as simple as appreciating the taste of your morning coffee or the sunlight peeking through the window.”
Gratitude is a centring emotion, one that puts people in the moment, in the here and now.
As Walt Whitman wrote, “Happiness … not in another place … but this place, not for another hour, but this hour.”
Gratitude also tends to recognize that men and women aren’t so much shaped by circumstances and the hand they’re dealt as by the way we react and handle those circumstances.
However corny it might sound, wrote psychologist and happiness researcher Sonja Lyubomirsky, “the research clearly demonstrates that you would be happier if you cultivated an ‘attitude of gratitude’.”
Gratitude, she reports, delivers all kinds of benefits.
It encourages the savouring of life experiences as they happen, even the lessons that come from loss or setback.
By doing so, it bolsters self-worth and self-esteem. It helps people cope with stress and trauma. It encourages moral behaviour, leaving less space for the rationalizing force of self-pity.
It also helps build social bonds. It lessens constant comparison with others. Since it is incompatible with negative emotions, gratitude tends to lessen feelings of anger, jealousy, bitterness or greed.
Gratitude is most effective, Lyubomirsky says, when expressed directly to another, either in thanks for gifts or help or support received, or by way of recognizing out loud the pleasure and joy in a shared moment.
Harvard researchers have found that something as simple as writing down three things you’re grateful for every day for three weeks significantly increases your level of optimism — and holds it in an elevated state for the following six months.
Richard Wagamese, the late Canadian Indigenous author, wrote in Embers, his book of meditations, that in his morning prayers “I ask for nothing, I only offer thanks.”
In that book, Wagamese chronicled his conversations with elders through his lifetime.
“Old Woman: Can you think of a better way to live than in gratitude?”
To Wagamese, prayers of gratitude for what is already here bring further blessings of peace and purpose.
Prayers that are no more than listings of wants usually bring only “more wanting.”
In all, the science about gratitude and its role in our happiness and well-being is more or less a fancy way of confirming what most grandmothers always said about what was important in life.
Do good things for other people. Appreciate the world around you. Develop and bolster relationships.
And here’s the payoff: Grateful people are more positive and optimistic, and positive and optimistic people tend to live longer.
So be grateful. If only in your own self-interest. Though in Canada, considering the challenges faced elsewhere in the world, there is an awful lot to be grateful for.
After all, a country so sure of its democracy that it grumbles about having too many elections rather than too few, a country that during a pandemic has more vaccines than people willing to take them rather than suffering shortages, has comparatively little to complain about.
Happy Thanksgiving.
May everyone have enough.
Grateful people are more positive and optimistic, and positive and optimistic people tend to live longer