Thanksgiving and Gratitude
In the week of Thanksgiving, it seems only appropriate to talk about the practice of gratitude, and the ways it can be so beneficial to our mental health.
Thankfully (pun emphatically intended), there has been a lot of research around gratitude, ways we can practice gratitude, and how this helps shape our outlook and mental health.
If you want to do a deep-dive on some of this research, I would recommend starting with this article from NAMI, or this white paper from UC Berkeley.
For this post, though, I’m going to keep it short and sweet and turn instead to the guidance and words of someone I am extremely grateful for, neuroscientist and cognitive psychologist Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett. The depth and insight of her work is astounding, and has had a huge impact on my own approach to doing therapy.
Below is a snippet from an interview she did with Michael Rucker, PhD, where she talks about the practice of cultivating emotions like gratitude, curiosity, and awe intentionally. You can find the full interview here.
I have to tell you that I came to this practice really very, very skeptical. I am a scientist by training, and so nobody had to train me to be skeptical. I think I’m a scientist because I’m inherently skeptical. When I started to read research papers about cultivating gratitude, compassion, or experiences of awe and wonder and that these things are really good for your health and good for your well-being—I was skeptical of that. But then the weight of the evidence started to become pretty clear. Once I really understood the neuroscientific basis, it became obvious to me that many of these practices are a really good idea. And in fact, it works! It’s not always easy, but it works. I’ll give you an example. I practice just for five minutes a day, and it’s never necessarily the same time of day, but whenever there’s an opportunity to experience awe or wonder at something, I do it.
Sometimes it’s just looking up at the sky, at beautiful clouds, or the stars. If I were by an ocean, it might be looking out at the waves. It can even be something if I’m taking my daily walk, and I see a weed like a dandelion poking through the crack of a sidewalk, I can cultivate an experience of awe at the awesome power of nature to be unconstrained by human attempts to contain it. Or if I’m having a Zoom meeting that falls apart, because I lose an internet connection because some satellite moved somewhere, or my computer freezes or what have you. I try in those moments to remember to cultivate an experience of awe because I have to remember that even if my connections to the person who I’m speaking to in Belgium or England or China is really shitty. I’m still talking to somebody in England or in China, or in Belgium, and I can see their faces, and it might be blurry, but I can still see their faces. Isn’t that amazing?
Because even ten years ago, that might not have really been something that we just assumed that we could do every day. There’s a lot of evidence to suggest that experiencing awe, experiencing yourself as a speck for a minute or two, really gives your nervous system a break. Because if other things are more majestic than you and you’re just a speck, that means your problems are just a speck. And just for a minute, if your problems are recognized as unimportant that actually gives your nervous system a break. It just lets you readjust and put things in perspective.
It doesn’t always have to be a positive, emotional experience. You can look, there is a huge catalog of experiences available to the human mind, in our culture and other cultures, and some may be really appealing to you, and you can practice them. Like driving—you practice something hard like learning to drive; at first, it is really hard, and then eventually, you get pretty automatic about it. Cultivating emotional experience can be viewed the same way.
-Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett
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