Reflecting on things that you’re grateful for can often feel like the type of mindfulness activity best saved for someday down the road, after you’ve achieved your dream life of luxury. Maybe you’ll schedule time for it once you’re soaking in an infinity pool overlooking the beach — or even just once this global pandemic is finally behind us.

But to hear therapist Seth Shugar tell it, practicing gratitude can yield an especially big payoff during moments of our lives when the things that we have to be grateful for seem the least obvious. Including, yes, moments like right now. “I have a couple of gratitude heroes, one of whom is the French Renaissance philosopher Michel de Montaigne,” he says. “He was suffering from these excruciating, inoperable kidney stones. Yet there he is in his final essay ‘Of Experience,’ practicing deep, sustained savouring of everything there was to enjoy in life.”

Montaigne isn’t alone in finding comfort in the practice of gratitude during times of adversity. A 2013 study published in the Journal of Health Psychology observed that patients with chronic pain who reported high levels of gratitude also reported lower levels of depression, while a 2016 study in Health Psychology identified similar findings in patients coping with arthritis and inflammatory bowel disease. Granted, gratitude’s benefits are not just felt by people experiencing physical ailments either — the 2012 study “Gratitude and depressive symptoms: the role of positive reframing and positive emotion” found consistent, sustained positive thoughts corresponding to less negative mood states.

For further evidence, Shugar points to University of California professor Robert Emmons, who really kick-started the positive psychology field’s research into the far-reaching benefits of gratitude. After prompting one group to spend 10 weeks partaking in regular gratitude journaling, another group to spend the same period journaling about things that irritated them, and a third group to recap their life events more generally, he observed the first group reporting not only higher optimism, but also more exercise and fewer trips to the doctor.

With all of that in mind, we enlisted Shugar — a Registered Clinical Counsellor, Marital and Family Therapist, and Board Certified Life Coach who regularly turns to gratitude exercises in his practice — to share some advice about how to get started with this powerful therapy tool. Here are our five biggest takeaways from our conversation.

1. Recognize the importance of blending the negative with the positive: “I think that one of the biggest impediments to practicing gratitude is that we often think of it as ignoring the difficulties or losses or injustices of life, when it doesn’t need to,” says Shugar. Instead, he reiterates that he actually tends to introduce gratitude most often when one of his patients is facing adversity. “I do it with a great deal of care, because it can seem really invalidating, but it’s also a real resource, psychologically.” (Just ask Montaigne, or any of the participants from those studies above.) “Anecdotally, I do see benefits immediately. If I were to graph it out, I feel like there’s a spike early on,” Shugar says. “There’s more enthusiasm, and a brightness in the eyes. When we’re noticing the sweetness of life, and the beautiful things about it, I think that naturally brings vitality.”
2. Schedule dedicated time to reflect on things that you’re grateful for: Gratitude might seem like something that we should feel naturally, but it’s actually an emotion that benefits from clear prompts and a structured reflection process. Shugar points to the psychologist Dr. Rick Hanson, who has popularized research on the negativity bias — the mind’s natural predisposition to tilt toward whatever is worrisome, threatening, or dangerous. “There’s been a lot of research on the default mode network, and how an overwhelming percentage of our natural thoughts are negative,” he says. “Doing random thought checking on people, only 10 or 15 percent of their thoughts were positive. So we really do have to train the mind, to get it to notice what there is to be grateful for.” Establishing a regular ritual helps to ensure this becomes a steady, consistent practice.

3. Sustain your feelings of gratitude by really zooming in on specific details: Gratitude journals have gained a passionate following, and Shugar feels that they’re a great way to get started with this practice, because they do train the mind to notice all of the things that might be in our blind spots. “But it’s important to really savour as well,” he says. “Not just to write down three things that you’re grateful for at the end of each day, but to notice how they leave you feeling, and to then soak in those sensations. There’s nuance in the research on gratitude journals, saying that it’s the precision of the detail — rather than just being grateful for our dog, being grateful for the way that it wags its tail when we come to the door, for example — that helps something to stay in the mind better.”

   Further to this point, Shugar returns to the wisdom of Dr. Hanson, who describes the mind as being “like Velcro for negative experiences, and like Teflon for positive ones.” Specifically, it takes truly savouring a thought — holding it in your awareness for somewhere between 5 to 30 seconds — to effectively encode a positive experience in our neural network and build a strong emotional stimulus.

4. Reflect on who has contributed to the things that you’re grateful for: Shugar pinpoints entitlement as another key hurdle that prevents people from adopting this practice successfully. “It’s closely related to taking things for granted, and to a strain of rugged individualism — I have what I have because I worked for it, and I don’t really owe it to anybody else,” he says. Writing mental thank you notes creates an opportunity to overcome these traps and pay tribute to the people who are directly or indirectly responsible for your experiences. “We can’t be grateful to someone without strengthening our sense of social connection, which then decreases loneliness,” Shugar says. He recommends a book, Thanks a Thousand: A Gratitude Journey by A.J. Jacobs, that encourages readers to spend their morning coffee break reflecting on the thousand-odd people who may have contributed to their grande soy Americano misto.

   And while Shugar notes that reflecting on things as being “gifts” has been demonstrated to help people adopt this practice more meaningfully, he also acknowledges that this language can feel explicitly religious. That said, it doesn’t need to. “A gift can be gifted by nature, by evolution, or by our ancestors.”

5. Know that you’re part of a long tradition with proven results: Robert Emmons and his research may have popularized gratitude within the field of psychology — and #blessed may have popularized it on social media — but Shugar points out that it’s actually been practiced in all of the world’s traditions since the beginning of time. “In ancient Greece, we had thinkers like Plutarch, who wrote this lovely letter to his wife after their daughter had died,” he says. “It was saying, of course there are dark and disturbing sides of life, and here we are in the midst of one, but also inviting her to notice the four children who had survived, and their beautiful home. He was preventing both of them from going too far into the grief.”

   The practice of gratitude has since gone on to earn many other enthusiastic endorsements throughout the ages. “I work out of the Buddist tradition a lot as well, and in the Book of Joy, the Dalai Lamai and Desmond Tutu identify gratitude as one of the three things most conducive to a happy life,” Shugar notes. “It’s there in all of the Judeo-Christian religions too. It’s really part of the human lineage. And now to see the science about it as well, it’s beyond dispute that it’s incredibly helpful.”

Looking to improve your ability to practice gratitude and want to speak with a professional counsellor? Inkblot therapists are here to support you. Reach out to our qualified therapists for an appointment today.