New York Times Online
Findings: A Serving of Gratitude May Save the Day

The most psychologically correct holiday of the year is upon us.

Thanksgiving may be the holiday from hell for nutritionists, and it produces plenty of war stories for psychiatrists dealing with drunken family meltdowns. But it has recently become the favorite feast of psychologists studying the consequences of giving thanks. Cultivating an “attitude of gratitude” has been linked to better health, sounder sleep, less anxiety and depression, higher long-term satisfaction with life and kinder behavior toward others, including romantic partners. A new study shows that feeling grateful makes people less likely to turn aggressive when provoked, which helps explain why so many brothers-in-law survive Thanksgiving without serious injury.
But what if you’re not the grateful sort? I sought guidance from the psychologists who have made gratitude a hot research topic. Here’s their advice for getting into the holiday spirit – or at least getting through dinner Thursday:
Start with “gratitude lite.”That’s the term used by Robert A. Emmons, of the University of California, Davis, for the technique used in his pioneering experiments he conducted along with Michael E. McCullough of the University of Miami. They instructed people to keep a journal listing five things for which they felt grateful, like a friend’s generosity, something they’d learned, a sunset they’d enjoyed.
The gratitude journal was brief – just one sentence for each of the five things – and done only once a week, but after two months there were significant effects. Compared with a control group, the people keeping the gratitude journal were more optimistic and felt happier. They reported fewer physical problems and spent more time working out.

Further benefits were observed in a study of polio survivors and other people with neuromuscular problems. The ones who kept a gratitude journal reported feeling happier and more optimistic than those in a control group, and these reports were corroborated by observations from their spouses. These grateful people also fell asleep more quickly at night, slept longer and woke up feeling more refreshed.
“If you want to sleep more soundly, count blessings, not sheep,” Dr. Emmons advises in “Thanks!” his book on gratitude research.

Don’t confuse gratitude with indebtedness. Sure, you may feel obliged to return a favor, but that’s not gratitude, at least not the way psychologists define it. Indebtedness is more of a negative feeling and doesn’t yield the same benefits as gratitude, which inclines you to be nice to anyone, not just a benefactor.

In an experiment at Northeastern University, Monica Bartlett and David DeSteno sabotaged each participant’s computer and arranged for another student to fix it. Afterward, the students who had been helped were likelier to volunteer to help someone else – a complete stranger – with an unrelated task. Gratitude promoted good karma. And if it works with strangers ….

Try it on your family. No matter how dysfunctional your family, gratitude can still work, says Sonja Lyubomirsky of the University of California, Riverside.

“Do one small and unobtrusive thoughtful or generous thing for each member of your family on Thanksgiving,” she advises. “Say thank you for every thoughtful or kind gesture. Express your admiration for someone’s skills or talents – wielding that kitchen knife so masterfully, for example. And truly listen, even when your grandfather is boring you again with the same World War II story.”

Don’t counterattack.If you’re bracing for insults on Thursday, consider a recent experiment at the University of Kentucky. After turning in a piece of writing, some students received praise for it while others got a scathing evaluation: “This is one of the worst essays I’ve ever read!” Then each student played a computer game against the person who’d done the evaluation. The winner of the game could administer a blast of white noise to the loser. Not surprisingly, the insulted essayists retaliated against their critics by subjecting them to especially loud blasts – much louder than the noise administered by the students who’d gotten positive evaluations.  But there was an exception to this trend among a subgroup of the students: the ones who had been instructed to write essays about things for which they were grateful. After that exercise in counting their blessings, they weren’t bothered by the nasty criticism – or at least they didn’t feel compelled to amp up the noise against their critics.

“Gratitude is more than just feeling good,” says Nathan DeWall, who led the study at Kentucky. “It helps people become less aggressive by enhancing their empathy. “It’s an equal-opportunity emotion. Anyone can experience it and benefit from it, even the most crotchety uncle at the Thanksgiving dinner table.”

Share the feeling. Why does gratitude do so much good? “More than other emotion, gratitude is the emotion of friendship,” Dr. McCullough says. “It is part of a psychological system that causes people to raise their estimates of how much value they hold in the eyes of another person. Gratitude is what happens when someone does something that causes you to realize that you matter more to that person than you thought you did.”

Try a gratitude visit. This exercise, recommended by Martin Seligman of the University of Pennsylvania, begins with writing a 300-word letter to someone who changed your life for the better. Be specific about what the person did and how it affected you. Deliver it in person, preferably without telling the person in advance what the visit is about. When you get there, read the whole thing slowly to your benefactor. “You will be happier and less depressed one month from now,” Dr. Seligman guarantees in his book “Flourish.”

Contemplate a higher power.Religious individuals don’t necessarily act with more gratitude in a specific situation, but thinking about religion can cause people to feel and act more gratefully, as demonstrated in experiments by Jo-Ann Tsang and colleagues at Baylor University. Other research shows that praying can increase gratitude.

Go for deep gratitude. Once you’ve learned to count your blessings, Dr. Emmons says, you can think bigger.

“As a culture, we have lost a deep sense of gratefulness about the freedoms we enjoy, a lack of gratitude toward those who lost their lives in the fight for freedom, a lack of gratitude for all the material advantages we have,” he says. “The focus of Thanksgiving should be a reflection of how our lives have been made so much more comfortable by the sacrifices of those who have come before us.”
And if that seems too daunting, you can least tell yourself -Hey, it could always be worse. When your relatives force you to look at photos on their phones, be thankful they no longer have access to a slide projector. When your aunt expounds on politics, rejoice inwardly that she does not hold elected office. Instead of focusing on the dry, tasteless turkey on your plate, be grateful the six-hour roasting process killed any toxic bacteria.

Is that too much of a stretch? When all else fails, remember the Monty Python mantra of the Black Plague victim: “I’m not dead.” It’s all a matter of perspective.

I have recently had some interesting conversations with 30 somethings who are STRESSED!  kids running around zapping their intimacy, chaos creating lack of connection, overworked, overwhelmed.

I have recently had some interesting conversations with 40 somethings who are STRESSED! Ok. You get the idea.

Stress is everpresent.  We hear that our 20′s are supposed to be carefree time to enjoy life.  We hear that our 30′s are time to settle down and make a family….etc.  But we let our 20′s pass by with busyness, stress, overwhelm, and our 30′s pass by with a marriage that dissolves from lack of intimacy, lack of connection…

What are we to do?

20′s: Develop the skills to recognize and manage stress

30′s: Create healthy patterns in our marriages–daily time outs with our spouse to check in and really connect/communicate, find scheduled times for intimacy, date each other, recognize the importance of Mom and Dad’s relationship coming ahead of the kids.

Contrary to what we usually believe–the passive, relaxing times are the best moments of our lives.  What if our best moments are occurring right before our eyes when our bodies and minds are stretched to the limits in our efforts to deal with these ‘difficult’ patients, people, and situations (This is what Professor Csikszentmihalyi points out in his landmark book: Flow).  What if the ‘difficult’ is really the technicolor of our lives?  If you are like me, I am thinking that these difficult times are the worst times, filled with negative energy, negative feelings, etc.  BUT I am working to change my perspective on this.  As I become more aware of these ‘difficult’ moments, I am able to embrace them, explore them, feel them…because in the end, they may actually be the best or at least the most memorable moments of our lives so let’s look at them for just that…technicolor, heart racing, fully alive, high energy moments…

I clearly will never be a ‘marketeer’ but coaching is not what someone else could ‘use’ or ‘need’.  Coaching is the unique opportunity to learn how to flourish, to learn how to live a life of fulfillment.  If we were to score on a 1 to 10 scale each segment of our lives (our marriage, relationships, work, play, parenting, etc.), what numbers would we see?  Are we living life to the fullest? Coaching is a gift.  It is the place to discover what a 10 looks, sounds, tastes, and feels like!  Can you imagine that?

Coaching has transformed my life and the lives of my clients.  It is an opportunity to learn & develop the know how to live your most fulfilling life, to live in the present (the land of the now here rather than the land of nowhere), to discover the power of choice, to laugh & live more…Now who doesn’t want some of that?!

Lesson #12: Open up to fear unconditionally.
“There’s nothing wrong with feeling anxious, ever, over anything at all. Fear and anxiety are part of who we are. Once we drop the pointless, wrongheaded routine about needing to get rid of them, we can carry fear and anxiety around with us through life like friendly companions. Instead of battling fear, we just let it happen, and when the fight against it dissolves, so does the torment. We slowly learn to live in harmony with fear, anxiety, and stress, expecting them to show up and welcoming them when they do.”

Lesson #11: Keep your eyes on a guiding principle.
“Fear, anxiety, and stress can make the universe seem chaotic and bewildering, so it’s always helpful to have a compass to steer you through the maelstrom…devotion to personal values is a crucial part of learning to live with anxiety and stress…our emotional pain helps highlight what’s really important to us…’If you flip anxiety over, it tells you what you care about, what your values are’…”

“He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how.”-Friedrich Nietzsche

Lesson #10: Build faith in yourself.
“…developing confidence that you can handle intense fear and stressful predicaments is absolutely vital…remember, worry research shows that people handle worst-case scenarios far better than they ever expected, and therapists like David Barlow like to plunge their clients into deep terror to show them reserves of strength they didn’t know they had. And in addition to building confidence through fear exposure, we can also do it through the ways that we talk to ourselves and handle worrisome visions of the future. Here’s a useful practice: next time you imagine something you fear coming to pass, visualize yourself not enduring it miserably or falling apart but coping with it well, demonstrating grit and resilience.”

Lesson #9: Joke around.
“…thinking playfully or joking in a stressful situation helps us break out of a negative point of view…by poking fun at life’s occasional grimness, we neutralize its venom and lift ourselves above it.”

Lesson #8: Reframe the situation.
“when the procession of negative biases and anxious thoughts starts marching through our heads, we always have an important choice to make: do we buy into a falsely pessimistic interpretation of what’s going on, or do we learn to see things differently? ‘I like to say you can make an emotional molehill into an emotional mountain, which is what people do all the time’..according to psychologist Kevin Ochsner…he stresses the importance of recontextualizing: staying grounded in reason and reminding ourselves of the doubtlessly more positive reality of our situation…’When you change the way you appraise a situation, you change your emotional response to it.’”