Gratitude: The Free Non-Pharma Evidence-Based Antidepressant

Everyone says they just want to be happy, but we’re so full of malarkey.

We want happiness, as long as it doesn’t ask too much of us, like, you know, becoming a better person.

Positive psychology and Buddhist philosophy advocate cultivating compassion. The science behind it is solid and growing. The Association for Psychological Science released a study in 2013 showing that people can be trained in cultivating compassion, and with fMRI scans taken before and after training, researchers found that brain changes occurred with greater activity in the inferior parietal cortex, which is involved with empathy and understanding others, and also in brain regions for emotional regulation and positive emotions.

For the rest of us, it might seem like a challenge to feel compassion when the reigning stories every day in the news rain with blood, sweat and tears caused by others with, it seems, very little compassion for their fellow wo/men. Meanwhile, anxiety disorders afflict over 40 million American adults every year and rank as the number one mental illness.

Makes it hard to feel compassion for others, or even think about them, when you're preoccupied with your own problems.

But you can feel better, and you don't even need a prescription. The two things that will rewire your brain for a more positive outlook and less stress is to practice compassion and combine it with gratitude.

If there are two virtues our society emphatically does not want to even think about, let alone practice, it’s compassion. And gratitude.

We’re often so wrapped up in what we think we lack in our lives that we forget to be grateful for what is.

The problem with feeling gratitude is we can run off a list of all the things we say we feel grateful for. But the key word is feel. We don’t. It’s hard to feel when we spend most of our lives turning our feelings off.

So we say we’re grateful for our family, and we are on some fundamental level, but do we feel it, or just state it like a mantra? And are we fully aware of and grateful for the modern-day miracle that most of us are even alive? That a hundred years ago children died of now-preventable diseases, and 150 years ago they died so much Victorian parents kept them at an emotional distance so they didn’t become too attached, because you never knew when you might have to order another small casket?

Food, vaccines, Xanax, Dollarama. We don’t even think about how fortunate we are to have them, so we can live long enough to pop pills to numb our annoying feelings and buy junk food and cheap gimcracks made by five-year-olds in sweatshops who have to pee in bottles because their fulfillment demands are too high. Oh no wait, that’s American adults at Amazon.

Be grateful you don’t work in an Amazon warehouse, at least. Don’t even ask about Amazon’s Camperforce.

Actually, that wouldn’t be real gratitude. According to an article in Psychology Today, comparing ourselves to others worse off isn’t gratitude. Not the kind that rewires your brain and pushes you toward that elusive target you call happiness.

Real, emotional, feeling gratitude offers measurable mental improvements. Studies show keeping a gratitude journal improves optimism and exercise patterns. You sleep better and exhibit less depression.

Gratitude stimulates the generation of dopamine, the ‘feel-good’ neurotransmitter, and we all know how much we like that dopamine rush. So we do and think stuff again to get another hit. More gratitude. More dopamine. You start thinking optimistically to feed your growing mental confirmation bias. “Life is good! Hey! Squirrels! They’re so cuuuute! See? Life is really good!”

Does your life suck so much you think you have nothing to be grateful for?

Consider this: All the effort that has been put in by others to bring us the life we live. The ones whose names you will never know.

The Dalai Lama likes to use a table as an example. How grateful should you be for this table that serves you so well and keeps all the random stuff that would otherwise accumulate around your house?

There’s the guy who made the table. The person who supplied the nails to make it. The tree that provided the wood for it. The rain and sun and nutrients that grew the tree so that it could be one day be cut down by some guy who’s probably dead by now so you could have your table.

And on and on and on. Let’s not even get started on the nails. Or the parents who raised the people who collaborated this fine, sturdy table into existence. The masters who trained the carpenter apprentices so well.

No one can do gratitude quite like the Dalai Lama.

Just because you’re not a lama or a saint doesn’t mean you can’t learn to appreciate others, too. This holds up even when researchers ran studies with stressed-out college students and they got the same results as the more well-adjusted people in other studies. The students who practiced a gratitude exercise exhibited less depression, more optimism, and all in a fairly short period of time.

Practicing gratitude rewires your brain, shedding toxic emotions, with greater activation in the medial prefontal cortex, the part associated with learning and decision-making. Ergo, you’re more likely to give to a good cause out of genuine feeling rather than guilt. The reward? Dopamine hit! Yessssss!!!

And you just did something to make someone else’s life a little more tolerable.

The fact is, practicing gratitude journaling is one of the few self-help exercises for which there’s a considerable chunk of scientific evidence.

The same with compassion, too, and guess what else is easier to do once you start feeling grateful.

The challenge is just getting started, when you’re so wrapped up in your own private dramas.

Often, you can start with the small things. Silly stuff that still makes a difference.

A neighbor who gives you a free carton of eggs because she overbought.

A friendly dog on the street.

A vending machine that dispenses two rather than one candy bar.

And they don’t even sport an expiry date from the last century!

A sale on your favorite snack food.

A cashier with a kindly smile and a sunny disposition.

A period of unexplained happiness. It comes and goes, be grateful you had it when it’s gone, it will come again.

Dumbest thing ever that once raised me out of a crushing depression:

It was a very bad day, and I was practically near tears. It was summer, it was sunny, and it was lunchtime. I couldn’t wait to get out and do my walk because frankly, I might just keep going and never turn back. You know, like Forrest Gump, except without running.

Life sucked and I thought I was about to get fired, which wasn’t true but I didn’t know that. I happened upon some chalk signs on the sidewalk by some irritatingly optimistic high school or college kid.

Don’t worry, be happy!

You are loved.

Love yourself!

Could it possibly get any more trite?

But damn, it was exactly what I needed. I don’t know why, it was so stupid. I felt so good after that. I liked the Don’t worry, be happy one best. And I HATED HATED HATED that song.

I'm not that great myself at practicing gratitude. I’ll admit it. Still a rank noob at compassion although occasionally I exhibit brief bouts of empathy for people I don't like (the real test).

But maybe I’m just not addicted to the dopamine yet.

Today, I didn’t wake up dead. Or as anxious as usual. I don’t know why.

Hey, I’ll take it. It’s a start.

Scowling girl Photo by LiveLaughLove on Pixabay

S?quirrel by Likeaduck on Flickr

I’m a freelance writer, sales/business developer and beta better human, but still very buggy. When I’m not practicing half-assed compassion or writing down stuff I'm grateful for I blog with attitude on Medium and look for ways to spend the rest of my life making a difference and helping others understand they're not nearly as weird as they think.