Just stop moaning and start being thankful
BEL MOONEY
IT COULD all seem too simple — this idea that if we express gratitude we can improve our lives.
When people are at rock bottom, isn’t it fatuous to suggest that they trill: ‘Thank you!’ for the fact that they can hear the birds singing?
That would be the cynical response to Janice Kaplan’s engaging account of a year in which she trained herself to look on the bright side of life. Yet I confess that having read her entertaining and informative book at a gulp I find myself feeling much, much better.
Sitting with a heavy cold while building work is messing up my house, I’m feeling rough, yes — but also grateful for the fact that the sun is shining and I’m blessed with a home and family.
Kaplan is a highly successful editor, TV producer and novelist with a handsome husband, two terrific sons and two homes, one in Manhattan and one in rural Connecticut.
She clearly has so much to be thankful for, yet, as she points out, there is always something to moan about if you give in to the impulse — as most of us do.
The spur for her experiment was a survey she read that revealed ‘94 per cent of Americans thought people who are grateful are also more fulfilled and lead richer lives. But fewer than half the people surveyed said they expressed gratitude on any regular basis’.
Many times in my advice column in Saturday’s Mail I have suggested that readers buy a notebook in which to write down things that make them happy. You don’t really need scientific research to tell you that ‘people who write down three things they’re grateful for every night improve their wellbeing and lower their risk of depression’. But Kaplan quotes many experts throughout the book, making it much more than an airy-fairy self-help tome.
Her method is to move through the four seasons, starting and ending on New Year’s Eve.
The fast-moving blend of revealing personal anecdote, lightly worn academic research and conversations with experts works brilliantly.
Kaplan begins with her own marriage. At first, her doctor husband Ron is taken aback when she starts thanking him for things he has done (when was the last time you said thank you to your partner for making breakfast?) and then they both find their relationship improved.
Kaplan points out that ‘a whole number of studies showed that taking the time to have loving, giving and grateful feelings could change how your brain functioned in emotion-related areas’. And she proclaims it has worked for her.
‘Gratitude had changed me,’ she writes, ‘and I suddenly had an image that gratitude could also transform the world.
‘Charles Darwin believed the societies with the most compassion were the best able to flourish. Acts of kindness are noticed, reciprocated and passed forward. If we put good into the world, maybe, just maybe, it starts to be returned.’
That’s an idea (all right, a dream) I agree with wholeheartedly. So start saying thank you to people around you. Appreciate the kindness of strangers. And when things are tough, search for atoms of joy to cast light in the darkness.
Yes, it can be hard. But Kaplan’s book is a delightful guide to uplifting the spirit.