Gratitude

Why practice gratitude?

Over the past decade, hundreds of studies have documented the social, physical, and psychological benefits of gratitude. The research suggests these benefits are available to mostly anyone who practices gratitude.  Even in the midst of adversity, such as elderly people confronting death, women with breast cancer, and people coping with a chronic muscular disease.

Here are some of the top research-based reasons for practicing gratitude.

• Gratitude brings us happiness:

Through research done by Emmons, happiness expert Sonja Lyubomirsky and many other scientists, practicing gratitude has proven to be one of the most reliable methods for increasing happiness and life satisfaction.  It also boosts feelings of optimism, joy, pleasure, enthusiasm, and other positive emotions.

On the flip side, gratitude reduces anxiety and depression.

• Gratitude is good for our body:

Studies by Emmons and his colleague Michael McCullough suggest gratitude strengthens the immune system, lowers blood pressure, reduces symptoms of illness, and makes us less bothered by aches and pains. It encourages us to exercise more and take better care of our health.

• Grateful people sleep better:

They get more hours of quality sleep each night, spend less time awake before falling asleep and feel more refreshed upon awakening. Count your blessings, not sheep, if you want to sleep more soundly.

• Gratitude causes us to be more resilient:

It has been found that gratitude helps people recover from traumatic events, including Vietnam War veterans with PTSD.

• Gratitude strengthens relationships:

It helps us to feel closer to loved ones and helps us to be closer and more committed to friends and romantic partners. When partners feel and express gratitude for each other, they become more content within their relationship. Gratitude may also encourage a more equitable division of labour between partners.

• Gratitude promotes forgiveness – even between ex-spouses after a bitter divorce.

• Gratitude makes us pay it forward:

• Grateful people are more helpful, altruistic, and compassionate.

• Gratitude can even assist in the mental health of children:

When 10 to 19 year-old children practice gratitude, they have reported greater life satisfaction and more positive emotions. They feel more connected to their community.

Studies suggest that mindfulness causes students to feel better about their institution and teachers. It can also cause teachers to feel more satisfied and accomplished, and less emotionally exhausted, possibly reducing teacher burnout.

Gratitude shifts your focus from what is lacking in your life to the abundance that is already in your life but overseen. In addition to this, behavioural and psychological research has shown the surprising life improvements that can result from the practice of gratitude. To be grateful, causes people to be happier and more resilient. It can even strengthen relationships, improve health and reduce stress.

Cultivating gratitude

Are you a natural pessimist? Take the following statement to heart: the benefits of gratitude aren’t only available to people with a naturally grateful disposition. Instead, feeling grateful is a skill we can all develop and master with practice, reaping its rewards along the way.

Below is a list of the most effective ways to cultivate gratitude, according to research:

• Keep a gratitude journal:

Write down a few things for which you’re grateful every day or week. Take especially conscious decisions about what you can do to become more grateful and write it down. Write about special things, events, or specific people that made you feel grateful.  Also, think about how your life would have looked like without these things or people, rather than just taking them for granted. Furthermore, record nice surprises – things you have never expected. It will enhance the good things in our life.

• Write an old-style gratitude letter to an important person in your life whom you’ve never properly thanked:

Research proved that gratitude letters provide strong and long-lasting happiness boosts, especially when the letters are written and delivered in person.

• Savour the good in your life:

Don’t just gloss over the beauty and pleasures that come your way. Begin to savour it as if it is all new and start to live in it.  Learn to live your days mindfully, in the moment.  For more information, please see my article on Mindfulness on my website.

• Focus on intentions:

When you receive a gift, or when something good happens to you, consider how someone tried on purpose to bring that goodness into your life, even at a cost to themselves. Research indicates gratitude goes a long way towards cultivating an attitude of gratitude, among children and adults alike.

• Teach gratitude to children:

You can teach your children gratefulness early in their lives.

• Recognise the positive:

You may want to take especially note of all the positive things that happen every day, despite the overwhelming negative things that may have already happened. Even a single minute of positive experiences may be very valuable and useful. Celebrate every small victory.

• Become more metaphysical:

Research suggests that serious thinking about our own mortality causes us to be grateful for the life we currently enjoy. Consider the many people who give meaning and purpose to your life. Another study found that praying more than often increases gratitude.

Practicing gratitude can increase happiness by 25%

Psychological research has found that people’s happiness levels are remarkably stable in the long term. It does not matter whether you won the lottery or are paralysed from the neck down – after about three to six months after a significant event, the individual is found to have returned to their previous level of happiness. While these findings are deeply counter-intuitive, they also raise a serious problem for those wanting to increase levels of happiness permanently.

A possible answer comes from recent research in the psychology of gratitude. Yes, you read that correctly – being grateful might be the key to raising happiness’s set-point thresholds. This theory is supported by acknowledged experimental evidence.

Counting blessings versus burdens

In his new book Thanks! Dr. Robert A. Emmons describes research he carried out on three experimental groups over a ten-week period.

Participants were asked to keep daily journals before the experiment commenced.  They were asked to chronicle their moods, physical health, and general attitudes. The researchers used the abovementioned information to provide a comparison between the before and after conditions followed by the experimental intervention. The participants were divided into the following 3 groups:

1. The first group was asked to write down five things they were grateful for that had happened during the past week for each of the ten weeks of the study. This was called the gratitude condition group.
2. The second group was asked to write down five daily hassles from the previous week. This was called the hassles condition group.
3. The third group was simply asked to list five events that had occurred during their previous week. They were, however, not told to focus on positive or negative aspects. This was called the control condition group.

Grateful people listed more or less the following:

• sunset through the clouds;
• the wonder to be alive;
• the generosity of friends.

Hassled people listed:

• taxes;
• difficulty finding parking;
• burnt macaroni and cheese.

People in the gratitude group felt 25% happier. They were more optimistic about the future, felt better about their lives, and exercised 1.5 hours more per week (because they felt more energetic) than the hassled people in the control group.

Does it mean that happiness comes only from reflecting on the pleasure of having seen the sunset through the clouds or is there more? Dr. Emmons also expresses surprise at the findings of the study, partly because there are some reasons practicing gratitude might not always be beneficial.

Gratitude, however, may also be reminding us of our debt to others. Our sense of responsibility may in turn remind us of our dependence on others and reduce a sense of personal control.

Studies have shown that people don’t enjoy feeling indebted to others. Debt tends to make us feel depressed.

Is gratefulness just the effect of positive comparisons, does it really mean gratitude?

Yet, despite arguments that gratitude might not increase happiness, it seems though, that it does. However, is gratitude simply a result of thinking about how we are better off than others?

In a second study, very similar to the first described above, Emmons and McCullough changed one of the control states – instead of asking people to write down any events from the week, people were asked to list ways in which they were better off than others. The idea behind this study was that grateful people are comparing themselves in a positive way, they are not necessarily thinking gratefully (although it can’t be ruled out).

The results emphasised that grateful people are significantly happier than those who compare themselves, even in a positive way, to others. Unsurprisingly, grateful people were happier than those who keep on focusing on daily hassles.

Gratitude can help those with chronic health problems

These two studies received criticism for being conducted with undergraduate students. However, these studies showed that gratitude is increasing the happiness of young, healthy college students. It does not address the situation of people with serious, chronic health problems though.

In a third study, Emmons and McCullough recruited adults who had neuromuscular disorders, often as a delayed result of surviving infection caused by the polio virus. While not life-threatening, this condition can be debilitating, causing joint and muscle pain as well as muscle atrophy. People with this condition have a good reason to be dissatisfied with the hand life has dealt them.

This study compared people with gratitude to a control group where participants wrote about their daily experiences. After a 21-day study, participants who fell in the gratitude group were found to be more satisfied with their lives overall, more optimistic about the upcoming week, and crucially, were sleeping better than the control group.

Try this

Can you perhaps mention at least 3 things you are grateful for during the last 24 hours? Doing this regularly in your work, marriage, and family life is a good way of becoming aware of your gratitude.

The purpose of this is not only to exercise your gratitude but also to make it a habit in your everyday life.

For example:

• I have a house;
• I can pay off my mortgage;
• I have a car;
• I am healthy;
• I have food to eat;
• I have friends and family that love me;
• I have running hot and cold water;
• I have clean and tidy clothes;
• I can easily move (walk) on my own;
• I do not have pain now.