photo by Giulia Bertelli

I woke up this morning eager to get started on the cooking for today’s Thanksgiving dinner. It’s my favorite holiday of the year. And despite the questionable origin of this tradition, I still find great value in celebrating it, so long as I remember what it really stands for: practicing gratitude.

Gratitude requires slowing down, being mindful, and choosing to focus on the positive things in your life. It is choosing to turn what you have into enough. Let that sink in. In a world which profits and runs on the belief that we are not enough, that what we have is not enough, deciding that it is and that you are is an amazingly powerful, even rebellious stance. Gratitude also requires a capacity to simultaneously zoom in and zoom out. To zoom into the “small” and often overlooked gifts in your day to day life while also zooming out to see the larger than life picture. The enormity of the world around you and the beauty and wonder in it. Gratitude, I would say, is a dual-focus cosmic lens which allows you to see and be in touch with both dimensions.

It is no surprise to most that focusing on gratitude can feel quite good in the moment. It brings a certain warmth, a joy, an effervescence that can be so welcome in the routine of our day to day. We instinctively know that it can alter our perception, our experience, and our mood. And now, there is a bunch of science to back up this intuitive knowledge.

The growing field of positive psychology, which in essence focuses on what is right with people rather than what is wrong, has focused much of its attention on gratitude. From this science, we can learn a great deal regarding this one day a year when we focus on giving thanks, and encourage us to bring this practice to our every day.

Here is my favorite study: researchers asked a group of students to journal once a week for 10 weeks. The students were divided into various groups, some were asked to journal on the large and small aspects of their life they were grateful for, some were asked to write about negative aspects of their life and some were asked to write about neutral aspects. Not surprisingly, those students in the “gratitude group” fared better than the other two groups. Meaning, they reported feeling more positive about their lives, more optimistic about the upcoming week, having fewer physical symptoms, and spending more time exercising. Surprisingly, however, they did not report better moods. So the researchers changed things up a bit and now asked research participants to journal, on these same topics, every day for 10 weeks. And here is where it got interesting. Those students who spent a few minutes each day taping into and connecting to what they felt grateful for in their lives had dramatically different results. They reported having more positive views of their life as a whole. They stated they had a much more positive mood and significantly fewer days of a bad or negative mood. They even reported improvements in health and habits, for example, exercising more often, sleeping better, having less frequent stress dreams and less time being up at night worrying about the stressors in their lives. Even their partners noticed! The partners reported that the gratitude participants overall had a much more positive mood and greater satisfaction with their lives than before the study.

This study, and many more like it, teach us an important lesson: to be grateful is good, but the more you focus on it, the more benefit you, and those around you will obtain.

So, on this day of thanks, I’d like to start a new tradition. To end each day with a few moments of silent reflection of what I love and appreciate about my life. Be it small (those new flowers that just popped up at my corner deli), or much more significant (that amazing person who just showed up at my door with said flowers), I want to focus on the good, for just a little bit. I encourage you to join me.

Below are some tips and ideas for keeping a gratitude practice:

1. Think about a person or group of people who have had a positive impact on your life. Hold them with love in your mind’s eye. Feel the warmth spread through your head, down your back, and throughout your body. Revel in it.

2. As you sit down for a meal, think about all the energy that has gone into creating the food on your plate. The sunlight and water needed to grow the vegetables, the farmer’s energy to harvest them, the countless others who packaged it, transported it, shelved it at your grocery store, and the hands that cooked it, yours or someone else. And if you eat animal protein, perhaps also take a moment to thank the animal for the energy and life force it gives you today.

3. Enjoy beauty in the world. Perhaps this means a stroll through the park and focusing on the life and energy thriving there, perhaps it’s a stroll through a museum. Either way, connect to the life and beauty all around which sustains and feeds our psyches and soul.

4. Schedule a gratitude visit. Is there someone in your past or current life who has changed it for the better? If so, psychologist Martin E.P. Seligman, in his book Flourish, recommends writing them a concise and honest letter identifying what they did to help you and how it affected you. Mail it, or even better, schedule a time to see them and read the letter out loud to them.

5. Keep a gratitude journal. Make a habit of reflecting at the end or start of each day and committing it to writing.

6. Think about those who often do not receive the thanks they deserve. Here I’m thinking about the men and women who collect the trash on my street every Tuesday and Thursday, or the woman who delivers my mail every day, or the woman at the front desk at the building where I have my practice. Her smile and genuine affection makes my every morning a little brighter and more joyful. Take the time to genuinely, authentically, and deeply thank them for the services they give us and the way in which they keep our worlds running smoothly.

6. Practice with yourself. This one ties into another one of my favorite topics- self-talk. Practice focusing on the parts or aspects of yourself you are grateful for. Look in the mirror, if you dare, and tell yourself what you appreciate, admire, or love about yourself.

Wishing you a happy, healthy, and grateful day.