Close your eyes (well, not before reading this–that wouldn’t help) and let your mind show you the scenes thatplay before you when you ask yourself: What are the most blissful times of my life? These are known as peak experiences. But is the scope of peak experiences reduced to the most jubilant, joyous times, or can they involve more?
Can Peak Experiences Include Profound Gratitude?
Recently, researchers looked at whether people also enjoy gratitude peak experiences. These are–I’m sure you know where this is going–the times in your life when you felt the most profoundly grateful.
Now, as amazing as traditional peak experiences (the researchers called them generic peak experiences) and gratitude peak experiences may be, why are we even talking about this? No offense to our friend, the peak experience, but isn’t it just an awesome moment that morphs into an enchanting memory? Not a bit.
Memories of joyful times aren’t passive, dust balls. They’re active, and they can enhance our wellness; the same is true when we feel grateful. So, it’s worthwhile to more deeply understand peak experiences and how they connect to how we feel and live our lives. On that note, this study explored differences between generic and gratitude peak experience in how people and in what they’re inclined to do.
The researchers asked everyone to write about a moment in their lives, and they gave folks different instructions depending on what group they were in. Some people wrote about a generic peak experience, others about a gratitude peak experience, and a third group wrote about an experience near the present day when they felt grateful. People tended to write about moments involving interactions with people, a landmark or watershed moment, accomplishments, and advancements a person’s awareness and outlook.
The study revealed that it didn’t matter whether people reflected on a generic or gratitude peak experience; they both felt just as purposeful. On the other hand, fresh moments of gratefulness felt less important.
When people were living that moment they remembered, people in generic peak experiences felt prouder, whereas people in gratitude peak experiences felt more grateful, even beyond folks who had a grateful experience in the present.
After those times, people with a generic peak experience felt a greater sense of genuineness, imaginativeness, and competence. On the other hand, after a gratitude peak experience, people were more inclined to give back to someone who helped them, to do kind deeds, and to recognize and celebrate people.
The Benefits of Reflecting on Peak Experiences
If you’ve ever kept track of what you’re grateful for in your life today in a gratitude journal, this work could open the door to a different kind of reflection. Instead of writing about what you’re grateful for in the here and now, you could widen your horizons and try reflecting on a time of immense gratitude at any point in the past. The researchers made this general point, noting that therapists could explore the deeper significance connected to these times. They also pointed out that people could cultivate peak experiences to connect to a sense of self-assurance and being good to others, or write about peak experiences involving contact with others and enhance their emotional health in the process.
So, if you’ve ever disregarded old memories, thinking they’re useless aside from being fodder for a good story, reconsider that. There are real some real gems, just waiting for you to polish them off.
