November 20, 2018 at 5:15 p.m.
Giving thanks is good for you
Giving thanks is good for you
We admit we don't really know whether that's true. It's no doubt fun for those who take it seriously, at least until the next morning, but the health aspects are quite unclear.
What we do know to be true is a similarly written piece of advice: Giving thanks is good for you, and those health benefits are all the more reason to do so this Thanksgiving week.
Sure, sometimes it's hard to give thanks, especially when the holiday has become so commercialized. We get lost in turkey and parades and Black Friday specials, not to mention football games and the arrival of Santa Claus and glittering Christmas decorations.
Our senses can become dulled to the holiday's very name.
Still, we Americans do manage to see just how blessed we are, usually when all our loved ones are gathered around a festive table.
Other times, it's hard to give thanks when the fast-closing year hasn't gone so well. We may have lost that job opportunity, or a loved one, or a relationship. We may have slipped into financial difficulty, or suffered illness. Maybe we just didn't accomplish all that we thought we would.
It's tough in such times to believe what Sheryl Crow taught us in song: It's not about getting what you want; it's about liking what you have.
That's where Thanksgiving comes in. By putting those we love in the seats right next to us, at least in thought if they are absent, Thanksgiving opens a window of opportunity to appreciate all the riches the people in our lives bring to us, and to see what we ourselves possess despite our flaws and frailties.
It also humbles us by forcing us to realize, as we sit for a toasty day with all our familial treasures, that others are not so lucky as we are. After all, appreciating what we have is meaningless, not to mention impossible and void of context, if we do not grasp what others don't have.
Almost always, there's somebody out there who is in worse shape, and being compelled to revisit that reality prompts us not only to appreciate our good fortune but to have compassion and empathy for the less fortunate. The impulse to give thanks is thus the starting point of charity, of kindness and tolerance and sharing.
Indeed, it is the foundation of the impulse to give in return, and from which flows the possibility of social justice.
That is a human impulse, by the way, not an American one, as evidenced by the broad range of nations and religions and cultures that each year celebrate some form of thanksgiving. It is a universal emotion of humanity.
So there's an altruism to giving thanks. But there's more, for we now know there's something else to be thankful for about giving thanks: It's good for us.
Any number of studies demonstrate this, but none more so than the Nun Study, a longitudinal study of aging and Alzheimer's disease funded by the National Institute on Aging.
The study included 678 American members of the School Sisters of Notre Dame religious congregation between the ages of 75 and 106, but baseline data was taken from the nuns in their 20s, from autobiographical essays they wrote when they took their vows, and from other youthful evidence.
The study, which is ongoing, seeks to answer questions about who gets Alzheimer's, and why they do, by tracking data from youth to older age. But along the way the researchers discovered something else: A positive emotional outlook early in life helps people live longer.
In particular, those nuns who expressed contentment - and, yes gratitude - early on were significantly more likely to be well all those years later. They were far more likely to escape Alzheimer's and to live longer, many by as much as 10 years.
Other research strongly supports the notion that gratitude makes for better health, and nations and cultures that explicitly celebrate gratitude are all the stronger and healthier and vital for it.
That's what makes Thanksgiving so important. Complaining about what we don't have turns us inward toward selfishness, while giving thanks for what we do have turns us outward toward selflessness, and toward a contentment that anchors longevity and well-being.
It's a win-win for everybody, in other words.
So in this week of national thanksgiving, may we all take a moment to give thanks for what we do have in our national life and in our personal lives. May we dwell just for a while on the bounty before us, on what we have right now, however modest it may be, and not on the things we can't have.
For the latter path is the path of isolation and regret; the former, the path of shared opportunity and sacrifice. As it turns out, lifting the glass of gratitude is as refreshing and healthy - and likely far more so - than that Guinness.
So this Thanksgiving, bottom's up: Giving thanks is good for you, and for all the world, too.
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