Feeling depressed? Make a gratitude list. Resentful? Get to a gratitude meeting. All you need is an attitude of gratitude.

It can border on the trite, the saccharine, the listing small blessings for which one might be grateful: the rain didn’t become torrential until after I got home, that driver let me merge into the exit lane, I caught a whiff of azalea, my favorite pair of jeans are clean, my brand of peanut butter is on sale, I heard the grumpy crossing guard laughing with a passing child this afternoon.

About thirty years ago Charles Figley, the Paul Henry Kurzweg Chair in Disaster Mental Health at Tulane University, coined the phrase compassion fatigue to refer to

“absorbing information and often the suffering of others through empathy. It happens when a helping professional experiences exhaustion due to caring for someone, and can lead to profound emotional and physical erosion that takes place when helpers are unable to refuel and regenerate themselves.”