Advanced Gratitude

Denise Foley has written an excellent article in Prevention Magazine about how "advanced gratitude" can change our lives for the better. Advanced gratitude is

the ability to identify and appreciate the bad events in your life because of what you've gained from them.

Clearly, you don't become grateful for difficulties overnight (and rarely in the throes), but once you do, you're privy to some amazing alchemy that will allow you to heal what hurts and see the victory that's often at the center of every seeming defeat. It also boosts what one leading expert calls your psychological immune system, and it may even physically alter your brain so that gratitude isn't just something you feel occasionally but guides how you approach life.

And it all starts with making a habit of appreciating what you have, what you've lost, and what your life would be like if fate hadn't nudged you this way or that.

Before you achieve advanced gratitude, it helps to get in the habit of being thankful for your good fortune. Numerous studies have found that people who keep journals or make lists of what they're thankful for are happier, more optimistic, more energetic, and nicer to other people than those who don't.

Responding to the positive is a tough sell for the brain, which is programmed to suss out danger and avoid it, says neuropsychologist Rick Hanson, PhD, the author of Hardwiring Happiness and Buddha's Brain. "The first rule of the wild is to eat lunch, not be lunch," he says with a laugh.

This means that to create any lasting changes in the brain—the kinds that will make thankfulness your default emotion, protect you from the ravages of stress, and increase your resilience—you need to hammer it home by practicing gratitude not only frequently but with considerable emotional intensity. "Try this as a regular practice," Dr. Hanson says: "Have an experience of gratitude that lasts at least 20 seconds, feeling it in your body, and giving yourself over to it to help it sink into your brain."

Don't just be thankful for that beautiful sunset, he says: "Sit with it for 20 seconds straight, and be open to the feelings in your body when you see it. Feel the positive emotions related to gratitude that come up—the feeling of being glad that you're alive, grateful for your connection with other people, your sense of awe. To build up neural encoding, it really helps to feel the emotion in your body—and even allow it to become intense."

If you have trouble coming up with reasons to be grateful, try the technique Dr. Emmons recommends to help remind you of what you've gained from sorrow, tragedy, and loss. "Think of your worst moments—your sorrows, your losses, your sadness—and then remember where you are now," says Robert Emmons, PhD, director of the Emmons Laboratory at the University of California, Davis, who chronicles his 3-week get-thankful program in his book Gratitude Works! "You got through the worst day of your life, you got through the trauma, you got through the trial, you endured the temptation, you survived the bad relationship, you're making your way out of the dark."

The ability to bounce back after trauma is what psychologists call post-traumatic growth, a positive transformation that can occur when people go through serious stress, such as a chronic illness, an injury, or disaster. "We're not talking about people being grateful for the cancer, the injury, or the disaster but for what happens in the aftermath, what they've gained from struggling through the event," says psychologist Richard Tedeschi, PhD, of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, who coauthored four books on the ways people change after trauma. "They tend to go through a process: Who am I, what kind of future do I want, and what makes sense to do with my time here on earth, now that this event has stopped me in my tracks?"