Is being grateful good for health?

The umpteenth academic article on the advantages of being grateful is published; on this occasion, "A multinational megastudy of the effects of gratitude practices on subjective well-being", in the journal Psychological and Cognitive Sciences.Since 2004, Robert A. Emmons and Michael E. McCullough published The Psychology of Gratitude, a wide range of studies has been conducted on the benefits of being grateful for general health and well-being. Being grateful reduces cortisol, activates the vagus nerve and increases endorphins, making you happier and calmer. It makes you sleep better. It reduces the risk of suffering from a psychiatric pathology. It also makes your general health state better. It even contributes to prolonging life, concludes a study that was echoed by an opinion article published in ARA it's been a while.With the best of intentions, positive psychology has progressively incorporated gratitude into the portfolio of emotions to be promoted in order to feel better, granting it a particularly privileged place, because being grateful is free and within everyone's reach, as suggested by the article in ARA. If all these benefits are true, it encouraged us, let's go for it. After all, the gratitude studies insist, everyone has something to be grateful for, even if it's a ray of sunshine on a winter morning.Thus, it quickly moved from theory to practice. Coaches on social media and self-help books began to promote “gratitude practices”. Nowadays, they are still full of them. Write “gratitude letters” to people towards whom you feel special gratitude, or pay them “gratitude visits” to express your emotion. But, in reality, the other person doesn't need to know, some remind you, because the positive effect that this practice has on your neurotransmitters is the same. Simply, buy yourself a blank notebook and turn it into a “gratitude journal”. Or every day, before going to sleep, mentally review three things for which you are grateful. The results will not be long in coming. It's not just that you will feel better, but your material life will also notice it: if you are grateful, your business success will increase, according to American coach Tony Robbins on his blog.

In Western tradition, being grateful had always been considered a good thing. I would say fundamentally for two kinds of reasons. The first was epistemic; that is, it has to do with knowledge: being grateful is the result of a certain view of reality. The person who is grateful is so because they realize that what they now enjoy is not their own merit, but the result of the impact of others on them. Thus, the experience of gratitude contributes to the awareness of interdependence. The second type of reason why Western tradition has considered gratitude positive is moral: when we feel grateful towards someone, we tend to wish them well. If we can, we give them a hand, even if they didn't help us to obtain any benefit. Furthermore, feeling grateful often generates being more generous towards others. In a few words, Western tradition has valued being grateful because it often induces what is called pro-moral behavior.In the last twenty years, it seems we have discovered that to the set of epistemic and moral benefits of gratitude, we must add the benefits it has for physical and emotional well-being. I wonder, however, if the scientific literature that supports this idea, as well as the discourses circulating on social networks and self-help books, do not actually represent a radical break from an essential aspect of the Western tradition of gratitude. I am referring to the fact that the epistemic and moral value attributed to the experience of thankfulness was fundamentally related to the other: recognizing the "its a positive impact on my life and let them know to him so that he would feel better.

On the contrary, in the version of gratitude I am talking about, the focal point is oneself: it is about being grateful for the benefit this brings to oneself. Within this framework, the other disappears; it is nothing more than an instrument at the service of my well-being.With this speech, one of the most joyful and fertile emotions that humans can feel has gradually permeated two logics inherent to neoliberalism, about which I have written on other occasions: the individualistic logic and the imperative of productivity. We must be grateful, they spur us on, because we must take advantage of the positive potential that being so has for oneself. It may seem that this does no harm to anyone. In fact, these discourses are presented under an aura of peace and harmony. And, undoubtedly, it is better to promote gratitude than many other emotions. But I believe they are harmful for at least two reasons. The first is because, as I have been advancing, they push us to look at relationships between people in an instrumental way, conceiving them as if they were the mere backdrop to my individual progress.And the second has to do with what gratitude theorists call the “gratitude paradox”, which consists of the fact that, in some situations, certain people are expected to be grateful for what has already been granted to them, and this implies that they should not ask for even more, even though they would like to complain about having so little. This is the case of a person who, after a long time of searching, gets a job, but under terrible conditions, and their environment repeatedly tells them “how lucky you are”. The “gratitude paradox” has been especially studied in cases of organ transplantation: the person who has received a heart is expected to be immensely grateful and their complaints about not feeling well and expecting more from the healthcare system are not well received. In this type of case, the imperative to feel grateful seems potentially harmful to me because it contributes to deactivating the political potential for transformation that awareness of discomfort can have. Thus, gratitude ceases to have an epistemic value to just contribute to the contrary: to the extent that this imperative aims to minimize discomfort, it erases its trace and hides the clues that allow us to read reality in order to transform it.