Kiss your Brain: How Gratitude Helps Us Learn and Be Happy

Gratitude may seem like a very simple thing. We say thank you when somebody helps us, we feel grateful when something good happens, and sometimes we remind ourselves to appreciate what we have. But can gratitude make the learning process more positive and motivating? Which comes first, gratitude or progress?

Learning a foreign language takes time, and learners often pay much more attention to their mistakes and difficulties than to their progress. They remember their mistakes and they often forget to notice their progress be grateful for it.

Brother David Steindl-Rast, a Benedictine monk who has spent many years speaking and writing about gratefulness, asks a very interesting question: Are we grateful because we are happy, or are we happy because we are grateful? Steindl-Rast suggests that it is not happiness that makes us grateful, but gratitude makes us happier.

We can use the same pattern with learning a language. We do not have to wait until we speak fluently to appreciate our progress, we could just be grateful for what we already know and use this perspective to support our motivation.

What happens in the brain when we feel grateful? Can gratitude help us learn?

Gratitude itself will not teach us English or another language. It will not help us remember an irregular verb if we have never learnt it, and it cannot replace practice, repetition or feedback. But it can influence some of the conditions around learning.

Research gives us good reasons to take gratitude seriously: gratitude practices have been linked to better well-being and positive emotions, and studies show that gratitude involves the medial prefrontal cortex. The prefrontal cortex also plays an important role in attention, working memory and goal-directed behaviour – processes we need for learning.

One particularly interesting study looked directly at gratitude and academic motivation. In 2021, researchers Nawa and Yamagishi asked university students to take part in a two-week online gratitude journal intervention. The researchers found that regular gratitude was associated with improved academic motivation.

Gratitude can also help our students notice progress that they might otherwise ignore. Their mistakes maybe have not disappeared, and they still need attention and correction, but the difference when they are grateful for every small achievement is that mistakes are no longer the only thing they notice. It is not about pretending that everything is wonderful but about seeing a more complete picture, having more positivity and happiness during learning. Happy brain learns better, faster and more efficiently.

Gratitude in my own life

Gratitude has become part of my own life and a powerful tool I use in my teaching. I keep a gratitude journal and regularly write down the things I am grateful for. They do not have to be big, sometimes they are very simple moments or things that could easily go unnoticed. It helps me focus on things I have accomplished and have better perspective about myself, stay positive and motivated.

The Kiss your brain method

One of my favourite gratitude practices comes from psychologist and educator Dr Christina Costa. Before becoming a psychologist, Christina was a teacher, and she taught her students to kiss their brain. They would kiss their fingers and then touch their head as a small gesture of appreciation for the work their brain had done.

Later, Christina was diagnosed with a brain tumour. Instead of thinking about her body and brain only as something she needed to fight, she consciously practised gratitude towards her brain and appreciated everything it was still doing for her. She also expressed gratitude towards her medical team and the people who were helping her. (She tells her story and talks about the science of gratitude in her TEDx Talk Kiss Your Brain: The Science of Gratitude.)

I loved this idea when I first heard it because it connects gratitude directly with learning. And since then, we have been finishing every lesson with my students kissing our brain.

Costa also connects gratitude with neuroplasticity, our brain's ability to change throughout life. I do not believe that this little gesture magically changes the brain, but it creates a small moment of gratitude in the learning process and reminds learners to notice what their brain has just managed to do. They have tried, remembered, made connections, understood something new or learnt something they could not do before. And that deserves to be noticed.

And what we notice matters.

Gratitude does not mean lowering our standards or telling ourselves that everything is perfect when it is not. It means appreciating progress while continuing to learn. There will always be another word we do not know, another grammar structure to learn, another pronunciation detail to improve and another mistake to correct. But there will also be things our brain can do today that it could not do before.

So sometimes, after learning something new, remembering something difficult or simply having the courage to speak another language, kiss your brain.

My multidisciplinary background combines English philology, education, distance-learning technology, artificial intelligence, coaching and neuroeducation. I am an ICC-certified life and team coach, neuroscience coach, trained with Joseph O’Connor, and a neurolanguage coach. My work focuses on how confidence, emotions, mindset and neuroscience can enhance language learning. Virginija Ros

References

1.     Costa, C. (2021). Kiss Your Brain: The Science of Gratitude. TEDxUofM.Watch the TEDx Talk

2.     Diniz, G., Korkes, L., Tristão, L. S., Pelegrini, R., Bellodi, P. L., & Bernardo, W. M. (2023). The effects of gratitude interventions: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Einstein (São Paulo), 21, eRW0371.PubMed record

3.     Fox, G. R., Kaplan, J., Damasio, H., & Damasio, A. (2015). Neural correlates of gratitude. Frontiers in Psychology, 6, 1491. 

4.     Nawa, N. E., & Yamagishi, N. (2021). Enhanced academic motivation in university students following a 2-week online gratitude journal intervention. BMC Psychology, 9, 71.

5.     Steindl-Rast, D. (2013). Want to Be Happy? Be Grateful. TEDGlobal 2013.Watch the TED Talk