HEALTH & WELLBEING

THE word “gratitude” is ubiquitous and everywhere these days. On mental health leaflets and in magazine columns, it is also emblazoned on mugs and seen often on motivational posters. All this is the result of more than two decades’ research in positive psychology which has found that having a “gratitude practice” – such as jotting down three to five things you are thankful for most days – brings a host of psychological and physical benefits.

Most of us will not want to seem, well, ungrateful. Even amongst sceptics, it is likely that they too would have been persuaded to take up the gratitude habit. When we remember to do it, we will feel better: more cheerful and connected, inclined to see the good already present in our lives. Counting your blessings, whether that’s noticing a beautiful sunset or remembering how your neighbour went out of their way to help you earlier, is free and attractively simple. But there underlies the problem. In our eagerness to embrace gratitude as a cure-all, have we lost sight of its complexity and its edge?

In positive psychology, gratitude is generally defined as a wholly good thing, a spontaneous feeling of joyful appreciation. But back in 1923, the Harvard psychologist William McDougall believed gratitude – especially when directed towards another person, rather than an experience in the more abstract way of, say, being “grateful to be alive” – was more difficult and complex to understand. Of course, there was awe for the generosity of the human spirit, and tender feelings towards the person who had given up their time to help. But there were also quiet feelings of envy or embarrassment, a sense of the “superior power” of the helper and even what McDougall called “negative self-feeling” (which today we’d call “low self-esteem”). The Japanese expression arigata-meiwaku (literally: “annoying thanks”) gets to the heart of what he meant. Arigata-meiwaku is the feeling you have when someone insists on performing a favour for you, even though you don’t want them to, yet convention dictates you must be grateful anyway. There’s a reason all this feels so annoying: being grateful throws off the balance of power and increases feelings of obligation. There’s your benefactor at the top, bathed in a sunshine glow of generosity. And there’s you, at the bottom, doffing your cap.

It might seem mean-spirited to focus on how being thankful can also obligate, diminish, or even confuse us. But as #feelingblessed becomes a performative norm, these aspects of gratitude are even more important to understand, particularly for the role they play in how hierarchical structures are reinforced in our world. A bleak tale about compulsory gratitude is that of the 13-year-old orphan Eyo Ekpenyon Eyo II. In 1893, he travelled from his home in British-occupied west Africa to take up a scholarship in a missionary school in Colwyn Bay, Wales. Less than six months after arriving, Eyo wrote to his patron, expressing thanks but begging to return home. The cold weather had made him poorly, and he feared for his life. It was a reasonable worry since three west African pupils had already died at Colwyn Bay.

Some time later Eyo did secure a passage home, but not before the British press got hold of the story. In a vicious outpouring of anger, they called him “spoilt”, “ungrateful”, and a “little prince”; their language soaked in colonial assumptions about who ought to feel grateful to whom. Not much has changed since. In The Ungrateful Refugee the author Dina Nayeri describes how, as a child refugee from Iran, she was expected to feel “so lucky, so humbled” to be in the United States. Only later did she understand how this “politics of gratitude” had subtly worked to transform her human right to refuge into a gift, one that had to be repaid by staying submissive and uncomplaining, being a “good immigrant” who stayed firmly in her lane.

This connection between power and the demand for gratitude reaches into many parts of life. When people in high-power positions are made to feel insecure, such as by having their failings and shortcomings pointed out, they commonly berate those who they perceive as inferior to them for being ungrateful. Consider the recent incident in the White House when Donald Trump and JD Vance took Volodymyr Zelensky to task for failing to show sufficient gratitude earlier this year.

These costs are part of what psychologists now call the “dark side” of gratitude. One common objection to the gratitude movement is that it risks “toxic positivity”, encouraging people to ignore and repress more painful feelings. But feeling thankful can lead to other dangers, too. People are more likely to transgress moral codes on behalf of someone else if they feel grateful to them. Members of historically marginalised groups, including women and LGBTQ+ people, are less likely to complain about unfair treatment if they are reminded first how lucky they are compared with the past. And, as studies with women in abusive relationships show, when people have been gaslit into believing they cannot survive without an abuser, gratitude makes them feel obliged to stay. Is it apt to ask, then, whether all those motivational posters should come with caveats and health warnings?

Given these arguments there is a lot to think about while trying to jot down three things you feel grateful for so you can retire peacefully at night.

Yet, the lessons of the latest research remind us that, like all emotions, feeling grateful is neither wholly good nor wholly bad. Too little, and we risk being entitled or rude, alienating those who try to help us. Too much, and we may leave ourselves open to exploitation by amplifying the power someone holds over us. Context, as always, is necessary and should always be relative.  

There are strategies that help mitigate the risk. Focusing on circumstances rather than individuals (broadly, feeling grateful for or that, rather than grateful to) can side-step the issue of power. And if you notice someone – a boss, parent, friend, or partner – expecting more gratitude than you want to give, you might ask yourself why. What might seem like ungrateful behaviour in our hierarchical world may really be an act of self-preservation, even one of political defiance.

And sometimes gratitude does need to have an expiration date. For all we may feel thankful, sometimes we have to release ourselves from the burden and move on with our lives. Gratitude is important. But so is paying attention to its limits.