How Practicing Gratitude Can Make You Happier
Here’s how practicing gratitude can make you happier. Happiness has everything to do with gratitude and being grateful. People who express gratitude are much more happier than people who don’t.
In college, my Senior Seminar class was assigned to write a thesis on gratitude. Each year the senior psychology students are assigned a topic of discussion by the psychology department and are given two months to write and research the topic before handing in a 22-page thesis explaining the direction that the student decided to go in with the topic. I decided to discuss the different modes of gratitude—thinking, feeling, acting… As I researched gratitude, I figured that not only would discussing gratitude as an action verb, but follow the trail a little further and look at the implications of practicing gratitude.
I discovered that gratitude is more than all of that. Like a flower, gratitude has to undergo a process of germination before it becomes second nature. The first step begins when one makes the conscious decision to be grateful—this decision then plants the seed for further grateful thinking. Unlike breathing or walking, gratitude is voluntary and we have to nourish the seed before it can sprout roots and grow into a beautiful flower.
Gratitude is an interesting topic of discussion for positive psychologists. In fact, as I did research for my thesis I discovered a menagerie of research on the topic. Dr. Robert A. Emmons, author of Thanks! How Practicing Gratitude Can Make You Happier and co-author of Practicing Gratitude is at the forefront of the Positive Psychology movement, and with hundreds of articles published on the topic along with the two books mentioned, all a curious mind has to do is type his name into the search bar of their browser and up pops dozens more hits.
One study in particular by Dr. Emmons and Dr. Michael E. McCullough, “Counting Blessings Versus Burdens: An Experimental Investigation of Gratitude and Subjective Well-Being in Daily Life” that explores the effects counting one’s daily blessings. The control group was required to keep a gratitude journal while also listing five irritants each day. The interesting part is that the control group was essentially training their minds to think differently—not just gratefully, but critically, taking in not only their emotions, but also their physiological state and life circumstances. A few benefits mentioned were increased sleep and in feelings of well-being, and a decrease in physical pain (pp. 385-85).
Gratitude’s emotionality brings people close together, especially in times of need. Psychologists Michael E. McCullough, Marcia B. Kimeldorf, and Adam D. Cohen (2008) explain gratitude’s prosocial ability in “An Adaption for Altruism” and explains that altruism it is at the heart of receiving gratitude because it positively reinforces the expression of gratitude—“saying ‘thanks’ increases the likelihood that benefactors will behave prosocially again in the future (p. 282).
Another factor is motivation. To expression gratitude, it begins with a person’s internal locus of control (the psychological term for the phenomenon in which someone knows that they are in control of their life). Emmons drives this point home with a quote from Brother David Steindl-Rast, “We can decide to live gratefully. By living the gratefulness we don’t feel, we begin to feel the gratefulness we live” (Emmons, pp. 180-81). The motivation to express gratitude has to come from within—from the roots of our mind, not the brainstem or the neurons, but more likely in the control center of our thoughts and motivations, the brain’s prefrontal cortex. When a person makes the cognitive decision to be grateful, it’s only a matter of time before they begin to feel the germination of gratitude has happened.
Sources:
Emmons, R.A. (2008). Thanks! How Practicing Gratitude Can Make You Happier. New York: Houghton Mifflin.
Emmons, R.A, & McCullough, M.E. (2003). “Counting Blessings versus Burdens: An Experimental Investigation of Gratitude and Subjective Well-Being in Daily Life.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 84(2), 377-389. Retrieved June 17, 2015, from http://www.stybelpeabody.com/newsite/pdf/gratitude.pdf (2003).
McCullough, M., Cohen, A., & Kimeldorf, M. (2008). “An Adaptation for Altruism?” Current Directions in Psychological Science, 17(4), 281-285. Retrieved June 18, 2015, from http://ggsc-web02.ist.berkeley.edu/
Sunflowers in the Field photo courtesy of blackthumbgardner.com
For more information:
Counting Blessing versus Burdens
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