Gratitude can be learned

ChroniquesDuVasteMonde WOMAN: Are people happy because they have reason to be grateful - or are we grateful because we are satisfied?

Henning friend: I assume that gratitude is the prerequisite for satisfaction. When I am grateful for the good in my life, it also keeps me from dissatisfaction - that is, from consuming myself for things I can not or can not achieve. A grateful attitude even helps to protect against depression. Of course, depression always has many different, including physical causes. From a psychological point of view, however, one could describe depression as the inability to distance oneself from unattainable goals.

The 48-year-old teaches religious psychology and conducts research on gratitude.

There are supposedly studies that show that gratitude makes you happier than infatuation.

If there was this study, I would say that apples were compared to pears. Everyone knows that being in love is a high-intensity, but temporary happiness. Gratitude, on the other hand, is a quiet, unspectacular feeling that has a long-lasting positive effect on our state of health. In short, falling in love makes you very happy at times. Gratitude does not make you happy, but it's sustainable. And then we call this sustainable well-being satisfaction. This is true only if gratitude is a basic attitude that is so stable that it is almost a personality trait. There are also fleeting states of gratitude, for example when someone gave me great pleasure.

If gratitude is a personality trait, is it even possible to learn it?

Our youngest daughter is two and a half, on Saturdays we like to go out with her on the market, she always gets from the market people something small, a roll or a sausage. My wife and I have repeatedly encouraged Paula to thank her. But she often did not want that, so we reminded her, "You will not get the bun until you say thank you." Recently she announced: "I'm not coming to the market, I do not want to get anything for free!" Why am I telling this? To show that gratitude has two components - on the one hand, the pure, joyful acceptance that small children can do especially well and that is probably innate. The other component is the ability to discern the good intention of the giver to thank him with words or even a return. This ability does not begin until the age of four and reaches puberty, with increasing cognitive development: it is learned through experience and education.

Even a rather ungrateful, dissatisfied person has the chance to lead a contented life?

Many people with dissatisfied attitudes have experienced as a child that their basic needs have become chronically frustrated. One way to rediscover or learn gratitude is through relationships that correct our bad experiences - for example, with a sensitive partner, but also with a good psychotherapist. However, gratitude can also be learned as pure behavior, simply by practicing it without first feeling the appropriate sensations or inclinations. At some point, well-being sets in through the practice. This is what our gratitude training program builds on.

What are these exercises?

A classic technique is called "counting blessings", "counting blessings". It consists of writing down five things every night that you are grateful for. Other exercises also suggest expressing gratitude, for example in the form of a thank-you letter.

Religions know many ritualized forms of gratitude, in Christianity, for example, the table prayer or thanksgiving. Have the secularized societies with faith lost the practice of being grateful?

I would put it this way: Gratitude reminds us that we depend on the support of others, or on the protection of God or a higher power. This knowledge of the vulnerability and dependence of the individual - and thus the meaning of gratitude - is not very popular in a society shaped by individualization, prosperity, and worldliness like ours. Sometimes it only returns to our consciousness when we experience that things like health or material safety are not self-evident. Then even from overcome crises and strokes of fate new gratitude and satisfaction can arise.

Does the ability to be grateful increase in the course of life?

I do not know of any study.However, research has explored the relationship between gender and gratitude: women are more grateful than men for judging that feeling more critically and for benefiting less from their emotional and interpersonal well-being. So women have much easier access to gratitude and their positive effects than men ...

... because the feminine stereotype makes it easier for women to accept their vulnerability and dependency? Men prefer to see themselves as strong and independent.

I would not speak of role stereotypes, but of role behavior: While women derive most of their well-being from the bond with other people, for many men is still the achievement, the professional success as the main source of satisfaction. By the way, American men judge gratitude more critically than German men. Probably because the American-American concept of the self-made man fits even worse than the German male ideal with the insight to be needy or dependent.

But sometimes there is little reason for gratitude: how do you manage to be grateful when you are lonely, ill, or otherwise unhappy?

Why should one have to be thankful in such a situation? If you have reason to be sad, disappointed or angry, then you should not force yourself to cover it with gratitude. That would be just another burden. No, everything has its time: the gratitude, but also the complaints and the anger.

Gratitude Training: Join in!

Together with Dr. Dirk Lehr from Leuphana University Lüneburg has developed Henning Freund, Professor of Psychology of Religion at the Protestant University of Tabor in Marburg, Germany, for about four weeks of online gratitude training. It is aimed at people who are prone to brooding and many worries and want to do something about it. The daily time is about 15 minutes, plus a little longer exercise per week. You need access to the Internet and your own smartphone to use the "Gratitude App", which is the central building block of the training. The training is part of a scientific study: Participation is free, but you must be prepared to provide information on your health and quality of life before and after the training in the form of an online questionnaire. Information and registration at www.geton-training.de/dankbarkeit.php.