Mental Subtraction
There’s a fair bit of research that suggests gratitude—feeling thankful for what we have—can have a positive influence on our sense of well-being, can reduce stress and temper depression, and can positively influence both our internal and social lives.
People who feel gratitude for what they have tend to reinterpret bad situations through growth-oriented filters (“this sucks but I’ve learned something from it and am better as a result”) and are more likely to lean on healthy coping mechanisms, rather than unhealthful ones, like avoidance or substance abuse.
All of which sounds pretty good, but for those to whom gratitude doesn’t come naturally, these benefits can feel out of reach.
A study in 2009 looked at the possibility that a sense of gratitude might be triggered by engaging in so-called ‘Mental Subtraction,’ which means thinking through a counterfactual in which something positive in one’s life didn’t happen.
Someone who has a spouse they love, friends they can lean on, or a job they enjoy, then, might come to take these things for granted because they’ve had them for a long time, or because they never considered how things might be different if they lacked these positive elements.
When asked to write about how such things might not have happened, however—how that relationship might never have formed, that job might have gone to someone else—and how it was actually surprising or remarkable that things turned out as they did, test subjects reported experiencing more positive affective states than another group of subjects who wrote about how these things were predictable and unsurprising.
Another, similar test that specifically had subjects write about their romantic partners and how they might never have met those partners led to reports by subjects of higher satisfaction with their relationships than for people who merely wrote about how they met their partners.
This suggests that using counterfactual reasoning to reposition positive things as surprising and wonderful happenstances might help us appreciate those things more because they weren’t a given.
The idea, then, is that we might tap into our latent capacity for gratitude by using a sort of ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ approach, thinking through how things might have turned out had a wonderful thing not happened. This can then lead to an internal recontextualization of that thing as a not inevitable, positive aspect of our lives for which we may then have a renewed appreciation.