People who know me best would probably list a lot of words to describe me before they get to words that convey emotional intelligence. My life operates mostly from a foundation of pragmatism and logic, though it’s – fortunately – an imperfect foundation with fractures that allow for a little more depth at times, and that’s where gratitude has had some success in creeping in.
I’ve seen the topic of gratitude come up a lot in recent years in various sources I keep up with, including the world of podcasts. I remember describing podcasts to my mom years ago when they were first emerging, and she seemed unimpressed; to her they sounded like a glorified repackaging of the Golden Age of Radio, or an online delivery of her vast collection of 1980s self-help cassettes, the decade of 'quick fix' gimmicks. I'm looking at you thigh master and grapefruit diet. This is all a meandering way to say I’ve listened to some podcasts and in some of those podcasts, gratitude was the focus.
In those first dark months of Covid, I was among the more fortunate souls with flexibility to come up with new ways to spend my lockdown time. I was on sabbatical from my university position that year and didn’t have to make the hard turn to online teaching. Somewhere I read about an online course that had broken records for its enrollment on Coursera, an online platform of free courses offered by universities, businesses, and other institutions. I enrolled in this course to help pass the Covid lockdown days, a course titled The Science of Well Being by Dr. Laurie Santos, a psychology professor at Yale (i.e,. smart). Once her name became known to me, I recognized her work in several podcasts and come across several articles both by her, or that cite her frequently. She is a clear leader in the area of well-being research.
There’s a section of Dr. Santos’ course about gratitude, and how it contributes to a happy life. All her class content is grounded in science, including experimental random control science, the gold standard in social science. I love science for an especially important reason: it removes value judgements from the conversation about Truth. Whether you like it or not, whether you think it’s important or not, we know this to be indisputable based on evidence: gratitude is good for us. No one can say with credibility that gratitude is overrated or pointless. Science says otherwise and the research is so abundant and consistent, the conclusion is indisputable.
There’s also the Greater Good Science Center at University of California – Berkeley, the epicenter of research-based science about what it means to live a good life. They’ve condensed and synthesized the work of literally hundreds of researchers and compiled it all into their keys to well-being. And gratitude made the cut.
Gratitude, according to the good people who do this work at UC Berkeley, and Robert Emmon’s work specifically, has two dimensions: 1) recognition that a positive outcome was experienced, often a positive emotion or feeling, and 2) acknowledgement that an external source played a role in the positive outcome. Pretty straight forward. When I experience something good, something or someone else helped make it happen.
When we practice gratitude – more on what that looks like, later – it positively affects our brain activity, restrains the parts of our being that produces negative emotions, and opens up opportunity for the good emotions to flourish. The brain activity findings are fascinating to me. When we practice gratitude, the parts of our brain that solve problems, make decisions and take in new information, are activated and stronger. What a ripple effect! Show some gratitude and become sharper at decision-making and problem-solving. Brilliant. That’s a strong pragmatic argument for gratitude.
In addition, more grateful people are happier, less materialistic, and healthier. In some research, there's a little bit of a chicken-and-egg argument with some of these outcomes; does gratitude lead to more happiness, or are happier people generally more grateful? Some research suggests there's a positive feedback loop at play here, that they both affect each other in a never-ending cycle of more gratitude/more happiness.
If I understand the research correctly, there’s also a clever zero-sum game trick our brains play by convincing us there’s limited room on the bus of emotions at any given time. You can be grateful, you can be jealous, but our brains don’t really allow for both of those emotions to exist in full in the same moment, or it’s at least not very common. If gratitude gets on the bus, something has to get off the bus, and gratitude will kick a negative emotion off the bus or at least make it hang out the windows. Guilt, jealousy, anger, whatever it is, it’s gonna have to wait for the next bus when gratitude climbs aboard.
Ways to practice gratitude, according to research:
Top image: Ololokwe Mountain, Samburu County, Kenya