#71: Gratitude

 

Picture credit: @DigitalMosaics 

I’ve been intrigued to see the prioritisation of gratitude a couple of times recently, one in the ethos of the very successful Michaela secondary school in north-west London, who ‘love to celebrate kindness and gratitude’, the other in a speech by author Douglas Murray to a class at New York’s Columbia University in which he praised the ‘unpopular virtue’ of gratitude and exhorted students not to live lives ‘tied up in resentment’. Before this, I recollect reading claims that gratitude improves psychological well-being.

Why gratitude?

Why be grateful, rather than happy? Gratitude is to someone or something, so I suppose it implies that you alone are not responsible for good things and thus encourages an acknowledgement of wider society. It also implies a sense of obligation to that society, an owed return, however small.

Grateful to who?

Traditionally, of course, thanks were and are devoted to God. But there are many other possibilities – people past and present, known and unknown; nature’s processes; even man-made objects.

Are there proven benefits of being grateful?

Some research looks at ‘dispositional gratitude’, a tendency to notice positive aspects of life – being naturally cheerful. This type of gratitude contributes to well-being according to this 2015 study with 233 participants. Likewise, this 2020 study says it is ‘moderately to strongly correlated’ with well-being. So if you are more inclined to feel grateful, you are likely to be happier. Unsurprising, perhaps – bordering on the tautological?

Then there are ‘gratitude interventions’, in which people are asked to do extra things such as keep a gratitude journal. Evidence in support of these is more mixed. A 2017 analysis of 38 studies found that encouraging people to develop their gratitude can improve ‘numerous outcomes, including happiness’, but that benefits may be overemphasised. This 2020 study found that gratitude interventions had only modest effects on depression and anxiety, and recommended that people find other ways of reducing these feelings. This 2016 analysis of 20 studies found that gratitude interventions with young people were generally ineffective.

On this evidence, it is hard to escape the conclusion that if you are naturally inclined to be grateful you will be happier. If you are not, it is harder to cultivate happiness through deliberately feeling grateful. None of the studies I looked at seemed to measure long term happiness, though of course it would be much harder to attribute this to a single factor such as gratitude.

What would I be grateful for?

Once I start thinking, the list seems endless. The astoundingly lucky chain of processes which mean the Earth has surface water, and thus can support life. The fact that life ever evolved in the first place. All the public and private health advances that mean I have lived over 20 years more than the average person in the Middle Ages. City planners, lawmakers, educators, people who have sat on committees to push through regulations on pensions, education, rights, health and safety legislation, transport… The fact that I happen to live in a stable country with low crime levels. Being able to work from home, even. Such statements sound unexciting and don’t make headlines, but are true nonetheless.

Short-term things to be grateful for

Here, at random, are some things just from the past week:

HMRC’s plain English, clear, step-by-step tax self-assessment webpages. A lot of thought has gone into making this process accessible and bureaucracy-lite.

The Saturday Walkers’ Club – they organise a fantastic selection of walks in the UK, all reachable by train, put together and updated by volunteers.

Five well-stocked supermarkets within walking distance.

Suncream.

Seeing friendly faces nearly every time I go out in the town where I live.

Gratitude in literature

To finish, here are a poet and novelist being grateful. The first celebrates an overflowing thankfulness to God for another day, the second expresses a longer-term debt to the generations that have preceded us. The first ecstatic, the second sober. The first leaning towards feeling, the second towards knowing. Gratitude interventions indeed.

i thank You God for most this amazing

i thank You God for most this amazing
day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun’s birthday; this is the birth
day of life and of love and wings: and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any—lifted from the no
of all nothing—human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

E. E. Cummings

And from a novel:

But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

The closing lines of Middlemarch by George Eliot (speaking of the book’s heroine, Dorothea). Does that ‘incalculably’ hint at things which research cannot capture?

picture credit: John Hain