I had to learn gratitude the hard way. You don’t
A year ago, in January 2018, I felt like I had everything under control: I was about to take an important step in my personal life, I had found a simple practice to deal with my chronic pain, I was at peace with the challenges of friendships, and I had found a job that perfectly matched my ideal job description.
Then, February came and things started to change at work. Fast, really fast. A new leader came in, the vision for the unit was redefined and part of the team was leaving or being reassigned. By the end of march I decided it was time for me to go too. I was totally lost, no idea of what to do next, so in April I started working as a freelancer. I figured this was the best way to take my time and ponder my next step. Even though I am a highly risk-averse person, I was enjoying being in charge of my agenda and being able to cherry pick the projects and the people I wanted to work with.
And then came May. One morning I was home alone taking a shower when I started feeling dizzy. I fainted and fell down at least 3 times, considering the different places I woke up in. The result: a broken coccyx and an injured arm. At this point I should probably make clear that the important personal step I mentioned earlier was getting married. In June.
. . .
By now I believe I have successfully established that my year was full of unpredictable, life-changing events. And yet, I learned a valuable lesson on gratitude. In the days following the accident, there was a persistent thought in my mind: I could have died. Nothing like becoming aware of your own mortality to make you appreciate life, they say. Even though I was in great pain, and still not sure how everything would turn out, I couldn’t help but feel grateful for being alive.
Also, my limitations made me realize how much I had been taking for granted. At that point I was not able to cook, walk, sit on a bench, drive a car, watch tv on a couch or turn around in bed at night. So as I recovered these capacities, I felt a renewed appreciation for each of them. Today, there is not a single time I sit on a garden bench without consciously feeling grateful for being able to do it. So why did I have to go through all the pain and uncertainty and fear to learn this? Why can’t we just value what we have on a daily basis?
Beyond the impact that our genes, our brain and our personality might haveon our ability to experience gratitude, there is also an array of cognitive biases that distort the way we perceive and interpret events.
My goal with this article is to introduce you to the top 3 tendencies that might prevent you from appreciating every single moment, person and experience in your life. And because these cognitive distortions are hard to avoid, I will suggest a few ideas to deal with them.
1. Hedonic Adaptation
According to Tom Gilovich, a Psychology Professor at Cornell University, the first obstacle to gratitude is adaptation — getting used to things over time and starting to take them for granted. The concept of hedonic adaptation was first introduced in 1971 by Brickman and Campbell, referring to the fact that most of us have a baseline level of happiness that is only temporarily spiked by positive or negative events. In other words, no matter how thrilled we might be following a particular happening, we’ll end up getting used to it and returning to our original level of happiness.
What to do about it: reflecting on death
If my personal experience wasn’t enough to convince you that coming to terms with your own mortality can foster a deeper sense of gratitude for your life, this study provides further support to the idea. Participants who were asked to picture their death experienced more gratitude after the experiment than those who were asked to reflect on a typical day. Sinister as this practice might seem, it is actually part of ancient wisdom and a way to keep you mindful of how precious it is to just be alive.
2. Negativity bias
Every group of people I ask thinks the world is more frightening, more violent, and more hopeless — in short, more dramatic — than it really is. (…) In large part, it is because of our negativity instinct: our instinct to notice the bad more than the good. — Hans Rosling, Factfulness
In 2001, Paul Rozin and Edward Royzman published an article referring to a predisposition called negativity bias: a human tendency to attribute more weight to negative than to positive events. A lot has been written about it ever since, and its impact has been measured across the different realms of life: psychologist John Gottman, for example, argues that couples need to have five positive interactions to offset the impact of a negative one during conflict.
What to do about it: keeping a gratitude journal
In 2003, Emmons and McCullough found that participants who kept a regular record of the things they were grateful for reported higher levels of well-being than participants in comparison groups. These results have later been expanded and today it is widely established that keeping a gratitude journal, i.e. sitting down regularly to write about what makes you grateful in life increases positive emotions in the short-term. And, from personal experience, I can report it makes it harder to remember the negative events.
3. Self-serving bias
When trying to identify the psychological tendencies that make it difficult to feel grateful, Robert Emmons, a pioneer in the systematic study of gratitude, points to our tendency to believe that when good things happen it’s because of something we did. Emmons explains that this cognitive distortion called self-serving bias gets in the way of gratitude because it prevents us from giving credit where it’s due.
What to do about it: writing gratitude letters
Since 2005, different studies have shown the positive impact of writing a letter to someone who had a positive impact in one’s life. It’s easy to forget the small things people do for us, so the goal of this exercise is to make it salient. You can write to people on your network or take it to a whole new level as AJ Jacobs did on his journey across the globe to thank everyone involved in producing his morning cup of coffee. Or you can just silently thank them, like Hans Rosling used to do:
Sometimes, when I turn the water on to wash my face in the morning and warm water comes out just like magic, I silently praise those who made it possible: the plumbers. When I’m in that mode I’m often overwhelmed by the number of opportunities I have to feel grateful for civil servants, nurses, teachers, lawyers, police officers, firefighters, electricians, accountants, and receptionists. These are the people building societies. There are the invisible people working in a web of related services that make up society’s institutions. There are the people we should celebrate when things are going well. — Hans Rosling, Factfulness
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2018 was, for me, a hard lesson on gratitude. But boy, have I learned!