The British Journal of Healthy Psychology just published a study that pooled 24 independent samples covering 6,967 people made up of a cross-section of ordinary adults, university students, and people living with chronic illnesses including fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome, and cancer.
In all three groups, they found that the people who scored highest on gratitude were also the people who were doing the best in life, regardless of the challenges they faced.
People who scored highest on gratitude were also most likely to eat well, engage in regular physical exercise, get enough sleep, and handle stress well, the constellation of behaviors and habits that are both signals of good health and things that explicitly promote good physical and mental health.
Gratitude, it appears, was the main common denominator. And gratitude is something that if you don’t regularly practice you can easily learn and incorporate into your daily life.
The Three Pillars Of Gratitude
When the researchers dug into why this would be, they came up with something they called the Temporal Affective Self-Regulation Resource model. It’s a fancy way of saying that gratitude — and, uniquely, only gratitude — alters three things in our lives: how much good feeling we carry, how we handle bad feelings and adversity, and how vividly we can imagine positive futures for ourselves.
While all three are vitally important, that last one is the key for most people. Unless you feel that you’re worth the actions or success or achievements you hope for in the future, you won’t imagine them in your future self. And what you can’t imagine is much, much harder for you to achieve.
So, gratitude isn’t just a reward for a well-lived life; it’s the thing that helps make you willing to build a well-lived life.
Indigenous Traditions Of Gratitude
The Haudenosaunee got there first and shared their observations with early Americans. The Ohén:ton Karihwatéhkwen (“Thanksgiving Address”) roughly translates as “the words that go before everything else.” Every meeting started with statements of gratitude, rather than an agenda or goal-setting. I’ve been in multiple meetings over the years with aboriginal and indigenous people and seen this over and over.
While we westerners sometimes do a closing benediction, most older cultures open every event with a statement of gratitude. Gratitude to the elders present, to the gods for this life, to the soil and land and animals for their food, to the children for their promise. Sometimes these statements — which are often joined by the entire group — can run as long as an hour.
They do this because they know that if you don’t ground yourself in gratitude, you can’t govern wisely or decide anything worth deciding until you’re in “right relationship” with everything that keeps you alive. That goes for everything from the plants outside to the mountains and the stars and the moon.
While they consider gratitude a precondition to pretty much everything, we tend to treat it as a self-care accessory to be half-heartedly invoked when it seems appropriate or as a form of flattery to get something out of somebody else.
Prescription-Free Healing
This study found that gratitude journals and lists are a “genuinely low-resource” approach to getting people moving in the direction of healthier behavior, both physically and mentally/emotionally. And spiritually, I’d add. It’s free, no prescription required, and science is just now catching up to it.
So, tonight, before you go to sleep, name three things for which you’re grateful, and the person or nature that’s responsible for each. Make them specific: instead of “I’m grateful for my health,” try “I’m grateful my knees still work and my mom walked me to school every morning for six years.” Specificity and attribution are keys.
Reprinted with permission from Thom Hartmann’s substack The Wisdom School: What It Means To Be Human.
Thom Hartmann is a NY Times bestselling author 34 books in 17 languages and the nation’s #1 progressive radio host, as well as a psychotherapist and international relief worker. Sign up to receive The Hartmann Report, a daily newsletter of Renaissance thinking about progressive politics, economics, science, and the issues of our day.
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