by Larry Senn
By contrast, if we choose to fully appreciate all that we have, we can experience life as full, rich, and rewarding. At the very least, we can be grateful for the gift of life itself. Just to have consciousness and to experience the world around us is a treasure that we usually overlook—just as the passersby in the video did, until the revised sign reminded them of its value.
Like so much else in life, being and feeling grateful is a matter of choice. Choosing to adopt the gratitude perspective is a powerful way to overcome negativity in your life. Bringing to mind something, anything, that you are grateful for can snap you out of a bad mood—and lift you back up to higher emotional levels. Gratitude is your always available “express button” on the Mood Elevator.
The Benefits of Gratitude
Choosing the gratitude perspective can lift you from the bottom to the top on the Mood Elevator, but being grateful isn’t just about feeling good. There’s abundant evidence that cultivating gratitude as a habitual way of thinking about life can have powerful psychological and emotional benefits.
Stephen Post is a researcher and professor of bio ethics at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine in Cleveland. Post founded a research group dedicated to testing and measuring the effects of love and other positive, caring emotions. His studies have shown that love-related qualities like gratitude actually make us physically healthier in at least five different ways:
Gratitude defends. Just 15 minutes a day spent focusing on the things you are grateful for will significantly increase your body’s natural antibodies, enhancing your immunity to disease.
Gratitude sharpens. People who adopt the gratitude perspective are more focused mentally and measurably less vulnerable to suffering from clinical depression.
Gratitude calms. A grateful state of mind induces a physiological state called resonance that is associated with healthier blood pressure and heart rate.
Gratitude strengthens. Caring for others (a parent or an ailing loved one) can be draining—but grateful caregivers are healthier, more robust, and more capable than less grateful ones.
Gratitude heals. Recipients of donated organs who have the most grateful attitudes heal faster from their surgical procedures.20
Post isn’t the only researcher to uncover evidence of the health-enhancing power of gratitude. Research by University of California, Davis, psychology professor Robert A. Emmons indicates that “grateful people take better care of themselves and engage in more protective health behaviors like regular exercise, a healthy diet, [and] regular physical examinations.”21 Emmons also finds that grateful people tend to be more optimistic, a characteristic that boosts the immune system.22
Another fascinating and illuminating research project titled “Dimensions and Perspectives of Gratitude,” sponsored by the John Templeton Foundation and led by Emmons, found that people who kept gratitude journals received many benefits. They exercised more regularly, reported fewer physical symptoms, felt better about their lives overall, were more optimistic when facing life’s challenges, and made better progress toward their work or life goals.23
Sonja Lyubomirsky, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Riverside, focused on the mechanisms underlying gratitude in her book The How of Happiness: A New Approach to Getting the Life You Want. She identified activities that help raise your set point for happiness:
Expressing gratitude
Cultivating optimism
Avoiding social comparisons
Performing acts of kindness
Nurturing relationships
Forgiving others
Pursuing “flow” experiences
Savoring life’s pleasures
Pursuing spiritual growth
Exercising and other good health practices
Gregory L. Fricchione, MD, director of the Benson-Henry Institute for Mind Body Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital, sums up these and other studies as constituting “a wave of research that is sweeping the field of psychology and demonstrating that positive feelings have downstream health-promoting effects.” Links between gratitude and several of the most important mood-regulating organs of the brain help explain, in Dr. Fricchione’s words, “why you feel better when you recognize and appreciate the good in your life.”24
The bottom line: If you want to be happier, forget the myth that achievements or acquisitions will bring happiness. Instead focus on activities that will nourish your sense of gratitude and your appreciation for the blessings you’ve already been granted.
Learning to Access Gratitude
All the higher levels on the Mood Elevator tend to be accompanied by a quieter mind. Gratitude is no different. It is difficult, if not impossible, to access with a very busy mind. That’s why the feeling of gratitude is often connected with prayer or meditation, both of which quiet the mind and open the door to a broader, richer perspective on life.
Learning to access gratitude is a very personal thing. Like learning to better ride the Mood Elevator, accessing gratitude needs to be self-taught through trial and error. It is like learning to ride a two-wheeled bicycle: someone can explain it to you, but you have to get the feel for it yourself.
Several practices contribute to an ongoing mind-set of gratitude:
In her book Thank You Power, journalist Deborah Norville suggests writing in a journal as a way to record and reflect on what you are grateful for.
In his book Flourish, Martin Seligman describes a simple exercise that he calls Three Blessings: once a day bring to mind three small things that lift your spirits. They can be as simple as a great meal, a hug from a loved one, or a soft pillow on which to fall asleep.
I take the first few minutes when I wake up to quiet my mind using the breathing techniques discussed in chapter 10. Then I spend a few minutes thinking about the things I appreciate in my life. I use a similar routine at night before going to sleep.
I try to remain alert and sensitive to happenings throughout my day that can remind me to be grate-ful—for example, any expression of love from one of my five children, whether in the form of a hug, a handwritten note, or a text message.
Family rituals can nurture your gratitude perspective. Many families take turns expressing gratitude as part of their Thanksgiving dinner. Our family has turned this into an everyday dinner ritual. After a brief thank-you prayer for the meal, each person at the table shares something they feel really good about from that day. This ritual evokes a spirit of gratitude and a warm connection between us.
Our family also occasionally devotes a dinner to “what I appreciate about you,” in which we each share one thing we appreciate about another family member.
It has been said that humans pass along only one out of every 30 good thoughts we have about others. Making a habit of generously sharing our appreciation for the people around us nurtures relationships and lifts the spirits of those on both the giving and receiving ends.
Gratitude in the Face of Adversity
Contrary to what you might assume, gratitude is not just for people whose lives are filled with obvious blessings. Many people embrace a gratitude perspective in response to profound adversity—for example, by gaining a new appreciation for just being alive after a life-threatening event. In a way it’s unfortunate that it takes a near-death experience or some other trauma to put the blessing of life in perspective. But when we are caught up in the challenges of everyday life, we easily lose sight of what’s most important. Adversity can become a blessing in disguise when it encourages us to recover our awareness of the beauty and wonder of ordinary existence.
You probably know someone who has gained, or regained, their gratitude perspective in the wake of hard times. My sister-in-law Sybil has been much more lighthearted and grateful for the little things in life since her successful battle with breast cancer. Compared with what she went through then, everything else is “small stuff.”
The gratitude perspective can be one of our most powerful tools for dealing with adversi
ty in life. As we’ve already seen, living among the top floors on the Mood Elevator helps you operate at your best, making it easier to find creative solutions to the toughest challenges.
I needed to be at my best when I faced three simultaneous major life challenges in the year 2000.
At the end of the dot-com boom, many consulting firms were merging to achieve greater scale and added capabilities. Caught up in the fervor, Senn Delaney merged with a larger firm in a stock swap. Unfortunately, our merger partner collapsed almost immediately. We lost control of the business, as well as most of the value we’d built over 25 years. And because Senn Delaney was still doing well, our resources were being drained to fund the survival of the larger organization. We had to find a way to buy our firm back, but we knew it would be a major battle.
Just as we were taking on that challenge, I was diagnosed with a cystic acoustic neuroma, a fast-growing tumor on the nerve that connects the ear to the brain. A risky operation was required. In fact, I was told that one slip of the knife could leave the left side of my face permanently paralyzed—not a great prospect for a guy who makes his living in part by talking to groups. And even if the operation was a success, I would probably lose the hearing in my left ear.
As I was trying to absorb those two major blows, my wife came home from the doctor and announced that she was pregnant. This was something we had hoped and prayed for but hadn’t expected, since Bernadette was in her fifties and I was in my sixties. Dealing with this dramatic life change at my age—and at the same time as the other two challenges I faced—was a daunting prospect.
I realized that this would be a great test of the principles I had been studying and teaching. I knew that being down the Mood Elevator—feeling worried, depressed, stressed, and resentful—would not give me the wisdom and insight I needed to address these challenges. So how would I rise above the lower mood states?
I made a deliberate, concerted effort to embrace a gratitude perspective. I consciously worked to shake off self-pity and to focus instead on all the blessings I could still appreciate in my life.
Yes, my business faced a significant organizational challenge, but it was still profitable, and my work with client companies and their leaders was still fascinating and fulfilling.
Yes, I had a difficult health problem to address, but the tumor was operable and not life-threatening.
And yes, adding a new family member, especially under such stressful circumstances, would be a difficult adjustment. But our family was a loving and supportive one, and the child on the way represented a blessing for which we had long been praying.
This higher-quality thinking helped me regain access to the wisdom I needed to get through the challenges I faced.
My colleagues and I found a creative way to buy Senn Delaney back, and today our business is stronger and more successful than ever.
A team that included my son Darin did the research to find the surgeon with the best track record in the world for my particular procedure, and somehow we got on his crowded calendar. Prayer groups with hundreds of people spontaneously formed, and I went into the operation with a serenity that was quite remarkable. The operation to remove the brain tumor was a success. And even the downside of the procedure—the lost hearing on my left side—turned out to be a blessing in disguise. I’ve found that being forced to concentrate on hearing the people around me has made me a better listener overall.
Finally, most wonderful of all, Bernadette gave birth to a beautiful, healthy son who is the joy of our entire family.
Once again I found that an understanding of the Mood Elevator can help with any challenge I face. The biggest lesson I derived from that difficult year was the importance of being grateful for what I have. I don’t take my life for granted—and I also don’t expect it to be perfect.
Unconditional Gratitude: A Goal to Strive For
Unconditional love is the kind of love a parent has for a child—or the kind of love that people of profound faith have for the higher power in which they believe. It’s a love that can never die no matter how circumstances may change.
While I don’t know whether it is fully attainable, I aspire to achieve what could be called unconditional gratitude. It’s a form of gratitude based not on what in my life I am grateful for—the people I love, the work I do, the physical health I enjoy—but rather on life itself, as it is and as it is not.
I think I have experienced unconditional gratitude on occasion. It generally takes the form of a feeling—not a conscious thought but a deep sense of well-being, connected to the awareness that I am part of something bigger and more important than myself. For many people unconditional gratitude has a spiritual quality to it—a knowledge that there is a greater intelligence out there and a desire to attain a deeper understanding of and connection with that intelligence. From that perspective unconditional gratitude might be called a state of grace—a gift of great value that is bestowed on us for no apparent reason.
It seems that there are some extraordinary human experiences that make it easier to attain this state of unconditional gratitude.
When astronauts fly 150 to 250 miles above the Earth, they get a view of life that few other humans have seen. They see how thin and fragile the Earth’s atmosphere is, how vast the oceans are, how relatively tiny the land mass that humans inhabit is, and how great the destruction is that we’ve caused to regions like the rain forests. They also see that our planet is a small, single entity floating in endless space, the political boundaries we fight over purely artificial and invisible.
As a result, many astronauts return home with profound changes in perspective. They feel as though they have come closer to seeing the bigger picture—to recognizing the pettiness of the problems we struggle with daily and the richness of the blessings that sustain and unite us. Some embrace pacifism, having come to recognize the foolishness of the battles humans fight and the evil of the political and social divisions we tolerate.
I have a lot for which to be grateful, but like most people I visit the grateful level on the Mood Elevator only from time to time—I don’t live there. Yet knowing it is there and accessible to me is a wonderful touchstone that makes my entire life much better.
12
Honoring Our Separate Realities
All the thinkers have had substantially the same thought. It would probably astound each of them beyond measure to be let into his neighbor’s mind and to find how different the scenery there was from that in his own.
—WILLIAM JAMES
Everyone is familiar with the idiom Seeing is believing. But the more you learn about life, the more you discover that that simply isn’t true. The ease with which our eyes can deceive us is remarkable.
One powerful illustration of this truth is the surprisingly large number of people falsely convicted of crimes due to the erroneous testimony of eyewitnesses. In recent years hundreds of convicted felons have been released from prison based on the irrefutable results of DNA testing. Some of these men and women spent decades wrongly incarcerated based on eyewitness accounts—versions of reality that the witnesses were absolutely sure were correct but that turned out to be completely wrong.
In a case from 2011, the Los Angeles chief of police announced with utmost certainty that the department had caught the man who viciously attacked a San Francisco Giants fan after a Dodgers baseball game, putting the fan in a coma—and incensing a city. The arrest was based on seemingly trustworthy eyewitness identification. But a few weeks later, the alleged assailant proved he had been elsewhere, and the police chief was forced to apologize. Only after the innocent man’s release was the real perpetrator finally caught.
In criminal cases the fact that seeing is not believing can have fatal consequences. But the same truth affects all of us daily in matters big and small. Have you ever driven by something for years without noticing it—perhaps until someone else pointed it out to you? Have you ever been sure you put the car keys one place only to find them somewhere else?
Have you ever remembered an incident in one way only to discover, to your astonishment, that another person who was there remembers it very differently?
If any of these experiences sound familiar, it’s not because you are unusually careless or absentminded—it’s because you are human. All of us have blind spots that affect what we see and don’t see. Recognizing and accepting this fact is an important step toward dealing more compassionately and wisely with our fellow humans.
We Live in Separate Realities
Two different people rarely have the exact same thoughts about any topic. In that sense, we live in separate realities.
Here’s a small example. To my wife The Real Housewives of Orange County is a fascinating television show; it offers a unique glimpse into the lives of some colorful characters, and it helps her appreciate what a great relationship we have in contrast with the dysfunctional ones depicted on the screen.
I couldn’t disagree with her more. I find the show painful to watch and utterly without redeeming qualities. It’s hard for me to imagine why anyone would want to watch it—least of all someone as intelligent and thoughtful as my Bernadette.
Which one of us is right about Real Housewives? Is Bernadette’s opinion of the show “correct,” or is she “wrong”? That’s actually a meaningless question because our judgments about the show are personal, subjective, and based on tastes, interests, and values that are deeply individual; it’s inevitable that they will vary from one person to another—and it’s impossible to declare either one right or wrong.
Of course, that doesn’t stop me from being absolutely convinced that my opinion of Real Housewives is “right” and that, in this instance, Bernadette is completely misguided! And I’m sure she feels exactly the same about me in reverse.