Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience

by Brené Brown

Call me a qualitative researcher, but I’m starting to see a trend here. It appears that many of the emotions that are good for us—joy, contentment, and gratitude, to name a few—have appreciation in common. There is overwhelming evidence that gratitude is good for us physically, emotionally, and mentally. There’s research that shows that gratitude is correlated with better sleep, increased creativity, decreased entitlement, decreased hostility and aggression, increased decision-making skills, decreased blood pressure—the list goes on. The research is persuasive, and I’ve read countless research articles and books on gratitude, but I still struggled to understand exactly why it helps so much. Until I read this by Robert Emmons. Emmons is the “world’s leading scientific expert on gratitude.” He is a professor of psychology at the University of California, Davis, and the founding editor in chief of The Journal of Positive Psychology. He writes, Research on emotion shows that positive emotions wear off quickly. Our emotional systems like newness. They like novelty. They like change. We adapt to positive life circumstances so that before too long, the new car, the new spouse, the new house—they don’t feel so new and exciting anymore. But gratitude makes us appreciate the value of something, and when we appreciate the value of something, we extract more benefits from it; we’re less likely to take it for granted. In effect, I think gratitude allows us to participate more in life. ...