Gratitude, Enhanced

A “soulful window” into the lives of those we love comes at the moment just before Thanksgiving dinner when it’s customary in many families to take turns saying one thing they’re grateful for. I’ll always cherish my two-year old granddaughter saying last year: “I am thank you for the marshmellows!”

But for the jaded who may be tiring of the construction paper turkeys, or even of the cranberry sauce, here’s a way to jump-start Thanksgiving. Robert Emmons’ ground-breaking book, Thanks! (Houghton Mifflin, 2007) alerted us to the multiple benefits of gratitude, which he defines as “a feeling of reverence for what is given.” That attitude accepts good and bad as potential gift. It can focus the lens through which we view life on evidence of abundance, not scarcity. Unsurprisingly, that gives an increased sense of personal worth which can offset anxiety and depression.

Emmons characterizes this attitude as not a “superficial happiology,” but a perspective that has transformative power. His original work alerted us to the benefits of keeping a gratitude journal and expressing thanks regularly through calls, e-mails, texts or letters to those who have done us good. Those are a “booster shot” for relationships, benefiting both giver and receiver.

That work has continued through the Greater Good Science Center at the University of California, Berkeley. Their website is full of wonderful articles and videos:

Greater Good Berkeley

Their research confirms with hard science what our religious traditions or intuitions may have told us about gratitude. For example, Science Director Emiliana Simon-Thomas, Ph.D., draws on the research of Philip Watkins to show how gratitude amplifies good experiences and counteracts habituation. (The classic example for this human tendency is how the “new car smell”—and the novelty of the car itself–fades over time.) It means that pleasure wanes when repeated. In relationships, it helps explain how the charming, handsome date can become a self-centered, boring husband; the sweet infant can turn into a snarling teenager.

To counter this tendency, gratitude gives a “positivity bias” so we notice and appreciate more. Setting aside the negative experiences, choosing to reframe or not focus on them, gives them less power. (True, too, for negative media and violent movies.) So, savoring positive memories magnifies them, building our psychological immune system to cushion failures and disappointments. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer (who should’ve known through direct experience in the Nazi concentration camp) said, “Gratitude changes the pangs of memory into grateful joy.”