Increasing Intellectual and Spiritual Gratitude: A Key to Mental Health and Motivated Learning

And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.

Col. 3:17

This past year a group of us published an empirical finding that will not be surprising to Christians. We found that students who indicated higher levels of certain virtues also demonstrated less anxiety and depression. Yet, what may be surprising to some Christians is which virtue proved most important. We studied the relationship between mental health and gratitude, forgiveness, patience, intellectual humility, and self-control. We found that gratitude had the strongest predictive value, by far, for lower anxiety and depressive symptom scores among students. This Thanksgiving week, it may be helpful to contemplate why that might be the case and what role gratitude should play in Christ-animated higher education.

Gratitude in General

The measure we used in this study, the Gratitude Questionnaire-Six Item Form uses a seven-part Likert scale that asks students to rate themselves on six items:

1. I have so much in life to be thankful for.
2. If I had to list everything that I felt grateful for, it would be a very long list.
3.  When I look at the world, I don’t see much to be grateful for.*
4.  I am grateful to a wide variety of people.
5. As I get older I find myself more able to appreciate the people, events, and situations that have been part of my life history.
6.  Long amounts of time can go by before I feel grateful to something or someone.*

• *Items 3-6 are reverse coded.

Gratitude, according to this scale, is measured by the number of things or people for which we feel or experience gratitude. In this respect, the old hymn that advises, “Count Your Many Blessings, Name Them One by One” gets things psychologically correct. We found that the type of gratitude that correlates with students’ mental health recognizes one’s abundance of blessings. Not surprisingly, positive psychologists favor interventions for increasing gratitude that involve helping people expand their thankfulness by counting one’s blessings, gratitude journals/app-based diaries, writing gratitude letters, etc.

Gratitude in Christ-Animated Higher Education

Interestingly, one topic I have rarely seen discussed pertains to how we foster intellectual gratitude.¹ For some odd reason, we rarely extend our gratitude interventions to the intellectual domain. Yet, to avoid making gratitude an odd, add-on virtue in our classroom, it would best to integrate it with the ends and practices of higher education in mind.

For example, one could start every class period with questions such as:  For what learning or wisdom are you thankful? For what former teachers are you thankful? What wisdom were you taught this week for which you are grateful? For what scholars are you thankful? Imagine adding this question to our students’ semester-ending evaluations: what knowledge did you learn in this class for which you are grateful? We need to teach our students to be thankful for the wisdom, learning, and intellectual mentorship passed to them.

I think this kind of gratitude, both for our intellectual and spiritual forebearers, is practiced more in Asia than in the individualistic West. I have personally experienced greater intellectual gratitude with my Asian students. For example, a former Chinese post-doctorate student always wanted to open the door for me, buy me lunch, bring gifts, and express other forms of gratitude for my mentorship.

Similarly in the spiritual realm, some friends of ours recently shared about their mission trip to Asia. During the trip, they visited a people group that had formerly been head-hunters but then had been converted through the efforts of American missionaries in the mid-1800s. During get-togethers, members of this particular people group would bow on their knees before the Americans and thank them for being the group that brought the gospel to their region. Then, they would ask for a prayer of blessing from the Americans.

These approaches model thankfulness for our intellectual and spiritual benefactors (note—of course, this kind of devotion to one’s spiritual and intellectual forebearers can be abused by the fallen humans to whom gratitude is shown—but God never abuses it). In contrast, imagine someone being bestowed with tremendous intellectual gifts and wisdom from God, a community, or a person and then walking away from God, the community, or the person without expressing any gratitude. This example resembles the ungrateful Israelites who wanted to go back to slavery. It is no wonder that one of the characteristics of the depraved mind in Romans 1:21 is “For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him” (emphasis added).

Unfortunately, current Christian higher education often omits this important virtue. Instead, we start by trying to initiate students into the rules and practices of learning without first establishing the gratitude that leads to the motivation needed for learning. When this happens, students may not engage vigorously in the hard practices of learning. Why? Because the deliberate practice of acquiring learning requires really hard work! As the famous scholar of excellence, Anders Ericsson and his co-author Robert Pool say, “Deliberate practice takes place outside one’s comfort zone and requires the student to constantly try things that are just beyond his or her abilities. Thus, it demands near maximal effort, which is generally not enjoyable.”² As Christ-followers familiar with the way of the cross, our gratitude for Christ should lead us to follow his example of suffering for good in other areas of our lives.

This same principle applies to our spiritual lives. I have interviewed numerous students who spent their youth practicing Christianity but failed to continue with their practice. The practice did not form their motivation. Thus, when given the chance, they discontinued the practice. To first thirst to become excellent through practice, one must deeply experience gratitude for God’s gifts and virtues. Experiencing gratitude for God’s gifts and virtue then produces a profound gratitude that motivates one to endure the pain and difficulty of Christian practice—a practice that leads us to fully bear God’s image through Christ’s virtue.

Christian Gratitude

Indeed, the unique element Christianity provides gratitude is an expanded understanding of the universe and the importance of gratitude toward God. For non-theists, gratitude stays on the horizontal human plane or in an ultimate sense, devolves from thankfulness to abstract notions of luck or fate or an over-realized sense of autonomous accomplishment. Aristotle for instance, thought a key quality of a person was their self-sufficiency and not their dependence. Similarly, Americans often hold up self-sufficiency or rugged individualism as a key virtue.

Christians, however, should recognize and celebrate our vertical dependence—that everything we have, both in our spiritual and intellectual lives, is from God. In this regard, Christianity provides a particular and unique impetus for gratitude. As Peter Leithart writes in his wonderful intellectual history of gratitude, “Christianity infuses gratitude into every nook and cranny of human life. Because all comes from God, thanks is offered to him for everything.”³

In fact, the most common form of Thanksgiving in the Bible pertains to thankfulness to God for others in the body of Christ (I Cor. 1:4; Eph. 1:15; Phi. 1:3; Col. 1:3; I Thes. 1:2; 2 Thes. 1:3). This gratitude should then expand into all dimensions of our lives—including the intellectual dimension. In this way, intellectual gratitude will help us remember our dependence upon God and the gifts of wisdom God offered us through others. May you enjoy the wonderful privilege and benefits of engaging in this Christian virtue this Thanksgiving season.

Editor’s Note:  We will not be posting during the rest of this Thanksgiving week.

1. For instance, Jason Baehr’s wonderful book on intellectual virtue does not mention intellectual gratitude.
2. Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool, Peak: Secrets from the Science of Expertise (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016), 17.
3. Peter J. Leithart, Gratitude: An Intellectual History (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2014), 227.