Why giving thanks will make you happier – Gratitude and Happiness

8 Ways Expressing Gratitude Increases Happiness and How to Practice Daily

I know people who created a real tantrum with the use of the word Gratitude. We see on social media, like Facebook or Instagram, many people saying Gratitude, don’t we? What you may not know is that several psychological researches have been proving that expressing gratitude, saying thank you, saying thank you, telling what good things happened today will make you happier – and it costs nothing.

The Positive Psychology

Positive Psychology emerged in the United States at the beginning of this 21st century, with the aim of studying the optimal states of human functioning. Instead of focusing attention on mental disorders and illnesses, researchers basically started looking for answers about psychic well-being. In summary, what can we do to be happier?

Thus, a gradual scale with 3 bands is considered:

Mental Disorder —> Normality —> Psychological well-being

Mental disorders have been studied by psychology, psychiatry and psychoanalysis for many decades and books and books have been written about the human affliction. However, until the emergence of humanistic psychology in the middle of the last century, we found little content about personal fulfillment, about happiness, contentment, joy, well-being.

Over the decades, humanistic psychology has lost ground to so-called cognitive-behavioral therapies and the emphasis on psychological well-being has been sidelined again (although, of course, treatments for mental disorders aim to increase the quality of life of patients).

So, Martin Seligman, in 1998, created a manifesto to increase the number of research and works again about what makes us happy, about what gives a sense of accomplishment, about how to move from normalcy to an optimal state of functioning.

Since then, positive psychology – along with neurosciences – has been developing at a rapid pace.

See also: Positive Psychology: Virtues, Character, Talents and Skills

The Science of Happiness

One of the most prolific researchers in this area is Sonja Lyubomirsky. In the book The Science of Happiness – How to Achieve Real and Lasting Happiness – she explains that “achieving happiness does not necessarily require digging into your childhood, psychoanalyzing the traumatic experiences of the past or dissecting your habitual way of relating to others. Nor is it essential to secure a better paycheck, obtain a cure for an illness, or regain youth and beauty.”

What is needed to increase our degree of happiness is to change small everyday behaviors. In the book, she mentions 12 of them, and among them is there: expressing gratitude.

8 Ways Expressing Gratitude Increases Happiness

1. Thinking gratefully encourages you to savor positive experiences.
2. Expressing gratitude favors self-worth and self-esteem.
3. Gratitude helps people deal with stress and trauma, that is, the ability to value the circumstances of your life can be an adaptive coping method by which you reinterpret stressful or negative experiences
4. The expression of gratitude encourages moral behavior
5. Gratitude can help establish social bonds, strengthen existing relationships, and nurture new ones.
6. Expressing gratitude tends to inhibit unsympathetic comparisons with others.
7. Practicing gratitude is incompatible with negative emotions and can actually lessen or dampen feelings like anger, bitterness, and greed.
8. Gratitude helps us thwart hedonic adaptation (our ability to adjust quickly to any new circumstances or events), that is, to no longer recognize all that is good in our daily lives.

A Simple Practice for Expressing Gratitude

A very simple way to express gratitude and make gratitude a habit that will increase your level of happiness in no time is what we call counting your blessings or writing down 3 good things that happened to you over the course of a day.

You can write it down in a notebook, diary, on your computer or on your cell phone – it doesn’t matter. What matters is every night remembering to write down 3 events, situations, things you are grateful for. It could be for what you can eat (a dish you love), or for having this or that object that you wanted so much and now enjoy (like a cell phone) or for being able to meet a family member or friend, etc.

Each person will evidently have to find what is good for themselves in the course of a day. And, of course, over the course of a week, a month, the 3 things will vary.

However, although they change over time, giving thanks starts to become a habit. We start to notice how we have so much positive things in our lives and we get used to it and don’t rejoice anymore. We also started not to complain (so much!) about what we don’t have or achieved yet, about what is missing or what we would like to be different.

As I said above, Positive Psychology sought to test practices and activities that modify our sense of well-being. And the practice of expressing gratitude has been experimentally proven to be a useful practice for this purpose and even for depressed people.

Conclusion

A very interesting feature present in science is curiosity combined with doubt. If you’re one of those people who can’t stand hearing the word Gratitude on social media anymore, that’s fine. Be at least curious and doubt what I said in this text and test it for yourself.

Take the test at the end of the day to write down 3 good things that happened to you and do this for two months. After 8 weeks, then, evaluate and see if you (and even other people around you) are not being happier and more cheerful. It is common for even the people around you, close or not, to notice that you have perhaps stopped complaining about every little thing and smiling more…

PS: It helps to put a reminder on your cell phone or a notice next to your bed so you don’t forget to do the activity before bed.

See also: Positive Psychology: Virtues, Character, Talents and Skills

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