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Key points
- If you're wronged by someone, won't you inevitably feel resentment?
- Are emotions like resentment and gratitude a result of our hard wiring?
- Emotions such as resentment and gratitude have measureable effects on health.
We live in an age of grievance.
More and more people seem to be doing irritating things. And more and more people are responding by getting irritated and angry.
We’re all bumping up against each other. And we’re angry at everybody else for what they’re doing to us. It’s all their fault!
But is it?
Dr. Laurie Santos is a professor at Yale University who teaches a course that asks that very question. The title of the course is, “Psychology and the Good Life,” and it is the most popular course in the 300-year history of Yale University.
In dealing with the question of grievance, Santos points out that grievance isn’t an inevitable response to any particular event. Grievance is a choice. A bad choice.
Many of the typical situations we face are value-neutral. They are neither good nor bad, but can be viewed either way, depending on our mindset or predisposition. And we can often be nudged toward viewing things as good or bad by external influences and people.
Critical thinking is an important tool in assessing whether our attitudes are really ours or the result of some external influence. Apply the tools of critical thinking to your attitudes and responses. Are your responses to situations and people in alignment with your own deeply held values? Or are you being swayed by someone else’s opportunistic agenda? By what they want you to think?
Just as grievance is a choice, says Santos, so is it’s opposite, gratitude. She points out that one of the best things we can focus on, for our happiness and well-being, is gratitude for the good things in our life. Maybe even for something as simple as a good meal! The expression of gratitude and thankfulness is transformative, she insists.
Santos encourages her students to be thankful not only internally, in their thoughts and feelings, but also to actively thank people who have done something they’re grateful for. She encourages students to keep a gratitude journal. in which they make a daily record of all the things thay are grateful for.
At the UCLA Mindfulness Awareness Research Center, scientists are also exploring the role of gratitude in our physical well-being. Researchers have discovered that “having an attitude of gratitude changes the molecular structure of the brain, and keeps the gray matter functioning at a higher level.”
Because gratitude can have such an profound positive effect on your entire life, give thanks for gratitude!
As Meister Eckhart, a 13th century mystic, once wrote, "If the only prayer you said in your whole life was thank you, that would suffice.”
© David Evans
