Gratitude: The American Psychological Association defines this phenomenon as a sense of happiness and thankfulness in response to a fortunate happenstance or tangible gift.
Sounds good and pretty prosocial, and in fact there are considerable health benefits associated with gratitude.
This feeling can help someone stop smoking. This may seem strange but encouraging a feeling of gratitude can significantly reduce people’s craving to smoke. A lot of the current anti-smoking campaigns tend to evoke emotions such as sadness and feeling sad encourages people to smoke more.
This is pretty interesting as current approaches to encourage people to get involved with sorting out the different crises we face tend to try and evoke compassion, sadness (about what is happening) and sympathy. In fact these types of message can discourage people from getting involved. Demand/withdraw communication occurs when one feels put upon, nagged or criticised, we tend to respond by withdrawing or avoiding the the whole subject. A gratitude based approach works better, encouraging people to feel grateful for, as an example, the services provided by natural systems, works better.
Gratitude is good for the heart. Getting people to notice and appreciate what is good in the world lowers the likelihood of them suffering an acute myocardial infarction. In fact it’s good for cardiovascular health in general as feeling grateful tends to reduce the negative consequences of stress.
An extra good thing about this is that if we feel less stressed we are less likely to be reactive and more likely to be active and even proactive. We definitely need less knee-jerk reacting and more proactive policies if we want to get out of this mess.
Stuck with a lack of academic motivation? Gratefulness reduces feelings of amotivation (feeling ones efforts are irrelevant to the resulting outcomes, leading to feelings of helplessness and incompetence.)
With regard to our crises amotivation is a big problem. Our crises can just seem too huge and individual actions futile and irrelevant. The opposite is actually the case so encouraging people to feel grateful will help them move from amotivation to getting involved.
Worried about ageing? An attitude of gratefulness helps people stay positive in face of the challenges of getting older.
It’s interesting that during Covid lockdowns people who focused more on feeling grateful and ‘best possible self’ (imagining themselves in the future after lockdown has lifted) felt more socially connected. Those who became nostalgic tended to feel more social exclusion and negative emotions in general.
Saying thank you to someone who is doing a good job can help that person sleep better, have fewer headaches and better mental health. Expressing gratitude creates a positive feedback loop and helps create a heathier and happier community.
Worried about your ventromedial prefrontal cortex? This part of the brain is connected to a ‘reward hub’ that produces a whole bunch of ‘feel good’ neuro-transmitters. Feeling grateful feels good and also encourages people to feel more altruistic. In fact encouraging people to feel grateful can actually reprogramme the brain. The ventromedial prefrontal cortex helps us make decisions balancing reward and risk. When people start to feel more grateful this enhances the ‘reward’ response of the brain and encourages people to be more generous.
Worried that someone will feel awkward if you express gratitude? Well you don’t need to be, we tend to overestimate how much someone will feel awkward and underestimate how positively that person will respond
Do you want to be more patient, be less impulsive and have improved self-control? Yes, you’ve gussed it, training ourselves to feel more grateful helps us develop these positive traits.
Do you want to eat more sweets and chocolate? Feeling grateful elevates our preference for sweet treats. This could be a problem except …. we’ve got better self-control too so that should help us avoid overeating!
There are of course situations where expressing or feeling gratitude can provoke negative feelings. Those people who over-value their autonomy tend to react badly when thanked. Many current societies tend to promote a sort of toxic individualism and people who buy into it don’t like being thanked.
Being thanked when you didn’t have any choice in the matter. A good example is a child being told to go and do the washing up and then being thanked afterwards!
Feeling grateful for things we shouldn’t like coming home from a protest march feeling grateful that I didn’t get hit by one of the chemical or projectile weapons fird into the crowd by the Police.
Thanking someone who gave you help you neither wanted nor needed.
These things can be addressed by a more mindful approach to gratitude and social interactions in general.
Nothing in nature is truly binary and most things are best thought about as being on a sliding scale. The same is true with gratitude, the number of people who are extremely grateful or ungrateful are exceptions and most of us cluster around the middle of the sliding scale. All of the above shows that moving along the scale towards a healthy attitude towards gratitude is good for our health, for social bonding and community cohesion.
So how do we cultivate feeling grateful? In the end it’s about cultivating positive feelings. It’s definitely not about going around spraying the place with indiscriminate thank you’s! There's a difference between politeness and gratitude. The latter is about a quiet appreciation of kindness, a helping hand and prosocial behaviour in general.
How de we cultivate a better realtionship with gratitude? If we make a ritual of it and each day try and feel gratitude for a fixed list of things or a thing then these things or thing tend to become banal. We end up having to force gratitude and the positive effects diminish with time. On the otherhand reviewing the day’s events and feeling gratitude for the different things that happened works well.
Sometimes this means inversing our reactions. Maybe someone responds highly critically to something said or written or posted on the social media. We could take this as a big slap down or see it as great opportunity to try and understand the other person’s point of view. We may never agree with it but we can feel grateful for the opportunity to better understand that we don’t all think in the same way and to refine our arguments. Replying with a delicately phrased ‘thanks’ can lead us towards more productive discussions rather than arguments. I say delicately phrased because it’s too easy to read such a message as being ironic.
That said I still have a lot of problems feeling grateful to the mosquito that buzzed around my bedroom all night. I do however feel grateful to the person who, ten years ago, gave me a mosquito net.
Gratitude is something we need to encourage in ourselves and those around us, it’s one of the major pro-social behaviours that we urgently need to cultivate. It’s vital that we transition away from our current social paradigm which encourages competivity, aggression and toxic individualism. We need to promote and better appreciate all forms of pro-social behaviour, it’s good for each of us as individuals, for our communities in general and for the biosphere.
In the next article I’m going to look at the building industry and how it really needs a pro-social makeover.