The answer is “often but not always.” Imagining what you should be grateful for and focusing on it can, indeed, help you feel happier. But this technique works best if you understand the science behind it.
To me, experiencing gratitude is just one example of what we therapists call cognitive restructuring: a lofty term for changing the way you feel by changing your self-talk. Here are some examples of it:
• When you change “my life sucks” to “I have a lot to be thankful for.”
• Same with changing “I can’t deal with my control-freak boss” to “My boss is detail-oriented, and here is how I should manage my relationship with her.”
• Ditto with changing “I hate those Republicans/Democrats/Millennials/whatever” to “I don’t see the world the same way as them, but I try to understand why they feel that way.”
In each of these cases, simply changing your internal language helps you feel better and more in control.
What happens clinically when you practice gratitude is that you are performing a form of cognitive restructuring known as scaling: in other words, you compare your life favorably to your own previous perceptions or other people’s lives. When I was growing up, for example, a popular slogan was, “I cried because I had no shoes – and then I met a man who had no feet.”
However, for gratitude to really make you happier, you have to believe both sides of this equation: first, that you are better off than you thought, and second and more importantly, that you can make peace with the state you are actually in. In other words, you honestly perceive that your life is better than you were seeing it before.
Unfortunately, some people find it very hard to do this. Take a trauma survivor, for example: her emotional pain and sensitivity may loom very large for her, and realizing that she has things to be thankful for – like food, a roof over her head, or even a partner – may not change the how bad her current reality feels.
This is where the deeper principles of cognitive restructuring come in. A trauma survivor may not be able to feel gratitude, but she probably can change her narrative from “I suffer from trauma and life is terrible” to “I suffer from trauma, so here are tools that I could use to feel at least a little better in this moment, and here are goals I could strive towards in small steps.” This kind of narrative-changing uses exactly the same clinical principle as gratitude, but often works much more powerfully. Especially when you keep practicing it over time.
So should you try to practice gratitude in daily life? Absolutely! I personally do it every day: often I will reflect on how in this moment I am warm, safe, dry, well-fed (admittedly too well-fed sometimes), and wake up every morning with someone I love. But a good therapist would never shame someone when gratitude doesn’t help. More important, its underlying principles truly can help anyone feel much better.
