Gratitude is a powerful, transformative positive emotion, complex and yet so basic. Research shows that even regularly using a gratitude journal for a couple of weeks or a month will improve your health, both physical and mental, reducing stress and its effects and boosting positivity.
A UC Davis professor and researcher, Robert Emmons, says that practicing gratitude “can have dramatic and lasting effects in a person’s life.” His work with fellow colleagues found that regularly “practicing” gratitude
can lower blood pressure, improve immune function, … reduces lifetime risk for depression, anxiety, and substance abuse disorders, and is a key resiliency factor in the prevention of suicide. [See www.headspace.com/articles/how-to-be-more-grateful ]
He also asserts that appreciation/gratitude “blocks toxic [negative] emotions, such as envy, resentment, regret and depression….” —emotional states that do not make you feel all warm and fuzzy.
For the gratitude journal, see if you can keep it up daily for at least 2 weeks. Experts recommend choosing the same time each day, when starting any new habit.
Dedicate a notebook or small journal just for gratitude. Share the activity with your family if you wish. Why wait till Thanksgiving to share what we are grateful for around the kitchen table? If you have children (or even if you don’t!), you can get some plain notebooks, old magazines (with pictures), and a glue-stick, cut out positive words and pictures of things you each enjoy, like foods or activities, and decorate the covers.
Use the instructions below to do this little writing-reflection activity every day. As you go along, notice any positive changes in how you begin to feel.
- 1.Sit someplace pleasant with the journal (or do it in bed at night). Take two or three deep breaths, exhaling slowly while allowing your shoulders, jaw, or any tight muscles, to release a bit. You can skip this part, but it makes you feel better--and may help your memory!
- 2.For each of the three areas below, a, b and c, one at a time, think about the person or thing you appreciate until you feel the gratitude. Hold that positive feeling in your mind for 30-60 seconds. Closing your eyes may help.
- 3.Next write down, briefly but with specifics, who or what you are grateful for, and why. Holding the positive emotion is really more important than writing, in the moment. What you write can be useful later on (see below).
Some people have a hard time with one or another of these three (often it’s “a.”). Echos of warnings against pride from our childhood come back to haunt us, depriving us of a valid source of feeling good. That’s ok, but see if you can come up with something ayway. To cultivate a rich life of gratitude and all its benefits, you want to foster appreciation in all three areas.
- a. Gratitude for yourself: Something as small as a good choice you made that day, an accomplishment, however small, or in the past even, a trait or feature, or an action you did that made someone else feel good.
- b. Gratitude toward another person: What do you appreciate about a specific other person? Even a stranger, like the mailman, or some faraway person you have not met but admire. Or someone close, like your spouse, child, friend.
- c. Gratitude toward the world at large: What is something from the world at large that you appreciated today? It can be as small as a lovely flower, sunset, or a sound that pleased you. Maybe some good news. Or just running water, your comfy bed, central air conditioning, or that fussy car starting up easily when you needed it to!
For the most benefit, aim to do this every day for at least 2 weeks. After those two weeks, take a moment to reflect on how you have been feeling lately, both physically and otherwise. Are you a bit less stressed? How is your health, your chronic pain or sleeping? How are your relationships? You are likely to notice positive results in all these areas!
Why does this work so well?
Because your brain does what you tell it to.
We prime it to pay attention to what draws our attention, just as we prime an engine to prepare it to move the lawnmower or car. If you spend a lot of time focusing on negative aspects of reality, your brain will work hard to find validating examples and such for you. It is less likely to pay attention to everything else out there, however. But prime your brain to look for things to appreciate, and knowing you want to produce these 3 examples every day, your brain will focus on finding them. It will be on the lookout, even when you aren’t consciously trying. It’s an obedient organ, really; it likes to please you, just like a (very) little child. Thus it will find things, more and more easily.
To a great extent, our day-to-day well-being comes down to what we pay attention to. This little activity is a way to adjust that toward positive things. I have been doing it recently and found each day I had to choose from several things to write down, because my brain is perceiving more and more. I am visibly increasing my positivity. And, yes, I am feeling better, and sleeping better, too! It really does work.
Perhaps you will choose to continue the journal past those two weeks, your journal becoming filled with lots of good memories and feelings. When life’s troubles pop up to threaten your mood, remember that you can read through your pages, reminding yourself of the many things you have to be grateful for. Then you can re-prime that dutiful gray, weighty organ you carry around with you all the time!
Gratitude is also called a gateway to all the positive emotions.
It leads to other positive emotions, lets them flow into you. So, when you want to shut off that smoldering, stress-inducing negativity, do something to bring forth feelings of gratitude!
Say someone gives you something you really need: a hug when you are sad, or money to pay an overdue bill. Right away you feel someone cares about you, or loves you, and you don’t feel so alone. You are grateful to your friend, even to the universe that you have such a kind, wise person in your life. You might even thank yourself for finding and keeping this nice person around! Maybe you feel relief, because that gift means that the crisis has been averted. Things seem a bit brighter, and you have hope it will all work out, somehow. You may think to yourself, how thoughtful that friend is, feeling love, affection, and admiration toward this someone who always seems to know what you need. All these beautiful, positive emotions come forth with that awakening of gratitude.
Later, you might share the story of what that person sent you, telling family members or friends, or posting it in social media. Whenever you do that, you re-experience the same good feelings.
We tend to think of gratitude as a response to something that happens to us, or to another person. They give you a gift, do a favor, and then you say “thank you” to express your appreciation. But those are only words, not the emotion that you always have access to within your own life. Words sometimes said in haste, just of politeness, with little real experiencing of the positive emotion we are talking about here.
If you wait for people to do you favors or give you gifts before feeling appreciation, you miss out on a rich source of healing, life-enhancing, well-being promoting mood lifting positivity
You don’t need an external source, however, to experience the benefits of appreciation in your body and mind. When it comes to emotions, good or bad, your brain doesn’t differentiate between things happening realtime, or in the act of remembering, or even in fantasizing or imagining things. Your body and mind will have the same emotional responses. How else could people scream or cover their eyes at scary movies? Or cry at sad ones?
How often do you think about what you did wrong, the nasty old trio of shouldacouldawoulda,? By comparison, how often do you think about things you did right during the day or workweek? Or the accomplishments that brought you where you are now?
I’ve written before in this blog about the value of positive emotions. (See my Sept. 2016 post, for instance.) The more positivity we experience lives, the better we feel. As we increase our experiences of gratitude, moreover, we begin to awaken to more things to be grateful for. What Dr. Barbara Fredrickson calls our positivity quotient begins to grow. When we hit a tipping point of 3 to 1, positive emotion experiencings to negative ones, we begin to flood with positive emotions, for we’ve trained that brain what to pay attention to.
How about —When did you last savor a memory of a mentor or teacher (or parent) who helped you develop confidence and faith, or send them a card telling them how much they’ve helped your life grow? And what about simply those things we always take for granted, like running water, a comfy bed, or central air conditioning? I am soooo grateful for that! We didn’t have A/C when I was growing up, and summers were miserable then, let me tell you!
Pause to savor the pleasantness of appreciating such things, now and then. A gratitude journal can be your tool to launch you on this path of well-being. Enjoy!
Elisabeth Carter Ed.M., MFA, completed the training to provide SMART at the Benson Henry Institute in 2015. For information about her Metro-West (Boston) based program, visit www.managemystress.net.
