The Surprising Benefits Of Being Thankful
Do you take life for granted, or do you show your gratitude every day?
By Janice Kaplan (dailymail.co.uk) – Most of us suffer from a huge gratitude gap.
We know we should be grateful, but something holds us back because, in general, negative events tend to overshadow the more positive ones.
Yet one study after another has connected gratitude to higher levels of happiness and lower levels of depression and stress.
Gratitude is an attitude, which isn’t dependent on good things happening to you. Instead, grateful people make sure they see the good in whatever they have.
That requires active emotional involvement. You have to stop and really make yourself feel it.
I remember writing a magazine story on Michelle Pfeiffer and asking her how she felt about getting older.
She was still extraordinarily beautiful in her mid-50s, but she admitted that it was easy to yearn for the days when she had flawless skin and a perfectly taut body. We looked together at a photograph of her at the age of 25, when she starred with Al Pacino in Scarface.
‘My breasts were very perky then, weren’t they?’ she said, smiling wryly at the picture of herself in a revealing dress.
But she didn’t look back at her younger self with envy. Instead she remembered being terrified and insecure during every moment of that photo shoot and was glad to be so much more confident now.
Different moments in life bring different reasons to be grateful. The gift is to capture what you have when you have it.
‘I’m really happily married now. I have a wonderful family and a handful of really close friends.
‘So I get up with a purpose in life and try to stay away from mirrors!’ she told me, focusing only on the positive aspects of getting older.
Like Michelle, perhaps I too could avoid the wrinkles in life by focusing more on the joys.
Theoretically I knew that I had many reasons to be grateful at home.
My husband is smart and doesn’t mind doing the washing-up. We have two wonderful children, Zach and Matt. We were all healthy and loved one another.
But it was the life I lived every day and had grown used to, which meant it was easy to forget why it was special.
Our expectations of a partner are huge – best friend, passionate lover, weekend playmate, equal-time parent, entertaining dinner date, constant supporter, soul mate.
So, however much you appreciate what he does do, there is always something else that he isn’t doing. When you expect everything, it’s hard to be grateful for anything.
So I decided it was time to start appreciating the husband I had, rather than the imaginary cross between Brad Pitt and Bill Gates who would remember to remove his muddy boots at the door. I decided to try to find a reason, at least twice a day, to appreciate the man I had married.
I got a chance to practise my new attitude that night. Ron is a doctor, with a busy medical practice and a deep commitment to his patients.
He didn’t have a lot of time to be appreciative of me and for years I had complained that I would see him more if he was my doctor instead of my husband.
He would stand me up on theatre dates and slide out of dinner parties to take calls.
Just after we’d gone to sleep that night his phone rang and he went into another room to take the call. He came back and started getting dressed by the light from the wardrobe.
He was hoping that I wouldn’t get annoyed and told me he had a patient in an emergency.
I took a deep breath. Normally I would rant that this was crazy, that there must be somebody else who could handle it, and…
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