The How of Gratitude

The first "secret of happiness" recommended by this book is so easy that it feels like cheating!  It involves thinking grateful thoughts.  This can mean a constant sense of appreciation and gratitude, but it can also be as ridiculously easy as writing down 5 good things that happened to you once per week for 10 weeks in a row!  That would take, what, 30 seconds per week?  And yet that study found a measurable increase in happiness relative to the control group, more time spent exercising, and fewer physical symptoms such as headaches or coughing.  Other studies found similar results with similar tiny investments of time and effort by the subjects of the study.

Why does a small amount of practice thinking grateful thoughts provide a measurable boost to the average person's happiness?  According to the author, the number one reason grateful thoughts make such a difference is that they help you appreciate the good things that happen to you for a much longer time.  The author refers to something psychologists call "hedonistic adaptation".  This is a fancy way to say that most of us quickly get used to the changes in our lives, whether these changes are good or bad.  We feel happier or sadder for a while, but then return to our usual typical level of happiness.

Grateful people, on the other hand, continue to express how glad they are about their marriage, their promotion at work, their favorite television shows, their health, and their best friends.  They get more of a happiness boost from these things, and they sustain that boost much longer.

So how does one become more grateful?  The author's studies, and similar studies by other researchers, actually found that people who wrote in a gratitude journal just once per week gained more of a boost than people who wrote daily.  She speculates that subjects who wrote more often probably became more bored with their gratitude journals.

What do I want to do with this information?  We want to start weekly family meetings again sometime soon.  If we make each person in the family describe 5 things that they are grateful for, the studies suggest this alone will help us all become more grateful in general and happier.  But I do consider this a minimum.  I also want to continue other practices that I've been doing based on other books that are likely to further reinforce a sense of gratitude in my family and friends.  For instance The 10 Greatest Gifts I Give My Children: Parenting from the Heart recommends steering ordinary conversations, whenever they arrive, away from the negative and toward the positive.  When the kids are complaining about things, address these issues as needed but don't dwell on them.  Redirect them to the good things that happened during the day, the people they like, the stuff that's going well.  This works for kids, friends, people at work, and strangers.  It's a great way to spread a sense of gratitude to everyone you interact with.