Coming off of Thanksgiving and being in full swing with the holiday season, I thought this was a great opportunity to discuss the importance of gratitude. There is a lot going on and this is supposed to be the merriest time of the year. But why is it so hard to be merry sometimes? Why do we tend to dwell on the negative? Can we train ourselves to be more jolly? Moreover, does it actually impact our quality of life?
While these questions may seem simple and insubstantial, the science increasingly points to how crucial and beneficial gratitude is for our well-being.
First, let’s explore why we tend to be predisposed to negativity.
Always on the Lookout
Evolutionarily, humans are wired to look for the worst case scenario. Since the caveman days when we were discovering the world and simultaneously trying to figure out how to survive, we had to be very sensitive to potential threats. We didn’t know what we didn’t know back then. We didn’t know if a Saber Tooth Tiger was a furry friend or a foe. Only after many of our ancestors were killed by Saber Tooth Tigers, our bodies began recognizing the pattern and thus began programming the tiger, and other similar animals like lions or bears, as a likely threat.
As a protection mechanism, we had to evolve to have an awareness and alertness for anything that threatened our survival. Since it is our body’s mission to survive and protect us, we began to assume that everything threatened our survival. By assuming the worst, our body believes it is better prepared to handle any threat we encounter regardless of severity. This adaptation is still ingrained in us today, hence, our negativity bias.
Scientists have a fairly solid understanding of our evolution and they’ve begun to study how we can continue to advance. Part of this advancement includes how we can work to overwrite our negativity bias and how that improves our wellness which we’ll discuss later. But first, we should go over how our negativity bias can affect our health and wellness.
How Our Negativity Bias Negatively Impacts Our Health and Wellness
Our negativity bias was used to keep us safe because it kept us alert to more quickly trigger our stress response (scientifically this theory is known as General Adapataion Syndrome). When our body senses a threat we go into what is more commonly referred to as “fight/fligh/freeze” mode in order for us to prepare to take on whatever is threatening our survival.
In General Adapataion Syndrome, a series of physiological events occur: our heart rate increases, our blood pressure increases, and our blood is diverted from processes like digestion to other areas of our body that can better fight off the foe or flee from the scene.
In a true moment of stress, these responses are in fact critical, helpful, and life saving. However, over an extended amount of time, staying in this stressed out state will begin to damage our body and our well being. The chronic stress turns into inflammation, chronically elevated blood pressure, interrupted digestive patterns…it can even begin to interrupt our sleep patterns if we’re perpetually wound up.
It is imperative to calm ourselves down. Allow our bodies to rest and be at peace. Typically, after a stressful incident our body will naturally bring itself back down to a peaceful state. However, if the body keeps perceiving constant stress, the body will fight between that stress response and that peace response.
In today’s world, since we all seem to be inundated and perpetually stressed, it’s crucial that we work to bring our body back to a peaceful, homeostatic state. Which leads us to how gratitude can help us get there.
The Science of Gratitude
There are countless studies and articles regarding the Science of Gratitude. I pulled a few examples, there’s one from Forbes, an entire Whitepaper from UC Berkley, How Gratitude Changes Your Brain from UC Berkley, an article from UCLA, the highly renowned neuroscientist Andrew Huberman has a video on it, Intelligent Change (which is the company of the 5 Minute Journal I use that helped me develop my gratitude practice) and there’s many more to be found.
Research consistently suggests that by intentionally practicing seeking gratitude we can train ourselves to not automatically go to a negativity bias. Not only can we train ourselves to not automatically default to negativity, but we can improve multiple factors of our health by training ourselves to seek gratitude. We can improve our mood, mindset, even physical factors like reducing stress, which has led to lower inflammation, improved sleep, and reduced risk of heart disease.
As Small As It May Seem, Start Being More Intentional with Practicing Gratitude
Though we need to continue exploring the Science of Gratitude, so far we only see upside and benefits, no downside. We need some exposure to stress in order to grow and develop. However, we don’t want chronic exposure to stress. Stress today looks different than it did for our primal ancestors. Even though a phone notification or comment on social media doesn’t seemingly compare to the threat of that Saber Tooth Tiger, we currently believe that our bodies only have one stress response By redirecting our mind to positive thoughts and intentionally seeking gratitude, we can begin to negate that stress response that may occur when we ruminate in stress.
The TL;DR is we don’t want to be chronically in a stress response and if we can train ourselves to not default to our negativity bias we can improve our health and wellness outcomes. Meaning, we not only will be more naturally grateful and positive, but also less inflamed, prone to better sleep, and less at risk for disease.