Framing The Positive Argument

"To speak gratitude is courteous and pleasant, to enact gratitude is generous and noble, but to live gratitude is to touch Heaven."...Johannes A. Gaertner

We know that having a grateful attitude is very important to a happy life.  It boosts our energy, makes us healthier, and increases our engagement with people.  I believe it's a very important part of life to think about ways of being grateful, and there's a way we can help ourselves adopt that frame of mind because of something we can call "argumentative reasoning".

Argumentative reasoning is a very common psychological phenomenon where we're very good at making arguments for ourselves and what happens is we frame a position in our mind and we marshal up evidence to support that position and then we feel like we've arrived at a well justified, well reasoned chain of thought to get to a particular conclusion.

But the interesting thing is that people are usually just as good at making the "opposite" argument, to argue the opposite side, if they'd only try, but usually only one side is ever argued to ourselves.  So what I'm trying to do now is if I find myself thinking something, I try to argue just the opposite to myself, and it's uncanny just how effective this is.  For example, if I find myself thinking "I'm a terrible cook", I could think of several reasons why I'm a terrible cook or examples of why I'm a terrible cook, but then if I think to myself "I'm a pretty good cook", I could also think of all sorts of reasons and examples of being a good cook.

So the way that I can do this with gratitude is when I find myself feeling resentful or ungrateful for something, I go out of my way and "flip it" and say I'm grateful for it.  So for example, if I ever say to myself "I really hate doing the laundry", I can flip it and say "No, I'm grateful for being able to do the laundry and I have many reasons for being grateful", and in fact when I frame that positive argument with myself, I'm suddenly filled with reasons why I'm grateful..I have a working washer/dryer, I have nice clothes to wash, I have the time and strength to do this work today.

I tried this out with my family over the weekend when we became stuck in traffic.  We started to hate being stuck in traffic and then I suggested that we should be grateful to be stuck in traffic, we own a car, it makes our life easier than taking the bus, we are comfortable, we can talk to each other while we wait, etc.  It does immediately take away negative feelings when we stop and think about gratitude.

If you ever find a day when you really can't think of anything at all to be grateful for, where you can't find a way to find a positive argument, one thing that is always there is nature.  We can always be grateful for the beauties of nature, and it's always available to us, seven days a week. 

"There is indeed something inexpressingly pleasing in the annual renovation of the world and the new displays of the treasures of nature."...Samuel Johnson

Hope your day continues to be a great one!

Cheers!
Linda