Gratitude is Insufferable—and it Works
How I become a reluctant advocate for doing the goddamn gratitude journal
I never thought I would have a daily gratitude journal. I despised the idea on principle.
To me, gratitude always felt like the minimization of one's suffering. Telling someone who is in immense pain to be grateful they aren't in Palestine, or Ukraine, or Sudan or some other global conflict feels like an unwillingness to sit in someone's difficulty with them. Another way to say, “our relationship is only valuable when it's pleasant for me.”
Be grateful you have food on the table and a roof over your head, another way to say, “Who are you to be sad? What right do you have to suffer?”
Most often I think, these are things we say to ourselves, and so when we hear other people repeat them it burrows deeper. The lie that we have no right to our own pain is an infection that scurries deep into already open wounds, causing them to ooze and spread. We band-aid over the wound until the infection impairs our functioning so much that it demands our attention.
Gratitude, I thought, doesn't fix anything, even when it is well-meaning. I couldn't see how if I was suffering, having gratitude would fix that which was causing the suffering.
I was wrong. Gratitude is not a band-aid, but a neurological shift necessary, especially for the depressed person.
Shortly after I began therapy, my therapist asked me to do a gratitude journal and, while I thought it was complete bullshit, I complied because I promised myself I would give therapy a real shot, and that meant trusting my therapist and giving his assignments a genuine try. So, every day I wrote down three things I was grateful for that day, why they happened, why it was meaningful to me, and how I could do more of it. Now, ending my day with my gratitude journal and a 20-minute meditation is a non-negotiable for me.
If, like me, you need science to justify to yourself you haven't gone off some hippy-dippy toxic positivity deep end, here it is: Humans have a built-in negativity bias. The bias makes sense in the context of evolution because if you see something that looks vaguely like a predator, it's always beneficial for survival to assume it is a predator out to get you. Similarly, if you eat a delicious berry, it is less important for you to remember that than to remember which berry made you violently ill. This negativity bias is more pronounced in depressed people. Studies have shown that depressed people are more likely to see a neutral facial expression as negative and interpret neutral statements as negative. In this way, depression is cyclical. While a non-depressed person may have two positive interactions, two neutral, and two negative, a depressed person would likely feel they had two positive or neutral interactions, and four negative interactions. In other words, because you are depressed, you create a reality in which you have more reason to be depressed (note: negativity bias is also more pronounced in those who have had depressive episodes in the past, even once recovered, than those who have not been depressed).
Gratitude is a two-fold solution. The first, is that it offsets the negativity bias, rather than putting on rose-colored glasses, it's actually bringing us closer to viewing things accurately (again, especially for the depressed). The second, is that it actually does help us solve problems. We pay far too much attention to what is going wrong in our lives and too little to what is going right, what is working well. Understanding both what is going well and what isn't, not only gives a more holistic view of what to prioritize, but it also helps us understand that doing more of what is working is fixing the problem.
I'm not advocating that people do not fix deficits they need to address, quite the opposite. Gratitude and understanding how we can do more of what is working can help us address those difficulties that cannot be fixed, like grief. And when difficulties can be fixed, they can often take an extended amount of time and energy, and gratitude enables us to not burn out as we put effort toward improving ourselves. Let's look at an example for this one. I have always had a hard time making friends and finding community. In my Freshman year of college, I forced myself to go to every university event hoping to make friends, even if I didn't want to be there. I'd been told that if I couldn't make friends, I should learn to enjoy solitude, so I went to restaurants, and concerts, and movies alone, but that didn't address the problem—what I wanted was companionship. Eventually, I burned out. I stopped going to events I didn't want to be at because I had been unsuccessfully trying to make friends for a year, and I retreated to my room because I didn't have the energy to do much else. When I turned to gratitude practice, I began, once again, doing things socially that I was a bit uncomfortable with. This time, it was getting easier instead of harder because every time I called a friend or had fun at an event, I wrote it down in my journal, reinforcing the reward circuitry in my brain. Burnout comes from working hard at something and not seeing any of that effort reflected in the results, but by reinforcing the rewards we do get, no matter how small, we protect against burnout.
The narratives of our lives, all our experiences, even those that feel objective, are filtered through our lens, which much of the time we aren't even aware of. Through things like therapy and meditation, we can become aware of that lens and our ability to shape it through building habits like gratitude. Gratitude never felt like a “fix” for all that was causing me pain because it wasn't a “fix” in the traditional sense. I didn't have enough distance to see the lens, I only saw the problem and potential answers to the problem. Gratitude, instead, is a change of the lens through which we approach problems, it is a transformational neurological shift from which everything else feels marginally more possible.
Brilliant piece: I still rally against doing a gratitude journal each day (might push myself to recount #3goodthings before bedtime 😂) even tho my superpower is finding the positives in everything - according to my psychotherapist! But love the science’y stuff and think I’m going to have to dust off my journal and get cracking …
This is a great piece! I never considered how the gratitude journal or list corrects for our negativity bias. Also: a friend of mine taught me the practice of keeping a gratitude list right next to desire lists. In my experience, writing both keeps me feeling showered in blessings but also with a spirit of fiery motivation.