Mind Your Q's: Gratitude Is Happiness
The Intro
Confession: I've not sent a thank you card to anyone in a long time. That's not to say I'm ungrateful—the Royal Mail and I are just very occasional friends, and since today is built for the instant gratification of emojis and Messenger, a thumbs up followed by a crying laughing smiley followed by a flamenco woman feels like just the right-here-right-now way of telling someone, "great party, thanks for inviting me, flamenco dancer was a cool idea." Or something. What began as a means to making intention clearer via text, now paves the way to a language we can all speak (type). Or something.
It's not a brand new idea, sure. And with climate change woes, bees under threat, and... everything else, bad news always overpowers the good. (Negativity bias would be a whole separate blog, though.) There's also so much distraction in life that it's easy to forget to say thank you. And so! My quest for good leads me to this: your TL;DR alert is that being grateful makes you happier. :heart_eyes:
The Science
Let's be reminded of this delicious pie chart:
You can assume, roughly, that your set point of how happy you feel is 50%—this would be your inherited, unique, you of joy. Circumstance—the outside factors, like where you were born and that kind of craic—is set at 10%. The rest—a whopping 40% of the steak and ale—is up to you. That is a lot of pie, friend. A lot of pie. It's this intentional activity that can get pretty tasty; actively being more grateful is just one way to fill up and feel good.
In their study, Counting Blessings Versus Burdens: An Experimental Investigation of Gratitude and Subjective Well-Being in Daily Life, Emmons and McCullough looked at people's happiness levels in relation to whether they focused on negative or positive occurrences during the study. Obvious spoiler: Across the board, the grateful group averaged more sleep, less pain, felt more refreshed, and felt more functional overall. Quel surprise.
They concluded that "gratitude is effective in increasing well-being as it builds psychological, social, and spiritual resources... The experience of gratitude, and the actions stimulated by it, build and strengthen social bonds and friendships. Moreover, encouraging people to focus on the benefits they have received from others leads them to feel loved and cared for by others (Reynolds, 1983)."
In other words, hallelujahs, thankyous, and fist bumps cover a gamut of healthy. Likening gratitude to love, they go on to explain that being consciously grateful "enables flexible and creative thinking, it also facilitates coping with stress and adversity (Aspinwall, 1998; Folkman & Moskowitz, 2000)... gratitude not only makes people feel good in the present, but it also increases the likelihood that people will function optimally and feel good in the future."
Boom: You get the feel goods not just right now, but tomorrow too. And that's a bonus; it's quite hard to think of future you and make sure future you is happy. (Think about how much you should really cut down on smoking/drinking/sugar and how much you don't actually do it. Yes, I am talking to myself.) With this gratitude biz, you can get instant gratification that covers you both now and later, without any extra cost. Kablamo! Kerching! That's the kid! Etc.
The Anecdotal
Plenty of you will have seen the happy happy joy joy video by SoulPancake, where individuals randomly call up people that have influenced them to thank them. It's worth trying if you need a boost.
So here's what I done: For all of 2015, I jotted down notes of gratitude. I'll level with you, it was meant to be a list of three things that I was grateful for, once a day. Anyone who's anyone who's tried to get me in to a state of great habit will know that my ability to routine on the reg is about as good as my ability to articulate when drunk. (Faltering, spontaneous, abnormal.)
Anyway, the idea is that on New Year's Day 2016—a day when we all need a good boost to kick things off, not least due to the epic hangover—I would have a jar of 365x3 reasons to have loved 2015. What did I say thanks for? Mostly people. But I did put random things in, like an especially great cup of coffee, because truth.
I may not have managed the habit in a strictest sense, but I stuck with it and I did notice a few things.
When it comes to happiness, even though it is only myself I am lying to, I cheated to get the goods; when I noticed that I'd missed out a few days, I started to double up and write belated gratitude notes. It definitely defeats the point of getting into a happy habit, but the end result was pretty much the same — a jar of joy.
Even the act of planning it made me happy. I looked ahead and felt good and I looked back and felt good. It meant I focused on the things that made a difference to my year in a positive way and it means I got to look ahead to what would make me happy in the future, so I adjusted my life towards that. Brucey bonus.
I cheated, in the bad way, once... and I really regretted it. (No one likes a cheater.) I wrote an un-grateful note: something happened that made me really unhappy one week, so I put that on a piece of paper and put it in my pot. It didn't ruin the hundreds of other happy memories, but I wish I hadn't sabotaged the jar.
Focusing on being grateful really helped to change my set level. It links in heavily to letting go of negativity, which will get its own post in due course, but stopping to smell the roses daily actually does mean that life is sweeter. There is so much to be thankful for and badness shrugs off all nice 'n' easy when you're looking at the good. Here's to more gratitude!
Perspective matters. Of course I get sad every now and then—I'm not Yoda. Or Data. Or other reference. But I really don't sweat the small stuff as much. No self-indulgent melodrama—things aren't that bad. When you've written down all this good stuff, and planned things ahead so you've more gratitude to annotate, it's hard to let most stuff get you down.
So, that's what I got. Hope that's inspired you to give it a go.
Getting Grateful
Here's an innovative thing: Gramr Gratitude deliver handwritten thank-yous on your behalf. They're not just quick-fix notes either—you can even customise the kind of wax and stamp you'd like to seal the envelope. Aww.
On the subject of snail mail, if you just want to send beautiful, handwritten notes to people for any reason at all, check out the amazing Punkpost. Srsly. All you have to do is compose the words—they take care of the rest with one easy app.
Further Reading: