How would you feel if in the middle of your most distraught moment, unbound from your every day comforts and scared for your survival, a complete stranger saved your life?
– Neural Correlates of Gratitude
Practicing gratitude right before an exam eased my anxiety and I could think and focus better on the exam.
– Brightening the Mind: The Impact of Practising Gratitude on Focus and Resilience in Learning
Every samurai knew that his life belonged to his Daimyo. Daimyos often, for various reasons, did ask for the lives of the Samurai under their command. This was the Samurai’s reality and they took pride in obeying without a moment’s hesitation. Having very limited control over their external circumstances, they engaged in rigorous, lifelong training to perfect control over their internal state of mind.
For example, in James Clavell’s Shogun, when a samurai is trapped on a rock before a very rough sea with his back against a jagged and high cliff, he surveys his surroundings and weighs the odds. Realising that with his injured ankle, there was no viable means of escape, he turned away from the rest of his unit who were atop the cliff, and experiences “vast clarity”. He begins to reflect on how “beautiful the sea and the sky and cold and salt” were. Focusing his mind on these thoughts, he begins to compose a poem to express the beauty before him.
In one interview, author Haruki Murakami explained that it was much easier for him to communicate in English than in Japanese because he only knew that many words in English. Speaking and writing in Japanese was an arduous task because it entailed purposefully selecting between an inordinate number of possibilities, each with its own nuance. It mattered to him that he used the word which encapsulated to the exact degree just what he wanted to convey. Murakami was speaking in relation to novels. It must take a lot more effort to compose a satisfying poem because it has to pack more punch in fewer lines, which is exactly the situation the samurai in Shogun found himself in.
Choosing words for a poem would require “heightened prefrontal activity” in the brain, “which enhances mental abilities like creative thinking, cognitive ability and the processing of information” (Goleman, 2006). During moments of high stress, for instance, when awaiting waves to yank you towards the raging sea, “the brain secretes high levels of cortisol and norepinephrine”, stress hormones which “debilitate the prefrontal areas” (Goleman, 2006) leading to panic.
Yet, what the samurai experienced was not panic but clarity. So did King Leonidas when facing Xerxes, Jack Sparrow when he was staring at the wide-open jaw of Kraken and Nicholai Hel when he was awaiting Mother Company. These individuals managed to calm the amygdala, the region of the brain which triggers the fight, flight or freeze responses during moments of real and present danger.
As it turns out, achieving glacial calm under immense pressure is not the exclusive province of heroes of lore. Psychologists have found that simply reframing a situation makes a world of difference in our ability to respond cognitively to stresses which typically suppress such cognition. A frame is how a situation is interpreted and labelled. The samurai could have interpreted his situation as one, external circumstances forced upon him against his will, cursed his plight and struggled in ways which might appear undignified to observers but if he had in fact done that, we would experience pronounced cognitive dissonance in calling him samurai. Rather, true to form, he labelled his situation as an opportunity to be truly in the moment, to treasure the precious time he had to feast his eyes on the natural wonder before him. He was thankful that he could finally be relieved of his duty and be truly free enough to lose himself completely. Deciding to be thankful brought quiet in his mind and he could now focus on choosing words for his haiku.
Up till recently and perhaps even now, gratitude has been thought of as a character trait, or as being beneficial to emotional well-being only. Psychologists who set out to study the effect of gratitude on cognitive performance, using fMRI and other instruments, found that deliberately choosing to be grateful activated regions of the brain associated with making mental calculations, perspective taking and making predictions about outcomes of actions (Greater Good Science Center, 2018). Wilson (2016) found that choosing to be grateful made students more focused and resilient when dealing with challenging learning tasks.
In her study, students who received text reminders to practise gratitude toward learning and did do so at least thrice a week, made statements like, “Stressful aspects of learning were shown to be small in the light of gratitude”, “Practising gratitude quelled anxieties related to schoolwork” and “When I practised gratitude, I become less stressed and more willing to push forth and complete any tasks that seemed long and tedious”.
Just saying I am thankful, reframes challenges, elevates moods, increases focus, builds resilience and allows for better learning outcomes. Gratitude is the superfood of the mind.
Students can practise gratitude toward learning by keeping a journal in which they record how much progress they have made in a topic or skill. In the quest for mastery, students often suffer from the glass half empty syndrome with their eyes on how far more they have to go. Practising gratitude could show them how far they have come and fuel them for the rest of their journey.
Unlike the samurai who saw a dead end, students have before them, multiple pathways at every stage of their learning journey. Being grateful for this reality might help them quiet anxieties, focus more joyfully on their learning and still have the time to relish nature’s wonders.
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