On finding real gratitude.
Gratitude comes up a lot in the self improvement space. There seems to be this ubiquitous rose-coloured belief that it’s the path to success, backed up by a ton of business articles about how important it is. Oprah Winfrey herself even says she kept a gratitude journal religiously for a decade - and she’s pretty damn successful. So, of course, gratitude has become a valuable commodity. A quick search on google showed me pages upon pages of gratitude journals, card decks, meditations, self help books and notepads dedicated to achieving this coveted state. Instagram is plastered with gratitude prompts. 34.6 million people have tagged a post with #gratitude.
It seems it’s a big fucking deal.
But here’s the kicker: it only works if we’re being really, heartbreakingly truthful with ourselves - and in order to do THAT, we might have to quit trying to be such a good person.
Let me elaborate.
I’ve noticed that when we run into problems with gratitude, it’s typically expressed in a sentence like “I know I should feel grateful for how my business is doing because some people don’t have anything”. So when we sit in front of our gratitude lists we write, “I’m so grateful for the success I have experienced so far” or “I’m so grateful for the fact that all my bills are paid this month” or “I’m so grateful all my clients are happy”.
Even if we’re bare faced lying - and here’s the problem.
If we consistently tell ourselves we’re grateful for how well our business is doing, when actually what we feel is overworked and overwhelmed by the demands on our schedule, or jealous of everyone else’s success, faking that gratitude is only going to highlight and intensify the truth that we are in fact not grateful at all for how well our business is doing.
Ironically, what we actually end up achieving from our gratitude practice is a lack of gratitude, because the dissonance between the two realities is too jarring to go unnoticed. Like an “I love you” when you know they don’t really mean it; the hollowness of the words is resonant with absence, not presence.
So why do we lie to ourselves?
Morality is our metric to understand how much of a good person we are, which is important to know because good behaviour is valued in society, and bad behaviour means we’re outcast. It’s basically what we use to pay our subscription fee to all the benefits of a community and, as social creatures, that’s both a safer and more enjoyable option than being left alone.
So we want to be the ‘good person’ - even in a room alone, writing our own personal gratitude list, ironically because we ARE good people. We want to do the right thing - and we know what the ‘right’ things are to be grateful for - which would be helpful if gratitude was tied to success in an objective capacity.
Unfortunately it’s not; although the routine of gratitude may have some benefits it’s specifically the feeling of gratitude that has been proven to make a difference to our brain activity and therefore our behaviour. It is the sensation that creates change.
And interestingly, we can measure that brain activity as distinct and separate from guilt, i.e. doing something because we have to.
Emotion and physical sensation are subjective to our own personal experience. We don’t have emotions in a vacuum; how we respond is influenced by everything else in our lives up to that point: our personalities, our past experiences, and our current stressors. To simplify enormously, you might feel great about going to see a friend one week, but after a busy time at work and a tough day of negative self talk about how you really should be doing better in life, you feel the absolute opposite two weeks later. Nothing about your friendship is different, but the way your brain is interpreting the signals it receives from your internal landscape prompts it to fire up a different neural network. This neural network in turn signals various parts of your anatomy which we can FEEL changing. Perhaps your heart will beat faster at the thought of going, which we call anxiety. It is then the role of our conscious mind, or our intelligence, to interpret the meaning of what we feel in the body. We notice the feeling we recognise as anxiety, and then choose whether or not we want to go and meet our friend.
So there are two active skills involved in emotion: we need to get comfortable reading the changes in our anatomy and labelling them as accurately as we can, and we also need to get comfortable adapting our conscious behaviour around what these emotions are telling us.
Note: this doesn’t mean we fall victim to the whims of our emotions - we simply use them as another source of information to help us navigate the experience of life, alongside our intuition and our intellect.
And what does this tell us about the feeling of gratitude?
Simply: we can’t fake it.
Like joy, or love, or anger, we can’t just summon it from anywhere, and we can’t trap ourselves into feeling it; it has to be genuine. So when we tell ourselves how much we SHOULD feel grateful for our business, we only succeed in conjuring up guilt, not gratitude.
So how do we find REAL gratitude?
Start with getting to know what gratitude feels like. Pick something that you know, without a doubt, creates gratitude for you personally. It can be something as trivial as ‘when there’s no traffic on the way to work’ or something as important as a pregnancy, but it has to be something that creates a physical sensation of gratitude for you. When you’ve landed on something, hold that feeling. Try and expand on it. Notice the way that it feels in your chest, or drops down into your belly. Get to know what it feels like. Is it in your fingers, or does your face change? See if you can spread the sensation down your arms, or into your back. This isn’t exact, and if it doesn’t make sense to you don’t stress, but just see if you can get to understand it better. If you’re comfortable with words, maybe you write about what gratitude physically feels like. Let’s just get real close and snuggly with it.
Begin to notice and draw attention to when you feel that specific sensation without prompting it. This is the real purpose of a gratitude journal, but I think it gets twisted when we think of it as a list, a to-do, instead of just noticing it in the moment. So rather than trying to think of when you felt gratitude at the end of the day, just bring your awareness to that sensation whenever it appears. Notice what you were doing that created it, even if it’s something that you ‘shouldn’t’ feel grateful about - like some plans being cancelled. Try to remove the judgement from it, and just treat it as information. It’s just a news update from your internal systems.
If you’re struggling with noticing spontaneous gratitude, focus on the creation of it. Pick just one thing that happened in your day and focus on attaching the sensations of gratitude to it. Good, bad, or neutral; it doesn’t matter. It could be your morning cup of tea, or even a weed growing outside your window. Just focus on that thing, and then focus on the gentle spreading of gratitude throughout your body. Allow your nervous system to start getting used to experiencing it, without shutting it down.
Become aware of your language, and use it to hone your emotional translations. The word ‘should’ is a signpost towards guilt. Rather than judgement being the default option, start to get curious about why guilt is present, and what it’s tied to. I did English at uni, so I get it’s more natural for me than others to question linguistic choices, but this form of analysis can be helpful for creating distance between you and the emotion you’re experiencing. A few other signposts: “I need to”, “I wish I could”, “always/never” - these words are indicators of what we want or don’t want, beneath the conditioning that’s influencing our beliefs or behaviour.
If it feels good to write it down, enforce a ‘no lying’ policy - especially in your own notebooks. You have full permission to rip up or burn anything that you write down, but you absolutely cannot lie about your gratitude. If all you felt genuine gratitude for one day was the end of a meeting, or the taste of chocolate, then that’s what you write. It doesn’t matter if it’s ridiculous or selfish; it just matters that you’re truthful with yourself, because the real benefits of gratitude come when you feel it - not when you tell yourself you feel it.
If you question whether or not you’re allowed to do this, or if it makes you a bad person, I invite you to turn again to that sensation of gratitude. Cultivate it within your body. Feel its warmth and its goodness. Then I invite you to conjure the physical sensations associated with perfection (the ‘should’). For me, there’s a tightness and a racing quality in my chest, a bracing in my shoulders. A stiffness. Consider what it would be like to walk around with that sensation in your body, vs. the sensation of gratitude. How would the difference in your muscles alter the way you respond to situations? How would it affect your tolerance for other people? How would you feel at the end of the day? It’s interesting to consider how these subtle changes, sustained over a longer period of time, change our actions and therefore the impact we’re having on the world around us.
And isn’t that the real measure of how much of a ‘good person’ we are?
I would love to hear how this has shifted your understanding of a gratitude practice, or if you’ve (like me) ever been guilty of lying in your gratitude journal. Do you promise to stop now?!
I also have a really exciting update for anyone considering working with me: I have just started my official somatic coaching certificate with The Somatic School. It’s a fully ICF accredited program that I’ll be training in for the next six months, and will basically take my understanding of working with clients from a body-centred perspective (rather than just mind-centred) to the next level, which I am so excited for. I won’t be fully qualified until October, but if you’d like to take advantage of working with me while I train, I’d like to offer a reduced coaching rate of £150 a month - and in return you can be a guinea pig for my additional skills! Just get in touch if you’re ready to get started.