Practices of expressing thanks appear across religious traditions with considerable consistency, and gratitude has become one of the most promoted secular wellbeing interventions.
The traditional and modern forms differ in ways that are worth noticing.
The traditional forms
Grace before meals. Present in Jewish, Christian, Islamic, Hindu and other traditions, with varying formulae. A pause before eating, directing attention to the origin of the food.
Daily prayers of thanksgiving. Structured, at set times, frequently including specific items — waking, health, the day.
Jewish tradition includes blessings for a remarkable range of occasions, including seeing natural phenomena, encountering unusual things, and bodily functions, which distributes the practice across the day.
Harvest and seasonal observances. Communal thanksgiving tied to agricultural cycles, present across traditions and predating most of them.
Offerings. Physical acts of giving back a portion, present in many traditions, which converts gratitude into action.
What the traditional forms have in common
Several features that distinguish them from the modern version.
An addressee. Traditional gratitude is directed towards someone — a deity, ancestors, the earth. It's relational rather than reflective.
That's a structural difference from listing things one is grateful for, which has no recipient.
Regularity independent of feeling. The practices are performed whether or not one feels grateful, at fixed times. There's no requirement to generate the emotion first.
Communal performance. Frequently done together, aloud, which makes it a shared act rather than a private one.
Attached to action. Traditions frequently pair thanksgiving with giving — offerings, charity, hospitality — so the practice has a consequence beyond the internal state.
Embedded in ordinary activity. Attached to eating, to waking, to encountering things, rather than being a separate exercise.
The modern version
Typically: listing things one is grateful for, in writing, regularly.
Studied extensively, with meta-analyses reporting modest effects on wellbeing measures and smaller effects on depressive and anxiety symptoms.
Some findings suggest that less frequent practice — weekly rather than daily — may be more effective, plausibly because daily listing produces habituation and the exercise becomes mechanical.
Other findings suggest that specificity matters, and that writing about a small number of things in detail outperforms listing many briefly.
What the modern version dropped
Worth considering whether the omissions matter.
The recipient. Gratitude without an addressee is a different emotion. Being grateful to somebody involves acknowledging dependence and creating an obligation; being grateful about something doesn't.
Research distinguishing gratitude towards persons from general appreciation has found differences in effects, with interpersonal gratitude showing stronger associations with relationship outcomes.
The most consistently effective gratitude intervention in the research literature is the gratitude letter — writing to a specific person about something they did — which is precisely the relational form.
The community. Private listing lacks the collective element.
The action. Traditional forms produce something — an offering, hospitality, charity. Listing produces a list.
The criticism worth taking seriously
Gratitude practice has been criticised on the grounds that it can encourage acceptance of circumstances that should be changed.
The concern is that instructing people in difficult situations to focus on what they have may function to reduce dissatisfaction that would otherwise motivate action.
This has particular force where the practice is promoted by institutions with an interest in the acceptance — an employer offering gratitude training to underpaid staff, for instance.
The traditions are not obviously vulnerable to this, since several pair thanksgiving with prophetic critique of injustice, and the same texts that instruct thanksgiving frequently instruct advocacy.
Which suggests the criticism lands more on the extracted version than on the original.
What to take from it
If you want the practice to do more than the modest effects the research reports, the traditional features are available.
Direct it towards someone. If not a deity, then the specific people responsible for whatever you're grateful for — which frequently requires working out who they actually are.
Tell them. The gratitude letter is the best-evidenced version and almost nobody does it, because it's uncomfortable.
Attach it to something ordinary rather than making it a separate exercise. Before eating is the traditional choice for good reason.
Make it periodic rather than daily, to avoid habituation.
And connect it to action. Gratitude that produces nothing is a feeling; gratitude that produces giving is a practice, and the traditions understood the difference.
Gratitude in difficulty
The version that generates most objection, and where the distinction between traditions and the modern practice matters most.
Instructing somebody in genuine hardship to be grateful can read as dismissal, and the research on gratitude interventions is drawn largely from populations not in acute distress.
Traditional practices generally handle this differently. Several include forms of lament alongside thanksgiving — structured expression of complaint, grief and protest, addressed to the same recipient as the thanks.
The psalms are the clearest example, containing considerably more lament than praise, and the two are held together rather than one replacing the other.
Which suggests the traditions understood something the extracted version lost: that a practice of thanksgiving without a corresponding practice of complaint is incomplete, and asks people to perform a feeling rather than to bring what they have.