Why Gratitude Is Good
Why Gratitude Is GoodBy Robert Emmons | November 16, 2010
With Thanksgiving approaching, we’ll all soon be taking time to acknowledge what we’re grateful for. It’s a nice gesture, of course, but why do we do it? What good is gratitude?
For more than a decade, Robert Emmons, the world's leading scientific expert on gratitude, has been studying the effects of gratitude on physical health, on psychological well-being, and on our relationships with others.
In a series of studies, he and his colleagues have helped people systematically cultivate gratitude, usually by keeping a “gratitude journal” in which they regularly record the things for which they’re grateful. (For a description of this and other ways to cultivate gratitude, click here.)
They’ve studied more than one thousand people, from ages eight to 80, and found that people who practice gratitude consistently report a host of benefits:
Physical• Stronger immune systems• Less bothered by aches and pains• Lower blood pressure• Exercise more and take better care of their health• Sleep longer and feel more refreshed upon waking
Psychological• Higher levels of positive emotions• More alert, alive, and awake• More joy and pleasure• More optimism and happiness
Social• More helpful, generous, and compassionate• More forgiving• More outgoing• Feel less lonely and isolated.
Challenges to gratitude
Just because gratitude is good doesn’t mean it’s always easy. Practicing gratitude can be at odds with some deeply ingrained psychological tendencies.
One is the “self-serving bias.” That means that when good things happen to us, we says it’s because of something we did, but when bad things happen, we blame other people or circumstances. Gratitude really goes against the self-serving bias because when we’re grateful, we give credit to other people for our success. We accomplished some of it ourselves, yes, but we widen our range of attribution to also say, “Well, my parents gave me this opportunity.” Or, “I had teachers. I had mentors. I had siblings, peers—other people assisted me along the way.” That’s very different from a self-serving bias.
Gratitude also goes against our need to feel in control of our environment. Sometimes with gratitude you just have to accept life as it is and be grateful for what you have.
Finally, gratitude contradicts the “just-world” hypothesis, which says that we get what we deserve in life. Good things happen to good people, bad things happen to bad people. But it doesn’t always work out that way, does it? Bad things happen to good people and vice versa.
With gratitude comes the realization that we get more than we deserve. I’ll never forget the comment by a man at a talk I gave on gratitude. “It’s a good thing we don’t get what we deserve,” he said. “I’m grateful because I get far more than I deserve.”
This goes against a message we get a lot in our contemporary culture: that we deserve the good fortune that comes our way, that we’re entitled to it. If you deserve everything, if you’re entitled to everything, it makes it a lot harder to be grateful for anything.
http://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/why_gratitude_is_goodImage courtesy of Stuart Miles at FreeDigitalPhotos.net