Let’s be grateful and healthy, too

In this world of struggle and confrontation, Thanksgiving Day offers respite, even an escape hatch. What’s better than a sumptuous meal with relatives and friends (assuming those annual familial clashes can be avoided) to provide insulation from the noise?

In fact, Thanksgiving is better than mere escape, more than just a festival of overindulgence. It refocuses attention on what is good in life, and just the simple practice of gratitude is healthy for the human spirit.

That sounds like the stuff of greeting-card platitudes, but there is actual social science on all of this. In 2008 a study published by the Journal of Psychosomatic Research correlated personality traits in a study with sleep quality and found a link: Gratitude helps you sleep better.

That’s apparently not a quirk or outlier. There are other peer-reviewed studies associating the cultivation and practice of gratitude with an overall sense of well-being: It reduces anxiety and depression, and even proves helpful to victims of post-traumatic stress disorder. In addition to making us feel good, it enhances altruistic behavior.

It’s really no wonder that Thanksgiving Day occupies a hallowed spot in our American consciousness. As every elementary-school kid knows, it commemorates the survival of the first immigrants and an accord, however brief and fragmented, with the native population. But its importance goes beyond being a historical artifact.

From the beginning, Thanksgiving was all about relationships, starting at the most local level and building outward. It’s on a foundation of such relationships that the young country and its budding culture grew. The reliance on family and the community bonding was key to survival in the early years, and then to the cementing of a national identity.

The need to continue nurturing that community is felt instinctively, especially at the holidays. It’s the reason for charitable outreach projects such as the Honolulu Star-Advertiser’s annual Good Neighbor Fund drive (see box). At a time when homelessness among families and individual members of Hawaii’s community has become an intractable problem in island society, the need for assistance is greater than ever.

Every year the Star-Advertiser tells a few of their stories, and often they mirror the experience of Jenna Costa and her children. Her split from their dad began a downward spiral, landing the family in shelters, short stays with relatives and tents on the beach.

Costa was brimming with thankfulness when they were selected for the Adopt-a-Family program. Donations from the fund, administered by Helping Hands Hawaii, provide Christmas presents for the kids and a holiday meal. That, as well as placement in transitional housing, is giving them a reason for gratitude for current comforts, and hope for a better future.

The realization that this community can have a profound effect on such families is a welcome feeling in a world that frequently reminds people of their powerlessness. Having some capacity to improve lives is another among the treasures that many Americans share.

But even if this holiday is an occasion for cocooning with family rather than for changing the world, we can all enjoy the simple balm of gratitude, the attitude that’s actually good for us, on Thanksgiving and every day.