Learning how to be more grateful can enhance all your life experiences.
We all have things in our lives that we can stop and be grateful for, but it is hard to appreciate them. We can get wrapped up in our worries and issues that cause us to miss out on all the great things we have going on in our lives.
Why we are not Grateful
Part of being grateful is linked to genetics and circumstances. However, there is one thing we can control when it comes to being grateful. One of the main reasons we aren’t as grateful as we could be is because of hedonic adaption. Also known as the hedonic treadmill, this is the theory that people repeatedly return to their baseline levels of happiness, regardless of what happens to them.
The hedonic treadmill has been observed with lottery winners, as well as people who have had major accidents resulting in limb loss. For both positive and negative realities in life, people get used to the circumstances and eventually return to their base level of happiness. By learning to appreciate our blessings, we can raise this base point of happiness higher and higher. Being grateful is a key component in raising this happiness bar.
The Benefits of Learning How to Be More Grateful
Besides just raising our baseline of happiness, being grateful has several other benefits as well.
1. Improved Personal Relationships
Harvard health found that in a study of couples, those who took time to express gratitude for their partner felt not only more positive toward the other person but also felt more comfortable expressing concerns about their relationship. Which can help lead to more communication and a stable relationship.
See this guide on how to have a long-lasting relationship!
2. Improved Work Relationships
A study at the Wharton School divided a group of fund-raisers into two groups. One group didn’t receive any praise, while the other received pep talks from the director of annual giving, who told the fund-raisers she was grateful for their efforts. The following week, the university employees who heard the messages of gratitude made 50% more fund-raising calls than those who did not. Just being more grateful for those you work with and expressing it can raise both their good feelings towards you, as well as increasing their productivity towards the organization’s mission.
3. Gratitude reduces negative emotions and increases positive ones
Gratitude reduces feelings of envy, resentment, frustration, and even regret. A leading researching in gratitude, Robert Emmons, found that when teaching people about gratitude, those who followed through the gratitude practices he assigned, had dropped their baseline depression by half, and increased their social interaction, life satisfaction, and knowledge absorption by a third. It seems gratitude can reduce the negative feelings, and promote a series of other beneficial behaviors that all work together to increase happiness and overall well-being.
4. Gratitude saves money
In the same study by Robert Emmons, he found that life satisfaction and materialism are negatively correlated. Overall, people who want more material items, tend to be less happy. Mostly because there is always something else to have. Those who were more grateful for what they had tended to spend less on material items and also reported higher levels of life satisfaction.
5. Gratitude improves Self-Esteem
Studies have shown that gratitude lowers social comparisons, which allows grateful people to appreciate other’s accomplishments and learn from them. Not only this, but grateful people also tend to be more mentally resilient. This is because of the positive emotions they feel and is a foundation found in resilience, which allows stress to less negatively affect individuals.
How to be Grateful
Being grateful is like building any healthy habit. It takes time, dedication, and energy to build the effects of it in our daily lives. Being grateful isn’t a panacea to automatically have an amazing life.
Being grateful is learning to recognize the daily blessings and the things we have going for us. The main way gratitude works are to focus on what we have instead of what we lack. Being overly thankful can seem backward and contrived at first, use the below are key strategies to help build the gratitude muscle.
1. Keep a Gratitude Journal Every Day
Write down 3-5 things every day that you are thankful for. Focus on finding new areas to be thankful for every day. Keeping a gratitude journal encourages us to be on the lookout for good things that happen every day. Even if it is something small, like the cup of coffee warming your hands on a cold morning, that is something we can train ourselves to notice.
Need help starting your gratitude journal? Check out this guide on how to get yours going!
2. Write a Thank-You Note Every Week
“wear gratitude like a cloak and it will feed every corner of your life”
Rumi
Aim to write one thank you note to a different person every week. Pick a time, like Saturday morning, and take five minutes to write a short thank-you note to someone in your life. You can deliver it to them in person to get a bigger boost of happiness. If that doesn’t feel safe, you can always mail it to them, or never send it. The act of thinking, and physically writing out a note is a good practice to increase gratitude.
3. Keep a Jar of Awesome for the Year
For when things particularly great happen, write a note and put it in a jar. Throughout the year you get to see the jar fill up and at the end of the year, you can open it and read all the amazing things that happened during the year!
4. Meditate
Meditation has been proven to increase mindfulness and positive emotions. By meditating, it is easier to focus throughout the day. With this new focus, it is easier to divert energy towards finding things to be grateful for.
5. Remember to be Grateful for Yourself
When in doubt, and on those really bad days, we can be grateful we are still breathing and are trying our best. Somedays we might not want to be grateful for anything, but we can appreciate that about ourselves. We are human and make mistakes. Even in the worst days, focus on how you are trying to be better and being grateful for that intention, even if it doesn’t happen that day.
Main Take-Aways
- Hedonic adaption can thwart our attempts to be happy
- To be happier, we need to develop it like any skill. This can be done through deliberately setting out to see the things in our lives we should be more grateful for every day.
Action Items
What are you grateful for today? How can you implement the above strategies in your day to day life to raise the standard of being happy?
