The science of gratitude is largely clear about its benefits for mental health and life satisfaction. Yet the actual practice of gratitude is frequently mis-applied, misunderstood, and over-simplified. The video and article below add some depth to gratitude and provide some ideas for how to practice it.
Gratitude too often gets a shallow treatment, casually thrown around as a quick trick for all that ails you. It’s true that the scientific study of gratitude has fairly resoundingly shown it to be a beneficial practice, good for our psychological well-being. But in typical discussions of gratitude seen on the internet or heard in casual conversation, it tends to be presented only as a desired emotional state, as in ‘It’s so wonderful to feel grateful!” or defined only as the behavior of saying thank you. But gratitude can be so much more than just a temporary feeling or a simple verbal acknowledgment.
Is Gratitude Just Something You Feel?
Let’s first take on the idea that gratitude is just an emotion. There’s no doubt that it’s enjoyable and soul-lifting to have a wave of thankfulness hit and wash over you. Often this happens in some poignant moment where life drops a gift in your lap that’s so impactful that it can’t help but bring an emotional response with it. But I might argue the real skill of gratitude has less to do with how you feel, and more to do with how you see. Especially in the more mundane, day-to-day moments of life. It has more to do with how you look out at the world around you, how you notice things in your experience, and how aware you are.
Related Article: Positive Psychology and Increasing Psychological Health
Instead of trying to feel grateful all the time–a moving target dependent on a lot of variables–what if instead we focus on expanding the scope, depth, and breadth of our awareness? To acknowledge and notice, without necessarily expecting any correlating emotion? This is where gratitude becomes much more nuanced and powerful.
So when you think of gratitude I’d invite you to consider words like:
- Purposeful Reflection
- Appreciation
- Acknowledgment
- Expanded Scope of Awareness
- Noticing
- Seeing Clearly
These are the words and phrases that I think start to lend some complexity to what the skill of gratitude really is, or can be. And as a bonus, sometimes when you work to see and notice more, you also get the positive emotional experience of feeling gratitude. But that won’t always happen, and that’s okay. The value of gratitude is far more than just its potential to produce a good feeling.
Why Gratitude Doesn’t Just Come Naturally
One of the reasons this is a skill that takes some work is that our brain’s ability to adapt quickly tends to get in the way. While adaptability is a great feature at times, and super helpful, the collateral cost is that our minds also quickly acclimate to good things that are frequently part of our experienced reality.
So we stop noticing, not because we’re cold, uncaring, and ungrateful…but because we get used to stuff. A quick look around, wherever you find yourself right this moment, will surely reveal things, people, influences, and benefits immediately available to you that have just sort of become routine. Normal. So frequent that our brain essentially registers them as insignificant background noise.
Another obstacle to gratitude, related to the above, is the well-known inbuilt negativity bias of our brains. There were plenty of good reasons, historically, for our brains to evolve to see threats, expend mental energy on problems, and predict potential stressors. Some of that remains useful today even though the types of threats have changed.
Unfortunately, there just isn’t a correspondingly powerful cognitive capacity to notice good things, to internalize and process positives. This isn’t a bad thing per se, it’s just a reality of how our brains work. Which means that the skill of gratitude needs intentional effort and practice, just like anything else you’ve ever learned how to do.
Related Article: (VIDEO) The Skill of Savoring, and Why it Doesn’t Come Naturally
How We Define and Apply Gratitude Makes All the Difference
There are lots of science-backed benefits to practicing the skill of gratitude. Reviews of the research show mostly positive associations between gratitude and overall well-being. Where it gets interesting though is in the details and exceptions to this. Some research has indicated that there are nuances in the relationship between gratitude and well-being, and a small handful of studies even show negative findings. To me this just emphasizes that there’s got to be something about the way gratitude is defined by a person, and/or the way it’s put into practice, that makes a difference.
For example–and you’d think this would go without saying, but WOW do I still hear it a lot: No, gratitude is not a way to just magically erase the pain and suffering in your life. It’s not a trick. Throwing some ‘just be grateful!’ at real-life distress in an attempt to make that painful stuff disappear is not only ineffective, it can easily worsen the problem. Gratitude is not an anesthetic.
Instead, consider it as a perspective-widener. I like to think of it as adding some color and other details to the picture of whatever I’m experiencing in my life. It doesn’t magically change or replace the picture, it just adds something to it that gives it some more depth and perspective. We go from “There’s some shitty stuff in my life right now, but I should just be grateful for what I have!” to a far more effective “This shitty stuff is hard, AND I’m glad that I can also see some good things while I’m trying to deal with it.” Subtle, it might seem, but actually a pretty huge distinction.
Consider These When Practicing the Skill of Gratitude
So what can we do to enhance this practice in our lives? Here are a few suggestions for how to get better at the skill of gratitude:
- Slow down, and pause a moment or two, to really see and notice. You can’t expand the scope of your awareness if your awareness is always racing off to the next thing, only registering what’s most prominent or in the foreground.
- Try to convince yourself that you’re seeing things as if for the first time, with ‘fresh’ eyes. Of course we can’t actually go back and have experiences for the first time, but we can pause and try to really see things as if they weren’t routine.
- Drill down into the details and depth of a moment. Really challenge yourself to see the confluence of everything and everyone that has come together to provide an experience for you. Considere behind-the-scenes or unseen influences and people that have offered something that culminates in the gift that you are presently experiencing.
- Don’t wait for big emotions of gratefulness, and in fact stop insisting that it be attached to an emotional experience at all. Sometimes noticing good things may bring positive emotions; great, that’s a nice bonus. More often though it will just be a simple act of noticing and acknowledging.
Gratitude is good for us in many ways besides contributing an occasional bump in happy feelings. But our brains just aren’t wired to be naturally super good at this skill. With dedicated effort, we can increase our gratitude abilities. This may add color and detail to the picture of our lives. It can also help us see our debt to the world around us in a way that encourages action on our parts. Action not out of guilt, but out of a sense of profound appreciation and humility. This all removes gratitude from just the feeling realm, which I think is so limiting and simplistic, and makes it broader and richer and far more powerful for our psychological well-being.
If you’d like to talk more about how gratitude can help you, or if you have questions about our therapy services, feel free to reach out to us today.
Photo by Kasuma
