When Gratitude Doesn’t Work
Gratitude vs. Guilt: How to Tell the Difference
I am a huge fan of a daily gratitude practice. I do it myself (though admittedly, not with consistency); I recommend it to clients often, and I find it not only effective but also just a pleasant and sweet thing to do. A gratitude practice consists of identifying 3-5 things every day that you are grateful for. They can be anything at all, large and broad like “I am grateful for the sun”, “I am grateful for my partner”, or small and minute like “I am grateful for this cup of coffee.”
So why gratitude? Even when we are not depressed, we register negative events in our environment approximately 5 times faster than positive events in our environment. This is an evolutionary strategy that enables us to notice any potential threats in our environments so that we can keep ourselves safe. Imagine ancient man scanning the horizon and listening intently at all times to see if they are going to be eaten by a bear or a mountain lion (or whatever other ancient environmental threats existed for humans— I’m not a paleontologist okay??!)
So, we already have an adaptation to register negative events 5x faster than positive events. That means we have to work that much harder to register positive events in our environment, by focusing on them and really taking them in. This is where a gratitude practice is so effective, because it forces us to spend time taking in positive information in our environment.
I often assign a gratitude practice to clients that are experiencing depression, but I have noticed that sometimes it backfires. When we are depressed, we notice negative things even more than the average person. This means that a depressed person would have to work even harder than a non-depressed person to absorb positive stimuli in their environment!
We know that people experiencing depression are often more tired, have less ability to focus and concentrate, lack motivation, and also spend a lot of their time feeling like a failure. So asking a depressed person to work so much harder to identify positive things, is sort of like asking a person who has never gone on a jog in their life to go run a marathon tomorrow.
This is all to say that sometimes, gratitude doesn’t work. Take *Eloisa, a client I’ve seen for many years, who deals with chronic depression and anxiety, and specifically feelings of failure and worthlessness. With this client, a gratitude practice leads her to feeling like more of a failure and more disappointed in herself. When she identifies her wonderful partner, beautiful home, healthy baby, supportive friends and family, being a white cisgendered woman, having the gift of a good education, and a stable career, she spirals into more shame, guilt, and feeling like a disappointing failure. Identifying her gratitudes highlights even further that she has failed to be happy, even though she has every reason to be. She turns the blame back onto herself, which is what she was already doing in her reflexive depression, further worsening the shame spiral that she is already deeply entrenched in.
Her self-talk is riddled with “shoulds”, such as “I have all of this privilege and all of these good things in my life so why am I not happy? I should have done more with what I have. I should be farther along than I am. I thought my life would look different by the time I got to this age.”
In Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, we call this “should and must” statements. I like to jokingly refer it as a “should’ing all over yourself” and “must-erbating.” This is when we focus on how people “should” or “must” be, treating our own standards or preferences as rules that everyone must live by.
So what's the lesson here? Maybe there are some helpful ways to identify gratitudes and some unhelpful ways, depending on your mental health at the time. Maybe we try keeping gratitudes more about the wonder of the world and nature- how the sun rises everyday, how our breath breathes itself, or the bright blue of the sky on a cloudless day. Maybe helpful gratitudes can be more about zooming out of our day-to-day rather than zooming in– getting the birds-eye view. Like looking up at the sky full of stars at night with wonder, and asking how did we even get here?
Maybe there are gradations of gratitude, and it's worth exploring different types, drawing from John Muir, Thoreau or Mary Oliver. Gratitude can be about how our bodies are made of plant matter, how the stars are like the sea, and we can wonder- what are we all doing here together?
Working with gratitude to get the bird’s eye view might be a slight tweak that can help chronically depressed individuals benefit from a gratitude practice. Can you think of any other tweaks or new ways of expressing or identifying gratitude that could make it even more powerful than it already is?
Are you interested in other practices to decrease depression and anxiety symptoms? Read The Post Holiday Blues and Mindfulness 101 and check out our Meditation Videos. Contact us today to get connected with a therapist who can help you apply these practices in your day to day life.
Warmly,
Becky White MFT
*Name changed for confidentiality
