I wrote a few months ago about my experience starting an intentional practice of gratitude, and I thought I’d take a moment to revisit the practice and report back on how it’s going.
First, a reminder of the quote from Brené Brown’s Atlas of the Heart that brought the whole idea to the forefront for me:
There’s research that shows that gratitude is correlated with better sleep, increased creativity, decreased entitlement, decreased hostility and aggression, increased decision-making skills, decreased blood pressure—the list goes on.
Does that sound good to you? Sure sounds good to me—that’s why I started the practice in the first place! So, I hear you asking, “How’s it going, Brendon?”
Well, the honest answer is that it’s hard to tell.
I can say that I’ve been good about maintaining the daily practice. As of the day I’m publishing this, according to my habit tracker, it’s been 334 consecutive days that I’ve been practicing. Every one of those days, I’ve spent just a moment every morning focusing on something that I’m grateful for.
Have all of those been deep and perfectly focused moments? Of course not. I’m a human being practicing a new way of adjusting my mindset, and so of course I’m doing it imperfectly. But, I have been spending at least a moment every morning thinking of something to be grateful for. On many of those mornings, I even manage to spend some time not just thinking of the thing, but also feeling the gratitude for that thing. Sometimes, I even immerse myself completely in that gratitude for a minute.
Now, the moment that I spend feeling the gratitude (or even just thinking about the thing that I’m grateful for) obviously feels good. It’s satisfying, and there have definitely been mornings where the practice has turned my attitude away from some bit of anger or resentment or frustration or malaise. But, has it significantly changed my attitude outside of that moment? As I said earlier, I t’s hard to tell.
One of the reasons it’s hard to tell is that I haven’t been collecting data. I think my attitude has been better (and, honestly, maybe that’s all that matters), but I know that it’s easy to practice self-deception around that sort of thing. If I had a year of emotional state data both before and after I started doing the practice, I’d feel more comfortable about saying that it was definitely having a positive effect.1
It’s also hard to tell because this, being my actual life, is not a controlled experiment. I’ve been continuing to live my life. Winter has ended and started again (as much as we have winter in Southern California). I’ve taken up new practices of mindfulness in addition to the daily gratitude practice. All of those things have certainly had impacts on how I feel on a daily basis.
There’s a problem in some forms of AI called the Credit Assignment Problem (geeky discussion here) which basically says that if you have a whole sequence of actions followed by an outcome, it’s difficult to figure out which actions were most responsible for the outcome, and which ones were basically irrelevant. It’s not just a problem in AI; this can be a real problem in our lives as well, and it makes it hard for me to definitively say how much effect the gratitude practice has had.
Having said that, even though I can’t definitively say how much of a result I’m getting from it, I certainly intend to continue it. Why? On the one hand, because it almost certainly is not having a bad effect, and it takes literally less than a minute each day. On the other hand, there are a few things I can point to:
I can say that it seems to have become easier to find things that I’m grateful for, even when challenging circumstances are in my life. Even when I’m not living up to my own expectations. Even when other people are angry or disappointed with me. Even when the world is not arranging itself as I think it ought. Even when other people aren’t showing up in my life the way I wish they would, or when I’m not showing up in my life the way I wish I would.
It’s also become easier to notice when other people are expressing gratitude, even when they’re not using that word. By focusing my own mindset on gratitude, I’ve become more attuned to gratitude in others.
I’ll keep practicing, and keep observing. Maybe in another year or so I’ll have some more concrete things to report. In the meantime, if the results that Brené Brown mentioned (that I quoted at the beginning) sound good to you, maybe think about trying it yourself, and you can report back to me. Just spend a moment every day (preferably in the morning) focusing on one thing that you’re grateful for, and let me know how it goes!
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- Yes, I’m a geek. Sue me. 😊 ↩