If you know me, you know I’m a gratitude hound. For years, I ran the gratitude dojo, a two-hour gathering of people who want to practice gratitude together (reach out if you want to do one in your workplace or community!). During the pandemic, I made the gratitude dojo a twelve-day practice sent to you by email. Finally, my buddy Drew and I created The Appreciation Effect, an email platform where recipients receive a daily feed of gratitude and recognition from their friends and family. So, yeah, I’ve thought a lot about gratitude. It’s my root practice.
The latest research on gratitude is surprising
Andrew Huberman is a neurobiology professor at Stanford Medical School who has the popular podcast Huberman Lab. I listened to an episode this week which summarizes the latest scientific research on gratitude.
Here’s a quick summary:
Having an effective gratitude practice can impact a huge number of health variables in both mental health and physical health:
increased cardiovascular health
increased relational health
increased physical and cognitive performance
increased joy, meaning, and motivation
more resilience to prior trauma, but also inoculation to future trauma
benefits to social relationships, not only about that person, but also also across the board
Prosocial circuits in our brain are designed to bring us close to other things, including ourselves. Prosocial circuits are triggered by gratitude more quickly than any other mindfulness practice. After a week of setting it up, you can trigger it in only a minute.1
Having an effective gratitude practice not only activate pro-social circuits on your brain, but healthy circuits in your heart and lungs, which will shift your physiology to relaxation, awe, and joy.
Gratitude disrupts “defensive circuits” of fear, resentment, and anxiety.
Gratitude reduces anti-inflammatory markers in the body and increases heart-brain coordination.
The surprising finding is that an effective gratitude practice is not being grateful or making daily gratitude lists but receiving and accepting (or experiencing2) other people’s gratitude. Repeating a story about receiving gratitude shifts your brain and body’s neural circuitry more potently than being grateful.
A gratitude practice is easier to enact than other mindfulness practices. Interventions can be as short as 1 to 5 minutes long, three times a week.
Participating in grace
Wow. I find this so interesting. I have a daily gratitude practice.3 But according Professor' Huberman’s research summary gives me something surprising and different: instead of being grateful, perhaps accepting gratitude should be the experience I’m committing to having. Following last week’s lessons about Franciscan theology, maybe the point isn’t being grateful for God’s extravagant love manifesting as the world around you, but understanding and accepting that you yourself are a manifestation of God’s extravagant love for the world.
If Franciscan theology is right, you are an act of God’s love. It’s, as the Zen Buddhists say, your Original Face, your primal identity of who you are, even before your parents were born.
Can you really accept that about yourself?4
If you understood yourself as an Act of Love, and that people were grateful for you, what would be different? What would you need? What would you have to buy? All that ceaseless striving, all that endless trying.
Franciscan mystic Richard Rohr says that the real question in the world isn’t why people are evil, but rather, the inexplicable: why are people good?
We have spent centuries of philosophy trying to solve “the problem of evil,” yet I believe the much more confounding and astounding issue is “the problem of good.” Sometimes I look at people and wonder: “Why are you so good? Why do you forgive?” How do we account for so much gratuitous and sheer goodness in this world? Tackling this problem would achieve much better results. - Richard Rohr
I think accepting that you are good, without having to do anything, is the hardest thing. As I wrote last week, accepting that I am loved is harder than giving love. But if grace is all around us5, we are part of it too. We are already participating in it. And all we have to do is recognize it, re-cognize ourselves (to see ourselves anew), as our original being.
It’s then we see that we have always been God’s grace for others, for our parents, for our children, for our family, and for our friends. In the work that we do, in the way we treat the homeless person on the street, in how we spend our money.
Who is grateful for you?
EXERCISE: Take out a notepad. Remember a time someone said they were grateful for you. Visualize it. Write down the details of what they said about why they were grateful for you. Write down your own emotional response when receiving their feedback.
Keep this story and read it once a day for a week. Commit to memory 2-3 key points.6 Do you find this hard to do? Good. According to Professor Huberman’s research, this is the most powerful way to practice gratitude.
Of course, the bad-assed way to do it would be to create an Appreciation Campaign for yourself. That way you’ll be appreciated for days on end.7
Giving gratitude and the Divine Exchange
So if receiving love and gratitude is a more beneficial practice than being grateful, what’s the role of giving love and gratitude to others? Well, in giving gratitude, you are giving the benefits of gratitude to others. (Of course they have to accept it. Some tips here: just breathe it in) You’re creating a culture of gratitude.
Even if you don't believe in any of this spiritual stuff, the gratitude exchange is the basis of all healthy relationships. You can feel in a healthy intimacy. Or when you’re in healthy workplace. It’s evident whenever you’re in a healthy community8. When you offer gratitude, it comes back. Everyone is participating in grace, as I wrote about before in the parable of the long spoons. You can’t give grace to yourself. You can only offer it to others and receive it when they give it to you. As four lads from Liverpool once said:
The hardest thing is accepting our inherent goodness. Robin Wall Kimmerer writes in Braiding Sweetgrass asking her college students how humans benefit the ecology, and none of them have an answer. Importantly, she says, not being able to see our goodness means we can’t see our place in the world, as part of it all. That sense of separation is the root of our ecological problems. Trying to do “less harm” doesn’t cut it. We need to find our own goodness in the world.
If the Franciscans and Robin Wall Kimmerer are right, we have always belonged, from the beginning. We have a place in this world, in the family of things.9 When we realize we’re part of the Divine Exchange, all our ceaseless striving for love, status, and attention can end. If that happens, if we can simply be, and understand we are loved, things will change. For us. For the world.
This holiday season, spend time with those who love you. It’s the simpliest, and best thing. Gratitious shot of Wu Wei, wonder dog. Happy Thanksgiving!
Postscript
Let me know if you want gratitude dojo in your workplace or community. Or get the gratitude just for yourself as a twelve-day practice sent by email. Finally, start a Appreciation Effect campaign, for yourself, or for someone you love. All this shit is free. You know, grace.
Gratitude is most effective grounded in a story. Then you can have the short-hand version after. Once a narrative has been set, just remembering the bullet points is enough to trigger the prosocial circuitry.
Also very suprising: If you can’t sit around waiting for people to be grateful to you, watching other people being grateful to others works as well.
My two mantras: this is God’s love, and When you see with the eyes of love, you see with the eyes of God.
For it will a lifetime of learning to love, learning to be loved.
Sister Mary Jo says we are drenched in it.
According to Professor Huberman, story telling is built into the brain. Neural gratitude circuits light up when we hear stories about receiving gratitude, ourselves or others. Only a minute a few times a week to retell yourself the gratitude story delivers the benefits. No need to recall every detail - the highlights are enough to spark the system. The more often you repeat the story, the more quickly your brain drops into the gratitude prosocial circuitry
Thank you for everyone who wrote in my appreciation campaign! I have 93 days of appreciation notes coming to me! I am grateful. :)
The best place I’ve seen that is at my friend Terces’s Be Love Farm.
Thanks, Mary Oliver! (wild geese)