HJ: Gratitude is a powerful emotional state that can significantly improve your quality of life by helping you tap into a state of mind that is free from many of the self-limiting beliefs we often carry around with us. But did you know that you can amplify the effectiveness and power of your gratitude practice by 10 fold by understanding and adopting a few simple concepts? David DeSteno’s brilliant article below helps elucidate exactly what those are and how you can leverage them to better focus your efforts.
Gratitude helps you bring more of what you love in to your life and let those things which you don’t want begin to fall away. As emotions go, it is a profound state to be in, especially when genuine and heartfelt. Although our perceptions may tell us differently, there is truly much in our lives to be grateful for, however, familiarity breeds contempt and often times we take for granted those things which truly nourish us. A consistent gratitude practice helps you avoid this tendency and stay in a positive, abundant mindset that helps the universe bring you even more reasons to be grateful. It is a ‘viscous cycle’ in a positive direction — bring you more of what you want instead of more of what you don’t want.
– Truth
Gratitude Is About the Future, Not the Past
By David DeSteno | Huffington Post
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When life’s got you down, gratitude can seem like a chore. Sure, you’ll go through the motions and say the right things — you’ll thank people for help they’ve provided or try to muster a sense of thanks that things aren’t worse. But you might not truly feel grateful in your heart. It can be like saying “I’m happy for you” to someone who just got the job you wanted. The words and the feelings often don’t match.
This disconnect is unfortunate, though. It comes from a somewhat misguided view that gratitude is all about looking backward — back to what has already been. But in reality, that’s not how gratitude truly works. At a psychological level, gratitude isn’t about passive reflection, it’s about building resilience. It’s not about being thankful for things that have already occurred and, thus, can’t be changed; it’s about ensuring the benefits of what comes next. It’s about making sure that tomorrow, and the day after, you will have something to be grateful for.
One of the central findings to emerge from psychological science over the past decade is that certain emotions serve socially adaptive functions. When we experience emotions like compassion, admiration, and shame, they drive us to alter our behaviors toward others. As Adam Smith intuited long ago, these innate feelings, or moral sentiments, impel us to act in ways that benefit our fellow humans — to engage with them in behaviors that foster the common good. And in the case of gratitude, the evidence couldn’t be clearer. In the face of loss, tragedy, or disaster, few psychological mechanisms can do more to benefit an individual’s or a society’s ability to thrive.
Much research, including from my own lab, confirms that gratitude toward someone for past assistance increases the odds that we’ll return the favor and help a benefactor in need. That’s fine, but in the case of many types of challenges, pairing previous benefactors and recipients isn’t an easy or efficient process. There are lots of people — those dealing with the flooding in Colorado or those struggling to put food on their tables, for example — that need help immediately. What is required for people and societies to recover rapidly, then, are mechanisms that make people help others they don’t know well — mechanisms that push people to pay it forward to strangers.
This is where the power of gratitude really resides. Its benefits come from an ability to create cooperation and support out of thin air. In my lab, we’ve shown this using a simple framework. We stage events where individuals experience a problem and then have someone come to their aid just when it looked as if all hope were lost. The result? Lots of gratitude toward the fixer. But that’s not the interesting part. It’s what happens next that is the surprise. When these newly-grateful souls subsequently run into strangers who ask for help, they not only more readily agree to aid them than do individuals who weren’t feeling grateful, but also expend a lot more effort in the act of helping itself. The more gratitude people feel, the more likely it is they’ll help anyone, even if it’s someone they’ve never laid eyes on before.
These benefits aren’t limited to direct face-to-face encounters. Given the option, grateful people will make financial decisions that “lift all boats” even when offered options to increase their own profit at another’s expense. In these times, where the click of a button can move funds to anywhere in the world where they’re needed, gratitude-induced giving can have a powerful effect.
Such occurrences of indirect reciprocity — the extending of help to new people — is known to kick cooperation in a group into high gear. In the face of individual or societal tragedies, then, any phenomenon that can enhance such indiscriminate paying-it-forward stands as a key to resilience.
So next time you have the opportunity to say “thank you,” don’t let it ring hollow. Embrace the gratitude; feel it as deeply as you can, because in so doing, you’re actually increasing the odds that in the future we’ll all have more for which to be grateful. On the deepest, unconscious level, gratitude is really about being grateful for the actions that are yet to come.
