Gratitude As Soul Amendment
While attending the eight day McDougall program in October 2016, we were taught the benefits of a plant-based whole food diet. Numbers for blood pressure, blood sugar, cholesterol and weight would all go down, because food really can be medicine, way more efficacious long term than pharmaceutical solutions. As predicted, based on thousands of people’s experiences, that is what happened.
However, a board certified physician for fifty years, John McDougall was also a pragmatist. If he’s in a car accident, he said, don’t come to the ER and treat him with mashed potatoes. There’s a time and place for western medicine. We can all be thankful to live in a country in which effective trauma care is usually available when we might need it. A plant-based whole food diet wouldn’t be very useful in a life-threatening emergency.
Working gratitude isn’t always first aid in acute situations, either, at least the way I know how to practice it. Maybe someone more advanced or spiritual would be able to, I don’t know. Like with food, we are taught that there are real physical benefits to increasing gratitude in our lives. There is some science now about how it affects our brain at the biological level.
The antidepressant Wellbutrin boosts the neurotransmitter dopamine. So does gratitude. The benefits of gratitude start with the dopamine system, because feeling grateful activates the brain stem region that produces dopamine. Additionally, gratitude toward others increases activity in social dopamine circuits, which makes social interactions more enjoyable.
Prozac boosts the neurotransmitter serotonin. So does gratitude. One powerful effect of gratitude is that it can boost serotonin. Trying to think of things you are grateful for forces you to focus on the positive aspects of your life. This simple act increases serotonin production in the anterior cingulate cortex.
You know what else? None of that knowledge helped me in the moment to realign my wild-ass out-of-control imagination after I got hit in the head and cut last week by some falling plaster and found myself at the mercy of my worst fears. I know we’re wired to look for the negative, our long-evolved negativity bias, so that helps, but the places I can go with health anxiety are many and tortuous. Maybe you know what I mean.
I don’t know what a more deeply spiritual person could have or would have done with gratitude at that point. I didn’t feel ungrateful, though I was clearly focusing on something negative rather than positive. This is in the aftermath, not even the first aid part, the headspace management part. I did say it could have been worse and I was present to that.
Gratitude is more like a diet, the value of which just builds over time. There can be trauma that needs a different medicine. That seems right with respect to gratitude work. That helps me not beat myself up because I’m just not grateful enough and am I letting worries get to me. That’s worth the whole experience, getting to that. Gratitude is nutrition, maybe not critical care. More like making deposits in the bank.
Also it struck me that there are soil amendments and there are soul amendments, as we get into gardening season, another way to look at this. I don’t know how much soil amendment matters when a groundhog starts turning his attention to your kale or beets in mid summer or there’s a massive windblown storm, but you’ve done all you could to make the plants healthy. You need a critical care plan to get the creature out of your veggies. I guess this daily writing is like a diet, as well, and I’ve had some breakfast now. The key is to eat all day, as McDougall advises, and not let yourself get too hungry.
There’s sacred space here to work, and it’s long term, not one and done. Susan Vreeland wrote “No matter where life takes you, the place that you stand at any given moment is holy ground. Love hard, and love wide and love long and you will find the goodness in it.”
