By Colin Hanna, Let Freedom Ring
This is Thanksgiving Week, so allow me to share some thoughts about giving thanks. Earlier this year, I adopted a new response to the most ubiquitous question most of us are asked on a daily basis: “How’s it going,” or “how are you today?” Instead of replying with the typically innocuous “Fine, how are you?” or “Great” or “Fabulous,” or some other variation of the same, I started replying with a single word: “grateful.” You’d be surprised how often that breaks the mindless pattern of typical social chatter and opens a conversation. “That’s a great response,” more than one said. “Yes, so am I!” several others have responded. My favorite was one gentleman who simply said “Darned right!”
We can fix our minds on either what’s going right or what’s going wrong. There’s not a person on earth who doesn’t have both at any one time. Which set should we focus on? I’m convinced that if we focus on what’s good, and express gratitude for it, our outlook on life will naturally be more positive, and happier, than if we focus on what’s gone wrong in our lives. It is a simple choice, but it’s one we must make intentionally.
Psychologists have long posited that gratitude can improve both mental and physical well-being. It can help you deal with adversity and relish good experiences. There are rewards to being grateful. There are actual physiological benefits in addition to the psychological benefits. Gratitude activates neurotransmitters like dopamine and serotonin, which can make you feel happier. Expressing gratitude can help family members feel appreciated and loved, which can strengthen family bonds. Positive Psychology.com has a list of 100 Reasons to be Grateful. They say, “Gratitude is a powerful and positive emotion that [can] help us dramatically change our attitude”.
Emily Fletcher, the founder of a meditation training site, mentioned in one of her publications that gratitude is a “natural antidepressant”. The effects of gratitude, when practiced daily, can be almost the same as medications. It produces a feeling of long-lasting happiness and contentment, the physiological basis of which lies at the neurotransmitter level.
When we express gratitude and receive the same, our brain releases dopamine and serotonin, the two crucial neurotransmitters responsible for our emotions, and they make us feel “good”. They enhance our mood immediately, making us feel happy from the inside.
By consciously practicing gratitude everyday, we can help these neural pathways to strengthen themselves and ultimately create a permanent grateful and positive nature within ourselves. I believe this fully, and it’s why I say that I am “grateful.”
So you can imagine my dismay when I read a column in the Wall Street Journal this week by a woman named Kim Murray, whose position on being grateful was precisely the opposite. She wrote. “Forcing ourselves to be grateful … can be harmful to our mental well-being and our relationships … It will only make us feel worse in the long run.”
She then quotes Peggy DeLong, a licensed psychologist in Long Valley, NJ.:. Quote: “Tough emotions need to be addressed or they stay with us and continue to grow… Publishers, coaches, influencers and retail companies—not to mention actual therapists … all admonish us to “be grateful.” We can buy gratitude journals, listen to gratitude meditations and wear gratitude sweaters… Performative gratitude—compelling ourselves to be grateful when we’re not—is a form of toxic positivity. The energy we expend trying to avoid the uncomfortable feeling will, ironically, keep us focused on the problem. Then we feel guilty because we failed to be grateful. Forced gratitude … prevents us from taking responsibility to change things to make them the way we want them to be.” End of quotation.
Although I understand her position, it is the opposite of my message this Thanksgiving week. Count me a grateful proponent of “toxic positivity,” although I think “infectious positivity” is a much better metaphor. I believe we live in the greatest country on earth, at the best time in all of human history, that we are loved by friends and family, even if there are exceptions for a few of us, and we should thank God for our station in life. That’s certainly not toxic, but I do hope that it’s communicable.
I’m especially thankful for you, the readers of PATownhall.com, and I hope that the spirit of Thanksgiving will thoroughly overcome and dominate the truly toxic spirit of negativity every day of your lives.
(Colin Hanna is President of Let Freedom Ring, USA)