Finding strength through gratitude and positive thinking

So far 2022 hasn’t been a year of wonderful for most people. Even if everything has gone pretty well in your personal life, there’s still COVID and Ukraine, and the deaths of so many beloved celebrities (which is sad and also a reminder that we all are aging).

After two years of pandemic and assorted other depressing developments, how do we continue to find the motivation to wake up every day and brush our hair and go meet the world (even if it’s only on Zoom)?

One answer comes unexpectedly from a coaching course I’ve been doing. The program insists that every morning you wake up and think of at least a few things for which you’re grateful.

At first I felt like that was a giant eye roll but before long I began to find I was looking forward to my morning gratitude. It was a relief from the alternative of waking up and immediately becoming anxious about the hurdles ahead.

It turns out that there is some science behind this idea of gratitude.

On the simplest level, you obviously can’t Think Positive and Think Negative at the same time. You can only do one at a time. Make your choice.

On a more profound science level, Alex Korb is a neuroscientist who specializes in mental health and is a professor at UCLA. He wrote in his book “Upward Spiral” that you train your brain to look for particular types of information.

If you wake up in the morning and think, “ugh,” and then continue to think, “ugh,” throughout the day,  you are training your brain to seek information that reinforces your sense of “ugh.”

Studies have been done (by smart people who like to remain in the Ugh state, apparently) that claim that you can find ways to improve your outlook but that we all have a baseline mood. You can make yourself happy for a while (or you can make yourself sad, presumably) but in time you will revert to your natural baseline state, whatever that is.

A study with a different outcome was done in 2005 at the University of Pennsylvania by a team led by Dr. Martin Seligman, a founder of the Positive Psychology movement.

Seligman is also an expert on, among other things, resilience — something that we  all need as we enter our third year of hard times.

The Seligman team did studies in which they assigned six positive thinking tasks to people who were mildly depressed, and then tested them for six months after to see if there were any lasting effects.

Four of the tasks had only short-term effects. But two seemed to bring a lasting change in mental state: “Our results suggest that lasting increased happiness might be possible even outside fairy tales.”

One of the key elements was that the tasks had to be fun and easy to do; the two most effective tasks were ones that people enjoyed enough that they continued to do them after the study ended.

Those two exercises:

• “Three good things in life.

“Participants were asked to write down three things that went well each day and their causes every night for one week. In addition, they were asked to provide a causal explanation for each good thing.”

• “Using signature strengths in a new way.

“Participants were asked to take an inventory of character strengths and receive individualized feedback about their top five (“signature”) strengths…. They were then asked to use one of these top strengths in a new and different way every day for one week.”

There are a number of other “gratitude” exercises that you can find online, from sources including Harvard Health. But these two exercises seem to be ones that have a lasting impact.

At the conclusion of their study, the Seligman team summed up by saying that modern psychotherapy always focuses on the negative (how to be less anxious, less depressed, less angry).

Perhaps, the team suggested, psychotherapy in the future will ask patients to also focus on the positive, things they like about themselves, things for which they are grateful.