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Making Gratitude Stick
3 Tips for Everyday Practice
We’ve all heard how important gratitude is in living a joyful and effective life. Gratitude lifts your spirits, keeps you focused on what you do have rather than what you don’t have, and helps you actively engage with the people and circumstances around you. Even the ancient Stoics recognized the benefits of gratitude. For example, Seneca said:
We should make every effort to show all the gratitude we can. For the good in it is our own. After all, gratitude is not justice (as is commonly believed), for justice pertains to others, but much of the good in gratitude returns to oneself.
And Epictetus reminded his followers:
Don't be ungrateful, but offer up thanks to God for sight and hearing, and by Zeus, for life itself and all that supports it, for dried fruits, for wine, for olive oil, remembering all the same that he has given you something better than all these, the faculty that makes use of them, that tests them out, that passes judgment on the value of each.
In theory, practicing gratitude isn’t difficult—you simply make a conscious effort to intentionally appreciate one or more things in your life. But it can be hard to carry an attitude of gratitude with you throughout the day. It’s very easy to get sidetracked and slip into negative mental habits of complaining or taking things for granted. So how can we keep a grateful heart and mind, even when we don’t feel like it?
Focus on one thing at a time.
Being grateful for everything in your life, all at once, is a tall order. Rather than trying to blanket the world in gratitude—which is probably not going to work right away—choose one category of things to devote your attention to. For example, you could choose to focus specifically on things that take care of your body (food, water, air, clothes, shower, etc.) or on people you see every day (spouse, bus driver, cashier, etc.). Make a habit of mentally thanking those people or things every time you come into contact with them. Once this habit is firmly in your mind, choose a different category to practice gratitude for.
Think of gratitude as a habit, not a feeling.
Ideally, we would always be able to align a feeling of gratitude with our intellectual understanding of gratitude. But this ideal takes a lot of practice to achieve, and we can’t simply will an emotion into existence. So sometimes it’s more helpful to simply practice being grateful without expecting a feeling of bliss to settle over you immediately. You are still resetting your mind and reframing your experience just by intentionally finding things to be grateful for. If you practice regularly, over the long term this effort will certainly have an impact on your emotional state. But in the short term, don’t rely on your emotions to always be your guide.
Try a different angle.
Many of us end up feeling ungrateful because we imagine all the ways things could be different or better—and then we get upset because they don’t live up to our expectations. But there is another way of thinking about it. People and situations could always be a lot worse! It’s often helpful to remind ourselves that things are actually not as bad as they could be. Epictetus demonstrates how this works in the following passage:
What room is left for contention, then, if someone is in this state of mind? For is he surprised by anything that comes about? Does anything seem extraordinary to him? Doesn't he expect to receive worse and harsher treatment from the wicked man than in fact comes about? Doesn't he count it a gain when anything that they do falls short of the worst? 'That man abused you.' I'm most grateful that he didn't hit me. 'But he has gone on to hit you.' I'm most grateful that he hasn't killed me. For when did he ever learn, and from whom, that man is a sociable creature who loves his neighbors, and that injustice is of itself a great harm to the one who inflicts it?
Instead of mentally deducting points for anything less than perfection, why don’t we mentally add points to everything that’s better than the worst? You’ll find that life always exceeds your expectations, and you’ll see reasons to celebrate everywhere.
As always, we hope you found this brief wellbeing guide beneficial. Wishing you wisdom and peace, from all of us at Stoicare!
