Gratitude is Good for Us

As our discussion about discharge ended, Ms. Jones, stooped, her thin grey hair pulled back, and moved slowly toward her husband’s hospital bed. Gently, she stroked his head and said, “We will find a way through this; won’t we, Henry?” His fragility and his cancer diagnosis couldn’t dampen the 60 years of love that warmed the room; he opened his eyes and smiled. Before leaving the room, I said, “I am so privileged to do this work and to be involved in your care at this important time. Thank you.” A wave of emotion flowed through my body as I walked out of the room and I thought to myself, “It is a privilege to do this work. God, I love it!” For years, I had been hearing about how “gratitude is good for us” but my scientific mind wondered if this was just ‘woo-woo’ talk. Instead, I found an incredibly robust body of evidence and when I learned how to apply it, I found my experience of work transformed. Let me share with you what I learned about gratitude and how it can help us find profoundly rewarding emotional experiences as we move through our days as hospitalists. For its first 100 years, the field of psychology almost exclusively focused on psychopathology—what is wrong with the mind. Then in the ‘90s, a group of young California-based researchers started investigating healthy mental states, and the field of positive psychology was born. One of them was Robert Emmons, PhD, at the University of California, Davis. He convinced a group of promin...
Source: The Hospitalist - Category: Hospital Management Authors: Tags: Essay Hospital Medicine Mental Health Source Type: research