Gratitude can be as simple as saying, “Thank you.” Or gratitude can be as global as an appreciation for first responders, police and fire fighters during a natural disaster.
What is Gratitude?
Gratitude is a positive emotion that involves being thankful and appreciative. It is associated with several mental and physical health benefits. It is the act of recognizing and acknowledging the good things that happen to you in life. When you experience gratitude, you feel grateful for something or someone in your life and respond with feelings of kindness, warmth, and other forms of generosity.
Levels of Gratitude
There are two levels of gratitude. One level is what is common, the things that might come up around a kitchen table at Thanksgiving.
The first, or tip of the iceberg, are the ideas you think about almost instantly: your family, a good job, good health, etc. Of course, these are important aspects of your life to be aware of! Sometimes these are called “fortunate life experiences”.
The second level of gratitude, or what is under the surface, include the things you might take for granted. These are not necessarily things that would jump out at you, for example, sunshine, holding hands with a partner, warm chocolate chip cookies right out of the oven, etc. These are sometimes called “simple daily pleasures”.
Internal and External Gratitude
Another way to think about gratitude is to think about gratitude from an internal or external perspective.
Internal gratitude is always on a more personal level. How gratitude affects you. This is when you say to yourself and others, “Life is good”. You are able to see the good in your life by appreciating the effort you put into living life to its fullest. For example, your ability to love and be loved, adventures exploring your world, a restful night’s sleep, random acts of kindness to others or volunteering.
External gratitude is focused on the things in your world that enrich your life but you can take minuscule, or no, credit for creating or continuing. For example, the armed forces, police, fire and first responders, clean water, farmers, the Constitution, modern medicine or National Parks.
Sometimes it is easier to have external gratitude than it is to be grateful for what is right in front of you.
Measuring your Gratitude
Are you a person filled with gratitude for life? You can evaluate your tendency to experience gratitude by asking yourself a few questions:
- Do you feel like you have a lot to be thankful for in your life?
- If you made a list of all the internal things you are grateful for, would that list be very long?
- When you look at the world, can you find many external things to be grateful for?
- Do you feel like your appreciation for life and other people has grown stronger as you get older?
- Do you frequently experience moments where you appreciate someone or something?
- Do you appreciate a wide variety of people in your life?
If you answered yes to most of these questions, you probably have a strong sense of gratitude. If you answered no to many or all of the questions, you may need to take a more serious look at your life and the world around you. Or, you may need to take steps to improve your optimism and gratitude for what you do have.
Impact of Gratitude
Feeling gratitude can affect both your emotional and physical well-being. Some benefits include:
- Higher self-esteem
- Resilience to life situations
- Lower blood pressure
- Improved sleep
- More successful relationships
- Better immunity to diseases and infections
People who are more grateful also tend to be people who take care of themselves emotionally, physically and spiritually. For example, having regular check-ups with your doctor, visiting the dentist regularly, leading an active lifestyle, eating healthy foods. People who are grateful take care of themselves.
The Downside of Gratitude
While gratitude is usually something people aspire to having more of, there can be a downside to gratitude. It is all about expectations. If your gratitude is forced and not voluntary, it might create a sense of obligation. Someone owes you, or you owe them.
This feeling of forced gratitude seems to be most prevalent during the fall and winter holidays. This can also contribute to feelings of stress. For example, everyone at the Thanksgiving table is saying what they have been grateful for during the last year. And maybe it has been a really tough year for you. You may feel forced to come up with something to say when the last thing you feel is grateful!
Sometimes gratitude can feel overwhelming. You may be so focused on being grateful to have someone to go to the prom with you, that you accept poor behavior from your date. For example, your date picks you up late, or s/he talks more to others than to you at the big dance.
Relationships Relearned: Learn. Unlearn. Relearn
To be in a healthy, successful relationship, what you learned in childhood about relationships may need to be unlearned and relearned in a different way as an adult.
Sometimes when people talk about gratitude, the discussion turns to people who are optimistic or pessimistic. In relationships, you will have learned how to interact with family and friends by observing others. Were you raised by someone who saw the dark side to any situation, or by someone who was able to stop and “smell the roses”? Did you hear the words, “Thank you for waking up early and scraping the snow off my car so I don’t have to”? Or was this behavior expected?
Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) had a wonderful quote about gratitude: “Now is no time to think of what you do not have. Think of what you can do with what there is.” This quote is as true today as it was seventy years ago. Feeling gratitude will require looking at what is, both internally and externally, and expanding there. Unlearning the pessimism and relearning the optimism of what is there.
Think about how your life would be like if you learned to have more gratitude, especially in your relationships. Would your relationship with your significant other be more successful? If you focused more on saying, “Thank you” instead of criticizing him/her, what would happen in that relationship? Learning to be more genuinely and authentically grateful to your partner might change your life.
Summary
While it is important to understand there may be some downsides of gratitude, they are minor compared with the benefits. It’s never too late to practice a more balanced sense of internal and external gratitude.
With warmest regards,
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