This is the statement I want to make, this is the claim, the main thesis of what I’ve
been doing for the last decade.
And this is a powerful statement, but I believe that the evidence
will back it up.
Evidence coming not only from our own laboratory, but other laboratories
around the world who have been take, building upon
our work and extending it and replicating it to
various other populations and various other ways.
That gratitude has a power.
Power to do what?
Gratitude, I believe, has the power to do three things: to heal, to energize and to
change lives.
In fact, people do report a healing power to
gratefulness, that it can heal them of past hurts as well
as give them hope and inspiration for the future.
People report that it can change their lives, that
it represents in many cases a “turning of the mind” to focus not on one’s which
one is lacking or deprived of, but which one has already.
Alright, so the definition of gratitude that I want to share with you is very short, very
simple, but it consist of two components.
Number one: it’s an affirmation of goodness.
We affirm that there are good things, benefits
, gifts, that life is good.
Doesn’t mean that life is
perfect, that there are not some complaints, some burdens, some hassles of living as well,
but all-in-all, as look at our lives as a whole,
if we look at life accurately, we can identify a number
of good things or some amount of goodness in our life.
That’s one step.
Second step though
is figuring out where that goodness comes from.
We make an attribution, psychologists would
say.
We make a causal decision/ inference- where did this good stuff come from?
Who do I give
thanks to if I am thankful?
Almost implies, doesn’t it, a giver behind that gift.
There’s someone
to give thanks to.
And so we acknowledge or recognize the sources of this goodness, are
outside of ourselves.
It wasn’t anything we necessarily did ourselves which we might take pride in,
let's say, or be happy/proud of something that we
did..
But, in a humble dependence, we acknowledge that other people did things for us or if
you are of a spiritual mindset you might attribute that
to God or to a higher power; to a supernatural being, and say that there are other forces
that provided this benefit for me, did for me what
I could not do for myself from which I recognize a
dependence and I am grateful for that gift that I received.
Now, there’s a distinction between feeling grateful, the short term feeling, emotion
of gratitude you might feel when you’re given
a gift.
For instance, someone provides you with a
benefit, you feel thankful and that can be a very powerful feeling.
I don’t want to minimize
that one.
But, there’s a difference between that short term feeling and saying that someone
is a grateful person, that they habitually look
at life from a grateful focus or through gratitude glasses.
That’s very different, I think.
So, we could align levels of gratitude on a
continuum from the habit of saying thank you, to a more
deeper, abiding sense of thankfulness for life as
a fundamental life orientation.
That’s a different level of a degree of gratitude.
So gratitude has a complexity, it has a depth to it.
The more I study it and read about and talk to people,
the more I appreciate that it's not as simple just
being appreciative or being thankful, that there are
many nuances and complexities to gratitude.
And, we’re not creating grateful people through
these experiments.
We want to, though, try , I mean I think that would be the ultimate goal, is
to help individuals develop gratitude more as
a deeper orientation, as an attitude towards life just
because of those benefits that it seems to provide.
What is a grateful person, you might say?
Well, a grateful person is one who is able to
receive gifts that other people are providing for them or life itself as a gift.
The grateful person at
this other extreme end of this continuum of gratefulness, is one who accepts all of life
good and bad.
Everything that happens they see it as a gift or potential gift.
That’s with a grateful person.
Now, it’s quite a bit different than journaling all the nice things happening to you, but
you have to start somewhere.
We wouldn’t assume that all people find it very easy to keep a journal
or even think in a grateful framework because
of some reason I will talk about shortly.
Some of the obstacles to gratitude, which seem so much
easier and so much more automatic and habitual than
grateful thinking.
We’ve developed ways to measure trait gratitude or dispositional gratitude, a very nice,
short 6 item questionnaire we get to use in a number of studies where we can identify
more grateful, less grateful people and we find,
much like our intervention studies, that grateful people have advantages when it comes to success
in life- that they tend to be happier, tend to
be more satisfied, but, they also tend to be doing good things as well.
It’s not just feeling good that
gratitude produces positive feelings, but also leads to doing good, leads to acts of
generosity, to compassion.
Grateful people are more forgiving.
Grateful people are more pro-social.
They’re helping other...and people are saying this
about them.
It’s not just them saying this about
themselves.
In our studies with the intervention, what we find is..we sent surveys, questionnaires
to spouses/roommates/partners- people who knew these participants well- and we asked
them to rate how helpful has, you know, Henry been
in the last week or so and how much has he offered
to take out the trash and all these things.
And what this is, they’ve become, something has
happened, I don’t know what’s happened to Henry, but keep doing what you’re doing
because he’s a new person.
He’s changed now.
He’s become more outgoing, helpful, generous, charitable
and so on.
And so, we’re finding this with grateful people as well as short term increases
in gratitude.
Well, I think that grateful and ungrateful people have different ways at looking at life.
It’s very
hard, by the way, to find people who are very ungrateful.
In fact, if you look throughout the
history of ideas, you see in-gratitude being excoriated as a vice, you know, it’s one
of the worse things people can say about you that you’re
an ungrateful person.
In some cases it really represents sociopathy, or anti-social behavior because
reciprocity is such a universal norm, that when
people do good things for us we do good things in return.
We don’t return harm for good and
so it’s unusual to find an ungrateful person, but there are ones who are less grateful who
have a different orientation toward life.
For various reasons they’re going to focus more on what
life is denying, what life is..um...what they’re losing out on.
Looking at life with a lens of
scarcity vs. a lens of abundance.
Looking in terms of life as a burden.
Life is a burden.
Focusing on deprivations, resentments vs. life is a
gift.
Satisfaction, what life is offering.
Very different orientation now because these are extreme
and many people fall in between and even the most
grateful people have times where they feel, you know, deprived and so forth and feel injustices
are committed against them.
But, in general we’re talking about two extremes there-
the most grateful and the least grateful individuals
and I think part of the reason why we see the positive
effects of gratitude is because on the left, we have this different orientation toward
looking at oneself, looking at other people, looking
at the world- a positive triad- which leads to, in general,
more functional positive outcomes.