The Importance of Gratitude
Taking time to be grateful for the good things in our life is a great counterweight to the stresses of these uncertain times
I took last week off to recharge my batteries – I had felt my stress levels grow over the preceding weeks and knew I was getting grumpy (grumpier?). The week was amazing especially as I lucked out with the weather and I spent the time in the garden looking after myself – something I don’t do enough of and I know I am not alone in that.
I spent much of the week working on fostering a sense of gratitude. It is one of the tools I use with my coaching clients on a regular basis and I wanted to practice what I was preaching.
There are many different levels of this practice, but the easiest way is to spend two minutes before you go to sleep identifying five things from the day that you were grateful for and either writing them down or saying them out loud. They don’t have to be earth shattering - my list from yesterday was:
The call of a red kite circling over my garden
My neighbour’s son dropping round some home-made chilli jam
A really positive coaching session with a client
A great wellbeing Zoom chat with my team at IHS Markit
Me and my wife taking time out for lunch together in the garden
There is science and research behind it
I’ve written before about the primitive instinctive response that drives so much of our lives – our preinstalled fight or flight software. Essential in the dim and distant past, it focusses on the negative, thinking the worst and thereby helping us avoid the myriad things looking to kill us. But it keeps on today pushing our brains to identify things that are a threat.
The fight or flight response meant the brain learns quickly from negative experiences but much slower from positive ones. Studies show that angry faces, viewed for less than 1/10 of a second and so not consciously recognisable, activate the parts of our brain responsible for emotion and forming memories. Happy faces viewed for the same time have no impact. It is survival of the fittest not the happiest thanks to our ancestors. This response of our brain means that we are conditioned to focus on the negative more than the positive.
Unless we do something about it.
The focus on gratitude comes from positive psychology which really kicked off in the 1990s. Up until then research into psychology had focussed almost entirely on working through the negative aspects of human life, supporting people through stress, depression and trauma. Positive psychology focusses on making people happier and more fulfilled.
Gratitude is one of the core tenets of positive psychology. It is not about viewing everything as rose-tinted unicorns and rainbows or repressing negative feelings of any kind but just recognising and looking out for things through a more optimistic lens. In these stressful times remembering the positives and the things that are good in our lives can be a great counterpoint to the negativity and uncertainty.
There are studies showing that gratitude makes you sleep better and even live longer. Martin Seligman, the founder of Positive Psychology conducted a study in 2004, with results since replicated, where participants who kept a type of gratitude journal for just one week were, six months later, still happier than they had been before the test and happier than other members of the study who hadn’t undertaken the practice.
I am a scientist by background so I like evidence. When I was looking into gratitude and happiness as part of my coaching training, I came across a study of 180 nuns that started in the 1930s when they were 22 and continued for 70 years. They started with a brief autobiography of their lives and what they viewed lying ahead of them. The text was analysed for the frequency of positive, negative and neutral words and sentences and the nuns put into four groups according to that occurrence. The nuns lived in virtually identical circumstances, no smoking, no alcohol, no marriage, no children doing similar work and eating similar foods. The findings were published in 2013 and for every 1% increase in the number of positive emotion sentences there was a 1.4% decrease in the mortality rate.
The 45 happiest nuns lived an average of 10 years longer than the 45 unhappiest
At the age of 85 more than 90% of the happiest nuns were still alive
54% of the happiest nuns lived to 94. Only 15% of the unhappiest reached this age.
The median age at death was 86.6 for thse in the lowest quartile for positive emotion sentences, 86.8 for the second quartile, 90.0 for the third quartile and 93.5 for thise in the highest quartile. Its only 180 people I know – hardly a statistically significant sample. But it’s a pretty good control group experiment.
If you can get into the habit of noticing the things that happened in your day that you are grateful for you will actually become more aware of the positive parts of life – you will recognise things to be grateful for more easily and you will make gratitude a more permanent part of your life.
I’d love to hear anyone else’s experience with gratitude – whether you are an old hand or whether you start focussing on gratitude last thing at night as a result of this post. Let me know what you find or think either in the comments here or drop me an email.
