Have you ever wondered whether gratitude can genuinely raise a person's sense of happiness and satisfaction with life? Gratitude is a word you might often hear at church or from your elders. In psychology, though, it is a relatively new concept that only began to attract researchers' attention in recent years. Over a mere two decades, the academic world has uncovered the many ways gratitude improves our quality of life. So let us take four minutes to look together at how practising gratitude can lift our sense of happiness — and how we can bring gratitude into our daily lives.
What is gratitude
Before we discuss how gratitude affects us, I would first like to talk about what gratitude actually is. Gratitude is a feeling or an attitude in which we are moved by what we have received or what we possess. Because gratitude places its emphasis on what we have, when we feel grateful we must also acknowledge that there is something good in our lives. If we do not recognise the value of certain things or people, we cannot offer thanks sincerely. On the other hand, when we practise gratitude we need an object of that appreciation. That object can be a person around us, a community, or even the world itself. Being grateful to oneself is not gratitude; practising gratitude asks us to look for the contributions others have made to us. Even when we succeed through our own performance at work, we can still be thankful for the ongoing support of others. Take the statement "I am grateful that I was able to attend secondary school." Here, "I" recognise that the chance to study at secondary school is a good thing, and the object of "my" gratitude might be the advance of civilised society or the provision of my parents. Gratitude must be sincere and come from the heart, so the things worth being grateful for differ from person to person; forcing someone to be "grateful to the nation simply because they can breathe" only puts the cart before the horse. When we practise gratitude, we should instead follow our own train of thought and feel thankful to the people or things we ourselves truly believe deserve our gratitude.
The effects of gratitude
The effects gratitude brings are not limited to a greater sense of happiness or satisfaction with life. Research has found that practising gratitude can bring the following benefits:
- Improved physical and mental health
- Making us happier
- Improved relationships
- Reduced stress
- Lower feelings of depression
Still, we would all like to know more about exactly how gratitude leaves us feeling more satisfied and happier. Unfortunately, psychologists do not yet hold a unified view, and understanding the mechanism by which practising gratitude lifts our sense of happiness still calls for further research. Gratitude makes people happy. The statement sounds perfectly reasonable, yet when we reflect on it for a moment, we find that the relationship between gratitude and happiness is not as self-evident as it first appears. The psychologist Robert Emmons (2010), who has devoted himself to studying gratitude, proposed several hypotheses about the relationship between the two; I have selected a few to share, and the detailed discussion can be found in the article listed at the end.
Gratitude can help us face difficult, stressful situations more effectively. When we practise gratitude, we focus on the positive things and shift our focus away from what we have lost. This can strengthen our resilience and make us more inclined to tackle problems proactively. Research has found that gratitude makes us better able to view problems from a positive angle (positive framing) and more inclined to seek help from others. It follows that gratitude increases our capacity to withstand stress, which is one possible reason it can raise our sense of happiness.
Gratitude can also reduce comparison, thereby reducing the negative emotions that arise from it and lifting our overall sense of happiness. When we compare ourselves with others, we may feel envious because we judge ourselves to "fall short." Envy makes us feel inferior and distressed, which in turn makes us unhappy. Emmons points out that gratitude means that, when we look at other people's lives, we no longer compare our own circumstances and ourselves against them. Instead, we place greater value on, and appreciate, the help others have once given us, and we feel glad about the good things in other people's lives (it is worth noting that Emmons is not talking about the "at least I'm better off than them" mentality here). By reducing comparison, gratitude can keep envy in check and ease the problems that negative emotions bring. Another object we tend to compare ourselves against is the counterfactuals that concern ourselves. What is a counterfactual? Counterfactuals are possibilities that, because of the choices we made, never came to pass. We sometimes say, "If I had plucked up the courage, I could have…" or "If I had chosen such-and-such, I could have…" — the consequences that follow these "ifs" are counterfactuals. When we compare ourselves with counterfactuals, we conclude that we ought to put right our past actions, and these thoughts make us feel regret. Regret is likewise a negative emotion; it makes us feel anxious, unhappy, and even depressed. Emmons believes that gratitude can help us feel consoled about our present circumstances, reducing the regret we feel because of counterfactuals, and thereby improving our mood and our satisfaction with life.
The last hypothesis I would like to share is that gratitude can increase our social resources (social resources) — that is, the support that comes from other people — and thereby lift our overall sense of happiness. Practising gratitude changes how we view those who have helped us; we become more likely to repay them in various forms, perhaps with a simple thank-you, or by lending a hand when they need help. We can see that gratitude can strengthen, and even help us build, new friendships, and research supports this view, affirming the positive influence of gratitude on relationships. And once we have improved our relationships with others, our social needs come to be met (see Maslow's hierarchy of needs and ERG theory). Gratitude changes our behaviour and our mindset, which in turn improves our interpersonal relationships, so that when we are in need we also receive others' support — and our sense of happiness is raised as a result.
Practising gratitude
A grateful heart cannot be cultivated by mere words alone. One way to practise gratitude is to keep a gratitude journal (gratitude journal). How you write this journal is entirely up to you: it can be on paper or electronic, you can write in it every day, or you can record something worth being grateful for once a week. As for content, you might think about who recently has been worth your appreciation, or whether anything has added colour to your life; you could also think about how you might repay these people in future, whether you will return their help down the line, or turn the help they gave you into the motivation to help others in your community. You can try to note down a few things that rarely come to mind yet are still worth your gratitude. A grateful mindset has to be trained. By looking at your own life from different angles, you may discover that the things worth being grateful for are far, far more numerous than you had imagined.
References
Emmons, R. A., & Mishra, A. (2011). Why gratitude enhances well-being: What we know, what we need to know. In K. M. Sheldon, T. B. Kashdan, & M. F. Steger (Eds.), Series in positive psychology. Designing positive psychology: Taking stock and moving forward (p. 248–262). Oxford University Press. https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2010-25557-016
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