The Emotions Series: Gratitude
Up to this point, most posts in The Emotions Series have focused on exploring, tolerating, and processing the difficult emotions (guilt, anger, shame) that arise in our bodies. This has been the emphasis because we can’t necessarily control when these feelings will visit us, and our emotional wellbeing and healthy regulation depend on our ability to manage ourselves and our responses to such unpredictable and intense waves of feeling.
Gratitude is different. We can actually choose to feel grateful any time we want to. Certainly we can experience gratitude as organically and spontaneously as any other emotion — when someone does something kind or helpful for us, when we receive good news or narrowly avoid disaster, even when we feel a certain contentment or appreciation for the life we have. But perhaps uniquely among all other emotions, we can set out to experience gratitude on purpose, which is not only a pleasant sensation but has also been shown to accrue meaningful benefits to physical and mental health. More on that below.
But first, what does it mean to practice gratitude? Happily, that’s an easy one! It just means to intentionally notice, take stock of, think about, and feel appreciation for anything and everything in your life for which you are grateful.
What is the best way to go about doing this? The best way is whatever feels doable, authentic, and fulfilling for you. I will offer a few examples, but your imagination and inner knowing are the best guide as you devise a gratitude practice of your own.
You might create a daily ritual of naming one, three, five, or any number of things you are grateful for — you could text them to a friend or loved one as part of a shared daily practice, you could write them in a journal, you could share them aloud at the dinner table with your family members. You might practice gratitude by writing thank you notes or expressing your gratitude outwardly to people around you who make your life better in their own ways. You might focus on your blessings in prayer or meditation. You might make art that represents the sources of your gratitude. Any routine, habit, or ritual that gets you thinking about all the things you have to be grateful for has the potential to be a beautiful, meaningful, and effective gratitude practice.
While choosing to focus on gratitude will leave us feeling good in the moment, research has also shown that it can provide longer-term benefits to physical health, longevity, and mental health. A 2024 study in JAMA Psychiatry found that participants who scored in the highest third of a gratitude questionnaire had a 9% lower risk of death over the next four years compared to the participants in the bottom third, even when controlling for physical health and economic circumstances. Just the gratitude — which researchers suggest might lead to other health-promoting behaviors — accounted for this “small but meaningful” decrease in mortality.
Another study, this one a meta-analysis of 64 randomized controlled trials, found that symptoms of anxiety and depression decreased in participants who received “gratitude interventions,” i.e. a variety of different practices designed to cultivate feelings of gratitude and/or engage participants in acts or expressions of gratitude. While the meta-analysis also found increases in happiness and positive mood, the effects on anxiety and depression especially help to make the case for gratitude as a valuable complement to other treatments for these conditions.
Finally — to those who may be struggling in life right now, who may be internally recoiling from the idea of practicing gratitude, thinking, “If you knew my life, you wouldn’t be asking me to reflect on my blessings. That’s for other people who have it easier.” If that is how you’re feeling, I humbly honor your pain. You’re right, I don’t know your life or your struggles.
And also.
A favorite text of mine, a seminal existentialist text and an astonishing record of human resilience, is Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. Frankl was an Austrian psychologist who was imprisoned for three years in Nazi concentration camps during the Holocaust. The book is his account of this experience and reflections on surviving the camps, both physically and emotionally. A profound idea to come out of the book is that despite our circumstances, we can choose how we respond within ourselves (what he called “attitudinal values”). In the book Frankl describes how, in the camps, appreciation for the smallest things, such as the beauty of the sunset, was essential to preserving his will to survive. From Frankl we can learn that of course we do not have to be grateful for everything that happens to us, but even in the midst of unspeakable dehumanization, injustice, and suffering, we can always find something to be grateful for.
“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way."
Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning