Being told to “count your blessings” or “show some gratitude” is never helpful (and, frankly, often obnoxious), especially when you’re already having a tough time. That’s tons folks immediately . So let’s start by talking about what gratitude is not: a avoidance from or minimizing of the immense suffering and loss happening immediately .
“Sometimes life is basically hard, and immediately things look really bleak,” social psychologist Judy Moskowitz, Ph.D., M.P.H., professor of medical social sciences at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of drugs , director of the Osher Center for Integrative Medicine at Northwestern, and president of the International Positive Psychology Association, tells SELF. “Gratitude isn't about diminishing how difficult and unprecedented this all is, or being all Pollyanna about it, or pretending you’re not anxious which everything’s fine. Because things aren't fine, for anybody.”
As we’ll check out thorough , gratitude are some things which will exist “alongside the very real and understandable negative emotions that the majority folks are experiencing immediately ,” not in situ of them, Moskowitz says. In fact, gratitude may help us better weather and get over these adversity .
“Sometimes it’s hard within the midst of tremendous uncertainty and grief, anxiety and anger about what’s happening, to feel grateful,” Robin Stern, Ph.D., the cofounder and associate director for the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence and an associate research scientist at the kid Study Center at Yale, tells SELF. “But gratitude are often healing. “
The 3 ways we experience gratitude
We all have a basic understanding of what gratitude is, of course: the state of being grateful or thankful. But it’s revealing to think about how the people that study gratitude define it. Researchers generally check out gratitude in three different but intersecting ways, Emiliana Simon-Thomas, Ph.D., cognitive psychologist and science director of the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley, tells SELF.
1. An emotion
This meaning could also be the one we’re most conversant in . “Gratitude is usually studied as a momentary emotional experience—a specific state that happens once we realize that something good went on , and sometimes as a consequence of someone else’s efforts or actions,” says Simon-Thomas, who helps run the Expanding the Science and Practice of Gratitude initiative at the Greater Good Science Center.
2. A trait
Gratitude is additionally studied as a trait or dispositional characteristic—how grateful of an individual you're . As Simon-Thomas puts it, “Do you tend to note what’s good in your own life? does one savor the goodnesses that are available to you? does one recognize the extent to which things that are outside of yourself, whether it’s people or some quite existential privilege or resource, are the origin of the positive things that you simply enjoy in life?”
3. A practice
This framing of gratitude is connected to the primary two—as something you'll do to both evoke the emotion of gratitude and potentially strengthen it as a trait over time. “It’s an activity or exercise of deliberately reflecting on what’s going well or what quite positive attributes one’s life could be providing at the time,” Simon-Thomas explains. “It’s how of creating the emotion of gratitude more readily available and more likely to occur generally .”
The science behind gratitude boosting your well-being
There is not an awesome amount of research on the psychological benefits of gratitude. “I think one among the explanations why gratitude maybe isn’t the foremost popular research topic of all time is that it’s not a really advertising ,” Simon-Thomas explains. the thought that gratitude may be a good thing worth valuing and embodying isn't exactly novel—it’s intuitive, well regarded, and deeply embedded in our culture. “Most philosophical and spiritual traditions espouse gratitude as a core virtue,” Simon-Thomas points out, as does society at large. (Survey data showing that the overwhelming majority of individuals within the U.S. place a high value on gratitude supports this.)
That said, we do have an honest amount of compelling evidence suggesting gratitude may have some very real implications for people’s psychological well-being during a sort of ways. Much of this data is correlational, where researchers study gratitude as a trait in reference to various indicators of well-being. (Researchers have developed variety of surveys and scales to live trait gratitude in people, like the Gratitude Questionnaire, where you rate what proportion you accept as true with statements like “I have such a lot in life to be thankful for.”) “It seems that folks who see the planet through that lens, who are typically grateful, tend to suffer less stress and be happier generally ,” Stern says.
A 2010 meta-review published in psychotherapy Review checked out dozens of studies to assess the impacts of gratitude on a good sort of outcomes across many various domains, including: adaptive personality traits, mental disease , subjective well-being, social relationships, and physical health. Researchers found that folks with higher trait gratitude were more likely to be more extroverted, agreeable, open, and conscientious and fewer neurotic. They were likely to experience less depression and greater subjective well-being, which incorporates high positive affect (mood), low negative affect, and high satisfaction with life. High trait gratitude is additionally related to more positive social relationships and better physical health, especially with regard to worry and sleep. a minimum of a number of these relationships are thought to be unique: Gratitude can account for variations within the outcomes after controlling for 50 of the foremost studied traits in psychology.
We even have some interventional research that studies the impact of gratitude as a practice, measuring change over time in various outcomes as a results of gratitude exercises that participants are assigned to perform (such as keeping a daily/weekly gratitude diary or writing a gratitude letter to someone). The results here are still good but more mixed. A series of meta-analyses published in Basic and Applied psychology in 2017 checked out 38 gratitude intervention studies to review the consequences of gratitude on a spread of outcomes, immediately after the intervention and at follow-up points (ranging from one week to 6 months after the intervention ended). Compared to participants who had no intervention or a neutral one (like listing daily activities or interesting things), participants assigned to gratitude interventions fared better on variety of outcomes. They saw “evident differences” for well-being, happiness, life satisfaction, grateful mood, grateful disposition, positive affect, depression, optimism, and quality of relationships.
The role of gratitude in handling stress and trauma
There is a mounting body of particularly compelling evidence on the potential role of gratitude in dealing with and recovering from trauma. “When we glance at these sorts of studies, we see that even people that are browsing or have skilled major traumatic experiences, something as simple as gratitude…can be helpful,” Moskowitz says. “The idea is that it'd be helpful for us too to practice it.”
The majority of the info here is correlational, Simon-Thomas says. Generally, researchers study populations that have experienced serious trauma, like combat, natural disaster, or a cancer diagnosis, and assess how trait gratitude is connected to psychological outcomes, including one or two common outcomes of trauma: post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and post-traumatic growth (PTG).
You’re probably conversant in PTSD, a condition which will occur in people that are exposed to a traumatic event, causing variety of great symptoms, which may include flashbacks and intrusive thoughts about the event; negative beliefs about oneself; avoidant behaviors; trouble sleeping; feelings of numbness, guilt, or depression; hypervigilance and reactivity; and trouble sleeping, consistent with the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI). Researchers assess PTSD using clinically validated measurement tools like interviews, self-reports, and symptom checklists.
A similar protective effect of gratitude was seen in college students in two joint longitudinal studies published within the Journal of Research in Personality in 2008. Researchers followed college undergraduates during their first semester at college (which, we will probably all agree, may be a pretty stressful time). They gave students questionnaires at the start and end of the semester that measured a couple of different variables: trait gratitude, perceived social support, stress, and depression. Then they analyzed the info with some sophisticated statistical footwork (structural equation modeling) to tease out the directions of those relationships: Did trait gratitude actually impact any of the opposite variables, or was it the opposite way around? Or were all of them just related? They concluded that having a better baseline gratitude actually directly led to higher levels of social support and lower levels of stress and depression. On the flip side, it didn’t seem that any of the variables directly led to greater gratitude. So maybe having higher gratitude does cause better well-being, even during really stressful times.
How exactly does gratitude help people cope better?
So how do researchers explain the salutary effects of gratitude, especially as they pertain to trauma and coping? It’s not entirely clear yet. “We have tons of behavioral and correlational data,” Simon-Thomas says, “but there’s still tons left to be learned at a biological or mechanistic level.” as an example , we don’t know much about what precisely is happening in our brains once we practice gratitude. While we've a few of excellent studies pointing to a couple of brain circuits, “there’s not an enormous amount of neuroimaging research on gratitude specifically,” neuroscientist, writer, and coach Alex Korb, Ph.D., tells SELF.
Most of our understanding of what’s happening is theoretical. Many of those theoretical frameworks are rooted during a particular area of study called positive psychology. If most of traditional psychology is concentrated on treating mental disease and reducing suffering, positive psychology is concentrated on cultivating well-being and human flourishing. The Positive Psychology Center at the University of Pennsylvania describes it as “the scientific study of the strengths that enable individuals and communities to thrive.” The American Psychological Association (APA) defines it because the study of the emotional states, individual traits, and social supports that “enhance people’s subjective well-being and make life most worth living.”
One influential theory here is that the “broaden-and-build” model of positive emotions, pioneered by positive psychologist Barbara Fredrickson. We tend to look at positive emotions—like joy, compassion, optimism, and gratitude—as merely evidence that somebody is happy. But the broaden-and-build theory argues that the experience and cultivation of positive emotions, including gratitude, can actually produce benefits that cause greater well-being within the long term—broadening our perspectives and building our psychological resources in ways in which help us cope, recover , and thrive.
“Positive emotions aren’t just the inverse of negative emotions,” explains Moskowitz, whose own research is rooted during this model. “They even have unique functions…and can actually help us build our resilience and help us cope.”
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