The Psychology of Gratitude

Photo by Kadri Vosumae, Pexels

Fifteen Fall seasons ago, Starbucks blessed our souls with the Pumpkin Spice Latte. For fifteen years, it has also marked the beginning of red, yellow, and orange colors, fall leaves, cozy weather, and America’s oldest holiday: Thanksgiving. 

Just like it’s hard to imagine Fall without the sensational PSL, it’s also hard to celebrate Thanksgiving without—wait for it—giving thanks. But if we’re only really thankful for all the food, love, and joy one day of the year, then why is it difficult to experience gratitude every day?

This difficulty persists as it comes head-to-head with a powerful psychological force: Attention habituation. The more often we experience things, the less attention we pay to them.

The Psychology of Attention Habituation

To understand how we habituate, we must first understand how our attention works. Our brain is driven to react both consciously and subconsciously to novel environments, experiences, and expressions. We give a small slice of our attention-pie to each new and striking thing we come across in our daily lives. When it no longer strikes us as new, we get used to it and attention evaporates. Enter habituation. 

Think of the usual route we take to walk to work. Every store, building, and street looks familiar until the new coffee shop, flower stand, or food truck that sets up their shop at the corner catches our attention. We personally don’t have to stop and check out the shop—our brain just knows there’s something new and different in our usual environment. 

Imagine moving to a bustling city like New York or Hong Kong for the first time after growing up in the countryside. Naturally, you’ll toss and turn the first few nights, unaccustomed to your new city that never sleeps. After a few weeks, you will have established your new normal. Enter habituation, again.

Habituation is the accruing feeling of indifference to the outside world. We habituate more and more over time. Eventually, the new coffee shop, flower stand or loud apartment won’t feel so new or exciting anymore. It will melt into the background.

Habituation explains our natural tendency to neglect the constants in our lives like people we see every day, places we visit often, things we use daily, and habits we cultivate. Habituation also explains why gratitude is difficult to cultivate. We take for granted the little difference makers in our lives like the bed we struggle to leave, the lights we turn on at home, and the jeans we wear regularly. 

The more common our constants are, the more we habituate, and the harder it is to be grateful for them. But everyone all over the world lives differently, so how do we know which constants are the most constant?

Our high school psychology class has an answer. In 1943, psychologist Abraham Maslow solidified our needs based on a hierarchy. 

The Hierarchy of Gratitude

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs might as well be called the Hierarchy of Gratitude because of its irony - what we need to survive the most are also the things we take for granted the most. 

For example, water is one of our basic needs sitting right at the bottom of the pyramid along with sleep, shelter, sex, and more. But if you think about it, we’re not exactly always thankful for every sip of water we’ve had. That’s habituation at play. We’re only truly grateful when we’re deprived of it. 

Take James Franco in the movie 127 Hours, for instance. With no source of water around him, he had no other choice but to drink his own urine. Can’t imagine how thankful he must have been to be alive, AND drink clean water after surviving the amputation!

The higher our needs are on the hierarchy, the harder it is to keep things at a constant. That’s why it’s easier to feel gratitude after getting a promotion than it is to drink clean water every day. Our need for esteem and belonging precedes our physiological/biological needs.

With so many needs and wants to fulfill, we look to places, people, and even products to drive us to the path of fulfillment. Here’s where a selection of products, services, and experiences come in as businesses leverage on our attention habituation. How? They fill our need for constant changes through consumerism. The result? A perpetual battle between being thankful (gratitude) and wanting more (consumption). 

Gratitude Is Not Good For Business

Habituation is the enemy of daily gratitude. And the consumer world doesn’t make it any easier. How can businesses drive consumption if we consumers are content and appreciative of what we already have? They can’t.

To the world of business, gratitude is kryptonite. Would you buy the new iPhone if you were grateful for your iPhone 5? The commercialization of Thanksgiving, especially the consumption-inducing Black Friday and Cyber Monday, has made it even more difficult to be thankful. If we’re so thankful on Thanksgiving, why are we driven to spend more on things we don’t need days after?

The world today has made anything and everything accessible at the tip of our fingers. Back in the day, people were loyal to their corner stores, because they sold everything we needed. Now, the champion of the everything store goes to Amazon, which has won the hearts of 82% of American homes with its Prime Membership. Today, we let a simple click-to-buy button drown us in never-ending desires, dwindling our sense of gratitude. 

We’ve let consumerism drive our reality, so much so that our attention is always onto “the next best thing.” So where does our gratitude lie? Is it toward the newest iPhone that serves the same function anyway? Or is it in our ability to use it to call our friends and family anytime, anywhere? The lines continue to be blurred.

Thanksgiving has become synonymous with seasonal shopping. In 2018 alone, Thanksgiving Day raked in over $3.7 billion in online sales, Black Friday with $6.2 billion, and Cyber Monday was marked as the “biggest shopping day” in history bagging $7.9 billion. That’s close to $18 billion worth of sales in just 3 days. The one day we are supposedly thankful for what we already have has become the day that drives us to buy things we don’t need. 

Are we to blame ourselves for not resisting our desire to buy? Perhaps. But it’s important to know the neuromarketing tactics companies used to nudge us towards the next-best-thing or the next-big-sale.

Every Pumpkin Spice Latte season, you may find yourself anticipating Thanksgiving. This season, mind the Hierarchy of Gratitude and enjoy Givingthanks.

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What’s Next?

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References

CNBC: Cyber Monday sales break a record, with $7.9 billion spent online, Adobe Analytics says, Lauren Thomas

DigitalCommerce 360: 82% of US households have an Amazon Prime membership, April Berthene

Forbes: Every Result You Need To Know From Black Friday, Cyber Monday And The Holiday 2018 Season So Far, Nikki Baird

Gagliano, Monica; Renton, Michael; Depczynski, Martial; Mancuso, Stefano (2014-05-01). "Experience teaches plants to learn faster and forget slower in environments where it matters". Oecologia. 175 (1): 63–72. doi:10.1007/s00442-013-2873-7. ISSN 0029-8549. PMID 24390479.

History: First Thanksgiving Meal

ThoughtCo.: Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs Explained, Elizabeth Hopper 

Verywell Mind: When and Why Does Habituation Occur?, Kendra Cherry

Verywell Mind: The 5 Levels of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, Kendra Cherry

WalletHub: 2018 Thanksgiving Fun Facts. John S Kiernan