Recent Comments

    Science and Thanksgiving

    tomSince 1863 in the United States, we’ve set aside an annual Day of Thanksgiving to share our collective gratitude for the abundance in our lives. It’s now largely a festival of greed and excess, but this time of year may still be an auspicious time to think about the benefits of cultivating “an attitude of gratitude.”

    The importance of gratitude has been understood for millennia by all of the world’s great spiritual traditions, but it only became the focus of empirical research at the beginning of this century. Dr. Robert Emmons, a U.C. professor of psychology, has spent much of his professional life researching gratitude. He describes what he’s discovered in his book Thanks! How The New Science of Gratitude Can Make You Happier. “Without gratitude, life can be lonely, depressing and impoverished,” he writes. “Gratitude enriches human life. It elevates, energizes, inspires and transforms. People are moved, opened and humbled through expressions of gratitude.”

    In a series of studies, he and his colleagues taught people to cultivate gratitude, usually by keeping a “gratitude journal” in which they recorded daily the things for which they were thankful. In these studies, subjects usually only kept gratitude journals for three weeks, and yet, in even that short amount of time, they consistently experienced enormous benefits.

    They reported that they exercised more regularly, had fewer physical symptoms, felt better about their lives as a whole, and were more optimistic about their futures than the control subjects who didn’t keep the journals. In addition, participants who kept journals were more likely to make progress toward important personal goals (academic, interpersonal and health-based) over a two-month period compared to the controls.

    Subjects who focused on gratitude reported increased levels of alertness, enthusiasm, determination, attentiveness, vitality and life satisfaction, and lower levels of depression and stress. Perhaps most importantly, those who felt grateful were more likely to help others and to feel loved themselves. Apparently, gratitude encouraged a positive cycle of reciprocal kindness among people, because one act based on gratitude encouraged another.

    Why is gratitude practice so transformative? Emmons believes that four factors help to answer this question:



    3. Grateful people are more stress resistant. A number of studies show that, in the face of serious trauma and suffering, people with a grateful disposition recover more quickly. It appears that gratitude gives people a perspective that helps buffer them against post-traumatic stress and chronic anxiety.



    Finally, when we’re grateful, we’re less prone to assume that we “deserve” the good things that we receive in our lives. This contradicts an assumption that is pervasive in our culture: that we’re entitled to all the good fortune that comes our way. When we deserve everything, we don’t feel grateful for anything. Gratitude helps us to overcome the assumption of entitlement, and opens the way to accept the gifts that come our way with grace and humility.

    Tom Moon is a psychotherapist in San Francisco. His website is