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About Our Guests:
Stephanie Bultuis pivoted from a teaching role in a public school classroom to join the Center for Transforming Engagement to contribute to the work of building healthy, purpose-driven communities. With a master’s degree in teaching from the University of Washington and seven years of teaching experience, Steph is passionate about fostering connection, growth, and learning. She is a big believer in the power of community and the dynamic spirit of humanity, that we are always able to expand our horizons when we are given the opportunities and tools to listen, explore, and connect. Before teaching, she worked at the Library at Seattle Pacific University, supervising the circulation area, event planning, and copywriting.
Dr. Danielle Zurinsky is passionate about building community and exploring the intersection of psychology and theology. She is the Research and Evaluation Manager at The Allender Center, overseeing both qualitative and quantitative research studies. She holds a PhD in psychology and her training is in research and health psychology. Danielle also has expertise in program evaluation and improvement, and teaches research methods at The Seattle School.
Episode Transcript:
Stephanie: Today we’re talking about Advent, the season of waiting, and our theme is gratitude. Dani and I were so excited to be asked to talk about gratitude. It feels like such a simple concept to talk about because there’s so much to be thankful for. For me, a book that I’m loving, Sunday afternoon dinners with my family, my healthy, hilarious toddler, time with friends, morning coffee. The list is endless. And then I think immediately of my loved ones who are in the midst of loss, who are struggling to stay afloat in a society that asks so much of us at such an impossibly fast pace. I think about the state of anxiety of our country, our world, the state of anxiety. It is in the climate crisis, polarized politics, systems of oppression, people facing trauma after trauma, and the Gaza genocide, continued war in the Ukraine, hurricanes decimating entire communities. This list too is endless. It doesn’t cancel out what I’m grateful for. In fact, it probably makes me more grateful for the beauty and joy in my life bright against the bleak news headlines. But my gratitude is often shot through with anger and sadness and whispers of guilt. The rosiness of gratitude smashed up and mixed with the heaviness of our shared losses. Like two colors of Play-Doh scrunched together in a toddler’s hands. So here’s what I’m sitting with. Do we try and separate the colors again, letting each have their space? Do we let them continue to mix until we have something that resembles a different color altogether? Numbness maybe. Or do we do something in between letting them mix briefly, acknowledging the other is present, creating a swirly ball, each color separate but coexisting.
Danielle: And we could end the podcast there with such a good question. Can I just first say that I feel it too, that tension between being grateful for and enjoying the beautiful things in life, both simple and complicated, and the heaviness of those aspects of the present world that you so well named. And yeah, as we step into this discussion together, I think a useful starting point could be to understand what we mean by gratitude.
Stephanie: Yeah.
Danielle: Being a researcher in psychology, I’m always curious to know how people who study a particular phenomenon have defined it and what they’ve discovered about it. And in this case, what do we know about gratitude and how can we use what we know about it to help us be more resilient people and to be better neighbors to one another, even when we, our loved ones, community members or the world at large are in the midst of suffering. And it turns out gratitude is an abstract concept and a complex phenomenon.
Stephanie: Tell us more, Dani.
Danielle: Research points to it being a temporary emotional state, like feeling grateful for an act of kindness from another person. And it can also be a general mood of being grateful. Like that first beautiful sunny day of spring and we’re located in Seattle. So when I think of that day, I’m always picturing people walking around Green Lake and smiling in this springtime haze.
Stephanie: I have experienced that very day.
Danielle: Absolutely. And just a general feeling of appreciation of life and the good things in it. And gratitude can also be a personality trait for some people. And they have what you might call a grateful disposition. And we know who those people are in our lives because we like to be around them. And I feel like you’re one of those people.
Stephanie: Wait me? Oh, you also, Dani, you also practice gratitude well. The idea of gratitude being a feeling a mood or trait, I like that. It begs the question that advent as a season poses for us. How does gratitude show up for you in this season of waiting, in many ways that feels dark, right? The season in some ways feels dark. Are you someone who falls naturally into a practice of gratitude when things look less than sunny? Or do we resist it and get taken over by what feels difficult and hard? My question is how do we exercise the muscle of gratitude in order to not fall into despair, be buried by it? Because really, if we are buried at despair, how much good are we able to do for ourselves or for those around us? But go on defining what gratitude is, it might make it easier for us to answer some of those questions for ourselves.
Danielle: Happily. As I was looking in the literature, I liked the definition that Robert Emmons gave. He’s a professor of psychology at the University of California Davis and an expert on research and gratitude. And he said that gratitude has two parts. The first part is that it’s an affirmation of goodness. When we feel grateful, we have a good thing in our lives to be grateful for. And we affirm that there is goodness and say, having a healthy child or sharing a meal with your best friends or even when your partner takes out the garbage. And the second part he says, is recognizing the sources of these goodness as being outside of ourselves.
Stephanie: Yes. Okay. Seeing gratitude as a way to turn our focus outward and acknowledge others in a society that is so individualistic and driven by personal success and pull yourself up by our bootstraps, like that mentality. Not to say that we can’t be proud or grateful for the things that we do for ourselves.
Danielle: Yeah, for sure. But perhaps not everything we’re grateful for is due to something we did. We have our positive qualities. Of course, it’s great to be a hard worker and say, maybe get a raise from your employer or recognition. You certainly earned that. And yet we acknowledge that many times that even when there are achievements we’re proud of, there’s also an interdependence with other people or with God. If you’re of a spiritual mindset, perhaps your neighbor helps with childcare so you can work full time and earn that raise from working hard. Perhaps your parents, for example, helped pay for the education that allowed you to get the degree to work in your particular field. Or maybe your roommate helps you pay rent so you can afford to live closer to the city and take a job that requires you to work in person and so on. So yes, affirmation of goodness and recognizing the source of that goodness is outside of ourselves. And what I appreciate about that is how antithetical it is to being entitled to something. And in this way, gratitude is the starting point to a movement to look outside of ourselves and turn toward the other, be it God or maybe a neighbor, a loved one, a friend.
Stephanie: Yeah. Your example of work and childcare is the life I’m living now. Exactly. I work part-time, right Part-time here at the school and part-time as a photographer. And I love being able to pour into the world in ways that are different from the ways I pour into my daughter every day. I’m grateful for the work that allows me to problem solve with adults and plan meaningful events and create art and memories with people. And none of it would be possible without my family being the most present village. My sister-in-Law and my parents-in-law, put in so much work every week taking care of my kid, supporting me in such tangible ways and loving on her in ways that make her so surrounded by care. I’m not entitled to that kind of support at all. They are giving it freely out of the goodness of their hearts, and I’m endlessly thankful for them. It’s the kind of generosity that doesn’t really have a way to pay it back. So what’s left for me is plain old fashioned gratitude. It’s weirdly difficult sometimes to let go of this sense of now I owe you a bajillion favors. And to just accept the gift, affirm the goodness of it, and allow it to remind me that I live in community with others that I depend on is humbling and quite lovely.
Danielle: And there are people in our lives that will just never be able to pay back. It won’t be equal. But yeah, I’ve felt the tension of that too. And we’re recording this mid-November, having also recently gone on a camping trip together with our families and group of close friends that we’ve had for some 15 years or so.
Stephanie: All hail the hurt weekend!
Danielle: The yurt weekend. It’s in these yurts. It’s wonderful. And for our listeners, Stephanie and I have been friends for a very long time, so we do go on these camping trips together with our other friends. And every year that we do this, the configuration of people looks a bit different. Some years there’s even a new child added to the pack, and each year there’s always one or a few people who are unable to join for various reasons too. But every year I feel grateful to be in a yurt, living alongside my closest friends for a few days, watching my daughter play with their kids. We’re cooking, we’re providing meals for people who’ve just provided for us too. And we’ve been doing this camping ritual every October for at least 12 years. And it gives me this mountaintop moment of looking out into all these friends’ faces and feeling so grateful that we put aside the constraints and the demand and scheduling gymnastics that we all have to do just all the time to get to prioritize being with each other as long as we can over the weekend. So I’m feeling gratitude as I’m telling that story, and I’m just affirming the goodness of that. And I recognize at the same time that there are factors at play that are outside of my control that make that weekend possible too. We’re still able, for example, to live close by to one another when other factors could have pulled us in different directions. And we all value the importance of staying connected so much that we’re willing to fight against the currents of distraction, busyness. And I value that personally, but I can’t necessarily control what other people value or what they have time for or what they invest themselves in. And yet here we are and we’re all doing it. We’re all making it happen. So I’m yes, affirming its goodness and realizing there’s a lot of factors that make it even possible.
Stephanie: So okay, we’ve defined what gratitude is: a feeling a trait that affirms goodness and recognizes that the goodness comes from outside of ourselves. And we all know that gratitude is important. It’s one of those things that we were taught is wee babes and goes as an unquestioned tenet. Dani, I’m just going to say I was yesterday years old when I realized it was tenet and not tenant. Gratitude has taken up residency in my soul.
Danielle: It lives in the apartment of your heart.
Stephanie: Indeed. Yes. But I was like, have we ever really questioned why gratitude is so important? What does gratitude do for us? Why are we taught this from such a young age? Young age? Why is it important, especially at a time when our unfettered access to information and headlines gives us so much to be anxious or angry about? So two things that came up for us when we were talking about the importance of gratitude are these, one, it can shift perspectives, and two, it can help us be more resilient and empathetic.
Danielle: Yes. Yes. And the field of positive psychology has a lot of research supporting that cultivating gratitude has a lot of benefits. We’re going to focus on a few just because the constraints of this podcast and conversation time. But just know that there was a whole host of literature talking about its physical, psychological benefits. It seems like gratitude can help shift our perspectives and build our resilience and help us get in touch with empathy and compassion.
Stephanie: It ties back to what we were talking about before, right? Gratitude is a practice that encourages us to look outward, to recognize those around us. Yes, those who are the benefactors of good in our lives, but also perhaps those who are experiencing life differently than we are. It asks us to see those who might be experiencing hardships, ones that we’re not currently experiencing ourselves, and think about how we might offer a hand or advocate for communities or make someone feel less alone. I think gratitude asks us to focus on what we have rather than what we lack. It moves us away from a scarcity mindset and towards one of abundance. I don’t think that means that we necessarily believe that an abundance mindset means an automatic reality of happiness and resources and goodness, but rather it holds the belief that those things are not finite, that humanity is capable of creating those things for themselves and for each other in limitless ways. For me, gratitude, a move towards an abundance mindset invites me to help in the creation and sharing of goodness rather than hoarding it. And that in turn helps me make meaning of what I’m supposed to do with my life and my time and how I’m supposed to treat those around me. More important now than ever when sometimes it feels like goodness is maybe scarce.
Danielle: Absolutely. Or you’re even touching upon it in what you just said. It’s like a mental, emotional, social process. And so I wanted to maybe spend some time thinking about the ways that it can also foster resilience. And this is important because we are living in challenging times, the nature of which could honestly be a whole other podcast. But to live well in these times, we need to know what tools can help us invest in our own fortitude, what’s going to help us be well enough so that we can show up for ourselves and our families, our friends, our communities, and meet the challenges of the present day with courage and tenderness. And one way that gratitude can be a tool for that is that there’s evidence to suggest that it helps you sleep better. Start with me here. There’s a study done in 2009 by Wood & colleagues and it found that when falling asleep, grateful people were less likely to have negative and worrying thoughts and more likely to have positive ones, which in turn predicted better sleep quality and sleep duration. And I loved reading through the study because anyone who struggled with sleep, be it parenting small children, both of our hands are raised struggling with insomnia or otherwise. Anyone who’s had issues with sleep can attest that having a better night’s sleep can really make a difference in how you show up for yourself and for others the next day. So if gratitude can help give you a little bit better sleep, wonderful.
Stephanie: Let us foster it. Foster it.
Danielle: Well, there’s also thinking back to the literature, there’s also quite a bit of research looking at the effects of gratitude on mental health as well. There was a study in 2022 by Kloos & colleagues that looked at whether an online gratitude app, which included modules and gratitude writing exercises used for six weeks could help people think less negatively, which is also often linked to anxiety, depression. Now, this study took place in early 2021 during the Covid-19 pandemic, a time when many were enduring immense challenges with social restrictions like social distancing, lockdowns work from home. And I’m not even naming all of the things that were happening then. We could spend a lot longer talking about that, but we remember these moments as being ones of collective difficulty.
Stephanie: Yes, it was lonely. Do you remember that picture that we have? Dani and I have a picture of us clasping hands through the glass of a window because we couldn’t be together.
Danielle: Yeah. I had walked to your house and you and I pressed our hands together on one side of the glass because we had not seen each other and we could not be together. And it was so sad. Thinking about that might’ve even been around the same time. Who knows? As the study was conducted. But yeah, those researchers found that those who did the gratitude program on the app had less negative thinking like decreased rumination. And they also had improved positive reframing, which is a coping strategy. And these improvements lasted even after three and six months. So what I want you to hear from that is tending to and strengthening your coping skills can help you endure difficult moments happening personally and collectively. What we experienced with the Covid-19 pandemic, and just on a personal note, I’ve heard it so many times this week just anecdotally, people who are weathering storms in their personal lives or weathering the fragment and divisive national landscape, we find ourselves in whose impacts are different for depending on multiple factors, including their identities or people who have both personal and societal. It’s very complex and difficult for a lot of people right now. And there is the sentiment that I’ve heard from folks where we’ve talked about it of we are not well. And yet I had a walk this morning because the weather was nice. I got to have a call with my friends, I had a nice lunch. I’m still here. You know, it’s feeling grateful for these things can help us weather the storms ahead. And there’s something about these things being held one in each hand that invite us into the tension of their coexistence. And what I appreciate about what you named at the beginning of our episode is this coexistence of gratitude and grief and the resulting ambivalence we often find ourselves in. And this question of can gratitude exist together with grief and suffering? I think the answer is yes, it does. And I think it has to as a way for us to find hope and strength when things feel difficult.
Stephanie: Oh yes, the moving metaphor of the Play-Doh ball.
Danielle: The Play-Doh ball! And just going back to that second part of gratitude, recognizing the sources of goodness is being outside of ourselves. I think this offers the opportunity to reckon with the reality that the goodness that we’re experiencing or that were the beneficiaries from may be due to privilege. And if you can do that, if you can take a moment, enjoy it, and feel your heart acknowledging the source that the goodness is outside of yourself and take a step further to extend empathy, care, compassion towards those who might not have what you’re enjoying, then so begins the trajectory towards greater humility, greater mercy and justice.
Stephanie: I think it’s a good point, and I want to sit with that word justice for a moment. Acknowledging that the source of my privilege is outside of myself, also causes to action historically, presently, and systematically. Sometimes that privilege was and is not freely given. It’s not an example of generosity, but an example of greed and self-preservation. And therein lies another tension. I can be grateful for what I have, but how can I also grow in awareness that I can live in a way that breaks down walls and dismantles the systems that put me as a white able-bodied woman in positions of privilege. How can I help build systems that offer equal opportunity and voice to all people? And how can we look upstream to start recognizing and maybe even interrogating the sources of what we are grateful for?
Danielle: Yeah, becoming more aware of your advantages and the disadvantages of others can serve as a motivating force. This is why we see a lot of interest in volunteering at food banks or community kitchens, especially around major holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas. People are in touch with their gratitude for a warm meal or for being able to give and receive gifts. And that gratitude is motivating. It moves them to donate their time and resources to others. And it helps us in that way to be better neighbors, which in turn helps others get through difficult times. And we can broaden our understanding of factors that drive inequality. At the same time as we are rolling up our sleeves and meeting our neighbors face-to-face and asking, what do you need and how can I help? Right? Actions like volunteering at a community kitchen fall under what’s called pro-social behaviors. And this is when people act in ways that are intended to help others, like sharing and comforting and helping. And you can be pro-social at an individual level like helping your neighbor by shoveling snow in their driveway. You can also be prosocial at a group or societal level, and there is evidence to support that there’s a positive association between gratitude and proso. So there’s a meta analytic review done in 2017 by Drs. Ma, Tunney, and Ferguson and – sciencey side note – a meta analytic review is great. It combines data from multiple independent studies on a topic. And in this review, they analyze data from 91 studies involving over 18,000 people and found that people who experience higher levels of gratitude are more likely to engage in behaviors that benefit others. And yes, we know this, but there’s data behind this too. Grateful people are more likely to do things that help others.
And gratitude in that way is the foundation of all give and take relationships, be it returning favors or paying kindness forward to others after someone’s been kind to you or paying it forward because you’ve been helped. Have you ever been in one of those Starbucks lines where someone pays for the order of the car behind them and so on?
Stephanie: I haven’t, and I’ve always wanted to.
Danielle: We could start in today, one day,
Stephanie: One day,
Danielle: Be the first person in the Starbucks line, but there’s a sweetness, there’s a connectedness you feel towards this complete stranger ahead and it motivates you. I mean, this is an action that keeps going. Right. It motivates you to do the same for the person behind you.
Stephanie: Yeah. Okay. So not strangers at all, but rolling back to the example of my sister-in-law, in all of her generous self, just last week, she got flowers for my in-law’s house to welcome them home from vacation. And she just said, offhandedly, you give people flowers and it’s so nice. This was very kind of her to say, because I really wish I was better about it. I’m not actually that good at giving people flowers. I just happened to get her flowers to say thank you for all the work she was doing to take care of my kid. But there you are. It sort of ended up in this little train of kindness that was born of her generosity in the first place.
Danielle: So she watched your daughter and you got her flowers, and then she got parents in-law’s, flowers because she had received the flowers and thought it was so nice.
Stephanie: It’s beautiful. It’s sort of generative.
Danielle: Gosh, I’d love to spend more time with her. She sounds amazing.
Stephanie: She is.
Danielle: And thinking about now that we’ve talked about the benefits of gratitude and what it can do and some of the ways that we’ve experienced it, when we were first approached with the idea of this podcast, my first thought was like, okay, I’ll look in the literature and if we end up recommending that people start gratitude journaling, I don’t think I’ll be able to follow through. Even though the research is very supportive of the benefits of gratitude journaling, that’s exactly what I found. Hear me when I say that. There are studies that specifically support gratitude journaling and its positive effects. And my ideal self would be someone who had a gratitude journal. My ideal self is just like a journaler in general.
Stephanie: That is all of our ideal selves. And yet those people that can do it, I just, I’m so impressed.
Danielle: If you’re out there and if you’re a journaler, you are doing something very good for yourself, add some things that you are grateful for and it will be even better. But I think with a toddler, with life’s current demands of relentless busyness and daily everything, I would just find it so difficult to realistically commit to a daily practice of getting out the pen and paper. Hopefully that’s not always true, but right now I have to be honest. It is true. So what are some other ways of cultivating a gratitude practice? And I was encouraged by the research of Schniiker and Tsang, two positive psychology researchers at Baylor University, they identified three ways that gratitude can be cultivated. And these are deep reflection, recognizing a giver and outward expression…
Stephanie: I love categories.
Danielle: Yes, yes. Let’s walk it through. So deep reflection, just paying attention and being intentional about thinking about what we’re grateful for. Just paying attention, deeply, reflecting. And next, recognizing a giver, thinking about them, perhaps even writing them a gratitude letter. And I feel like I could commit to this in a more brief form by composing a text to someone. And maybe there’s a time of day when you actually have a few minutes to do something like that. For me, I think it would be probably when I ride the bus to work. Yeah, there’s not a lot of multitasking that happens when I ride the bus to work so I could focus on one activity. And finally, outward expression. If we stay with my example of texting someone you’re grateful for, it’s not only the writing of the text, although that is beneficial, it’s also the sending of it outwardly expressing thankfulness to a giver. And bonus points, the person who receives it will likely feel grateful for you too.
Stephanie: I love that Dani. Like I said before, I do like categories. It gives me a good framework of how to think about things. So like you named oftentimes is not on my side. I love the idea of deep reflection through journaling and meditation, but in reality, I don’t give myself the time to get into that head space very often. To get into that head space, I need to give myself some time to quiet my brain down. And then the actual time for the actual writing part just doesn’t happen with a toddler these days. But it does mean that I need to get a little bit more creative about how I cultivate gratitude. And so one of the things that you pointed out for me is my one second everyday practice. I’m not going to call this deep reflection, but medium reflection maybe. I’ve been using the One Second Everyday app for six plus years now.
An app introduced to me by one of our friends, Sarah, that as a name might suggest, has you record one second of every single day. And I love looking back on my one second. Some of them are miraculous. One second, I’m very pregnant, and the next second I have my tiny baby at my arms. One second, I’m hiking with friends. Then the next, I’m waking up to a mountain sunrise. But more often than not, my one seconds are snippets of the everyday: cherry blossoms, my cat yawning a friend, making a ludicrous face, my brother reading a book to my kid, reminders that there are moments of beauty in the ordinary and the extraordinary, and they happen all the time. When I look back on years worth of these small moments, there is no doubt that there is an abundance of goodness that exists in the world. But I want to think about ways in which I’m recognizing the giver and cultivating outward expressions of gratitude too. Not just at Christmas or birthdays, but every day. I dunno, maybe I choose three people to call and check in on each week and make sure to tell them I’m grateful for them somewhere in there.
Danielle: Yeah. I mean, give it a try. We can experiment with these things. Find something that fits. I’ve heard stories of people setting phone reminders to text or check in on somebody, and that could be another tool. But I think for the sake of ourselves, our neighbors and our communities, thinking about how to maintain gratitude even during challenging kinds is an important question to be asking ourselves. And yeah, I love that we got to spend some time I asking it together. I love this conversation with you.
Stephanie: It ended up being a bigger question than I thought initially.
Danielle: Yeah, absolutely. And yeah, there’s a lot of places we could go with it. But specifically to have this conversation with you as someone I’m deeply, deeply grateful for is such a privilege.
Stephanie: So grateful for you, too, Dani.
Danielle: We took a few minutes, a few minutes, now it’s gone. So gratitude is, and we also have to hold the tension that gratitude still exists even during difficult times personally and collectively. And we covered how gratitude can become a resource that helps us to build up our resilience, to meet the challenges of the present day while reminding us of our privilege and inviting us to be good neighbors and community members. So for everyone listening before you move on to the next thing, our podcast will conclude in just a few seconds, and before you hit next on your next podcast in your queue or enter your house after walking your dog, if you’re me, I just want to encourage you to take maybe one or two minutes to just be in it. Think about it, reflect on your own experiences of gratitude. What’s something that you’re grateful for right now. Right now.
Stephanie: And with that, thank you so much for tuning in today. Listeners, we are by no means professionals in this field, and it’s been a good practice to muddle through some of these thoughts and ideas with each other. We’re grateful for you and sign off with wishing you a meaningful and blessed Advent season. Go in peace.
