Fixing Happiness — The science of gratitude, my grandmother, and your legs.
My grandmother has a superpower; She is grateful.
Not only is she grateful, she is also very kind, energetic and deeply pragmatic, but I have come to think, in agreement with Philosophers, Nobel Prize winners and Scientists, that the gratitude itself is of key importance and might affect the other virtues in a positive way.
Like every old person, my grandmother has suffered a great deal from the quarantine and the loneliness that comes with it. Before this, she had a very social life and was engaged in both the church and all kinds of other physical and mental activities. Sometimes I half-jokingly tell her that she does more in a day than I do, half-jokingly because half of the time it is true and she is 60(!) years older than me.
When I talked to her on the phone yesterday she told me that her best friend had just passed in Covid-19, a friend she had known since her twenties.
When I said that I felt sorry for her in all this, she simply replied:
— “Don’t, because I don’t”
She went on, in all seriousness to say how grateful she was for the fact that she still had her energy and two working legs.
When was the last time you were grateful for yours?
Gratitude has been said to be the most important of all virtues by thinkers such as Cicero and it holds a central place in all the great religions of the world. Gratitude was said to form the way out of the “Kingdom of night” by Holocaust survivor and Nobel Prize winner Elie Wiesel and Albert Schweitzer, another Nobel Price winner, called gratitude “the secret to life.”. So to say that my grandmother is in great company by putting an emphasis on gratitude would be an understatement.
While it is always hard to pinpoint a single factor and determining its contribution to someone becoming resilient to life stressors and enjoying what they have, most of the scientific literature would agree with my grandmother's mindset that gratitude plays an important part.
A problem with gratitude however, is that it is one of those areas of psychology, like meditation and exercise, that seem a bit too universally good to be true when listening to the experts in the field.
It is linked to increased overall life satisfaction, reduction of stress and depression, improved self-esteem, relationships, and academic engagement and much more. As the subject has gotten popular over the last years it has seen a big rise in the number of published papers covering it with more and more RCTs being done with the majority of them pointing in the same positive direction. Important to mention is that the authors stress that gratitude seems to have positive effects on general psychological well being but the evidence is still lacking in terms of its effectiveness in cases of psychopathology (4; 5).
And while words are my preferred way for describing things I figured I could mix things up and therefore stole some cool figures from Emmons and McCullough's book — “The psychology of gratitude” to hopefully get the point across even better.
What these graphs portray are heart rhythm patterns in relation to different states. Supposedly this is just as confusing to you as it was to me, but I guess that you can still pick out the nice synchronous waves in the lower left, as well as its accompanying huge (in contrast to the other two) spike in the lower right.
To translate heart-language to English, what these are saying is that what is going on is really good. To quote one of the only intuitively understandable sentences from the more than one-page long figure explanation “This indicates systemwide resonance, increased synchronization between the sympathetic and parasympathetic branches of the nervous system, and entrainment between the heart rhythm pattern, respiration, and blood pressure rhythms. “. This, in turn, makes it so that our metabolic systems become more efficient in doing their job theoretically leading to improved health, and increased longevity (2, 237–238).
Luckily the second figure was a bit more understandable for me since brains are more my thing than hearts.
The white areas represent Alpha wave synchronicity in relation to the subject's heartbeats. And again, to this time translate from heart-brain-language to English, this is also good, or to quote the authors, “Not only did increases in heart rhythm coherence accompany increased cognitive performance, but also the degree of coherence correlated with task performance across all subjects during all tasks.” (2, 239–240).
Getting practical
More and more studies are emerging that are looking at the state of gratitude (like the original studies where the figures come), and the great thing with the state rather than the trait is that the state can be induced by simple exercises.
The most basic form is often called “Counting your blessings”, which is just as easy as it sounds:
You take a few minutes each day and actively focus on and write down what you are grateful for in your life. It can be big or small, start with the fact that you had the time to read this text, or why not with the fact that you have working legs!
I’ve been using an app called “Bliss” for a number of years as a gratitude journal and it is something I would recommend. And while I would love to have an actual physical book, I have simply never gotten around to it. Since I know that some people believe in the magic of writing things down by hand, there have also been studies done on digital versions, so no need to worry (3).
Sources
1 — Emmons, R. A. (2007). Thanks!: how the new science of gratitude can make you happier. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co.
2 — Emmons, R. A., & McCullough, M. E. (2004). The psychology of gratitude. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
3 — Heckendorf, H., Lehr, D., Ebert, D. D., & Freund, H. (2019). Efficacy of an internet and app-based gratitude intervention in reducing repetitive negative thinking and mechanisms of change in the intervention’s effect on anxiety and depression: Results from a randomized controlled trial. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 119, 103415. doi:10.1016/j.brat.2019.103415
- Unfortunately no open access.
4 — Jans-Beken, L., Jacobs, N., Janssens, M., Peeters, S., Reijnders, J., Lechner, L., & Lataster, J. (2019). Gratitude and health: An updated review. The Journal of Positive Psychology, 1–40. doi:10.1080/17439760.2019.1651888
- Unfortunately no open access.
5 — Wood, A. M., Froh, J. J., & Geraghty, A. W. A. (2010). Gratitude and well-being: A review and theoretical integration. Clinical Psychology Review, 30(7), 890–905. doi:10.1016/j.cpr.2010.03.005
