Ingrates

While I remain staggered by the willingness of a sitting president to engage in a twitter war over “gratitude” with UCLA-basketball-dad LaVar Ball, there is more than simple naïve insecurity at work here. There appears to be something about human nature that is begging for an explanation… why expressing gratitude, sincere thanks beyond the polite automaton “thank you” at work, is so difficult for people. Picture mommies and daddies constantly reminding their reluctant little charges to say, “thank you,” and how rote-like that can become.

We often hear that success teaches us nothing, but failure and recovering from failure imbues us with knowledge, experience… and most of all… meaningful life lessons that are the basis of personal growth. Huh? Why is the good stuff less important? Again, another lesson in human nature?

Just looking at your own emotions, real feelings, how often do you feel waves of gratitude and the need to express that gratitude versus the moments when something angers you or generates genuine outrage? In short, what is the ratio of such deep feelings of thanks versus those moments when you feel outrage? Be honest.

Generally, across the broad spectrum of human emotions, feelings of outrage and anger overwhelm those moments of overwhelming gratitude. There’s an innate, if not atavistic survival mechanism, which frequently treats anything different with an immediate reaction of distrust, dislike and even fear.

As I have noted before, introduce a new strange element into the wild (even an inanimate big black box), and animals do not run to embrace it. They may circle around it, maybe sending family leaders into to sniff it out, but as they say, curiosity killed the cat. Many experts have attributed racism and other such negative reactions to those who are “different” to this ancient “survival-driven” emotion. Even though we may think of ourselves as more “evolved” than that, statistical research seems to bear out this cautionary emotion of negativity as deeply embedded into the human psyche.

“‘Part of the reason we are so quick to be outraged, yet slow to offer gratitude at work and in life, more broadly, is because of the widespread finding that human beings possess a negativity bias,’ says Christian Thoroughgood, assistant professor of psychology at Villanova University.  He says that even when they’re of equal intensity, negative events and experiences have a much more potent effect on our thoughts, emotions, and behavior than do neutral or positive events and experiences.

“‘Being yelled at by your supervisor is likely to cause you to become much more angry and upset,’ he says, ‘than a client reaching out to express their gratitude to you would make you feel happy and joyful.’ In fact, Thoroughgood says, research on employees’ daily work experiences finds that daily frustrations and upsets are five times more impactful on employees’ emotions than daily uplifts.

“The reason lies deep within our brain and hasn’t evolved much past the point when we were hunter-gatherers. Back then, humans were fine-tuned to sniff out a simple shift in the wind that could signal a serious situation. Most of the time the threat wasn’t there, but the high alert meant the difference between survival or death. Although that’s no longer the case, the amygdala, our little caution center in the brain, is still hard at work sifting through all available information to surface danger.

“But now there’s much more information to process on a daily basis than there was when our eyes scanned the horizon for potential threats like a predator, fire, or storm. However, that firehose of information still gets funneled through the amygdala.

“Is it any wonder then that with our daily work/life stress combined with the constant onslaught of horrific headlines of mass shootings and sexual assault, outrage dominates our consciousness? … As Thoroughgood observes, ‘We don’t think to be grateful because we’re often too preoccupied thinking about what has recently gone wrong.’” FastCompany.com, November 23^rd. In short, you have to learn to be grateful most of the time, and that actually starts with thinking about gratitude a lot more than we do and in giving credit to others for what they do. You have to want to have more gratitude in your life.

I’m Peter Dekom, and I actually wrote this on Thanksgiving Day.