Gratitude is a commonly misunderstood concept. Most of us are aware that gratitude is good for us – we recognize that it helps improve our mood, our relationships, and our overall health. But for some reason, most of us struggle in actually engaging in gratitude-promoting behaviors and when we do, we tend to skim the surface instead of diving deep. In essence, enhancing gratitude is more than simply listing the things we are grateful for, much like we would list the things we need to buy at the grocery store, or reviewing our to-do list. Enhancing gratitude goes much deeper than this.
See, this is what tends to happen with most of the positive things in our lives. We list them, are aware of them briefly, but don’t really let them sink in deeply. In the words of Rick Hanson, being aware of the positive without really enhancing those positive experiences is akin to looking at a menu, but not eating any of the food. This is what our brain naturally does with positive experiences – we look at them, list them, and then walk away from them. This doesn’t really allow the positive experiences to get “digested” by our brains, and because of this, the experiences don’t really nurture us the way they could. However, when we take the time to stop and highlight the positive moments in our lives, using all of our senses to intensify them, they sink deeper within us and have the ability to actually change our brains as they strengthen the calming centers of the brain (Hanson, ).
Doing this is especially important when trying to manage negative or anxious thinking because our brain is actively doing this with the negative information in our minds. Our brains can get so good at being anxious, that they don’t even need a negative experience, they just need the possibility of a negative experience, just the thought of the negative experience, and our brain fills in all the rest – taking that negative experience and making a simulation so that we feel that the negative thought is actually occurring. In essence, this is really what anxiety is all about – our brains take negative thoughts, and turn them into negative experiencing, even if they are only perceived (not actual). So learning to do this in the opposite direction – learning to take positive thoughts and turn them into positive experiences – is essential in balancing out the incredibly strong negativity bias of the brain that occurs for those of us who deal with consistent anxiety.
So what is the difference between a positive thought and a positive experience? Again, in the words of Rick Hanson () – a positive thought is simply information. A positive experience is the integration of that positive information with the senses. We all have many positive thoughts that happen in the space of a day, an hour, or even a minute. However, what typically occurs, because we don’t highlight and integrate it, is that only one body sense is focused on the positive information, rarely do we engage all of our senses when processing positive information to fully integrate that information deeply. Noticing the positive and integrating it is the difference between simply noticing a sunset visually (i.e. looking a beautiful sunset), and noticing how your body feels (i.e. body sensations) when you look at the sunset, what emotions are correlated with that positive experience, the soothing sounds associated with that sunset, and any other sensations associated with that experience. Highlighting the senses and linking the senses with positive information changes the way your body and mind store the memory of that experience. Highlighting something moves it from being merely positive information, and moves it to a place in the mind where it can be stored as a memory. And the more you highlight the experience, the stronger the memory is.
So the reality is that we all have positive things that happen on a regular basis, but for most of us, the positive things stay in the form of mere information, and not as actual positive experiences. And building gratitude in both the mind and body is much easier to do if we use techniques that help grow the positive experiences within us. BrainSculpt MindSpa has many programs that are uniquely focused on building a sense of gratitude through the use of highlighting techniques, thereby deepening the well from which you can draw upon when reviewing the positive things in your life.
