Gratitude has a whole host of psychological and physical long-term benefits. Consciously and intentionally looking for the good in life helps develop happiness as a habit, something that takes minute amounts of healthy techniques.
A study conducted by Emmons and McCullough in 2003 had participants keep 10 weekly journals, listing five events from the last week. The three experimental groups were – 1) the group was told to write five things/events that they felt grateful for in the last week, 2) five hassles/negative experiences over the last week, and 3) a control group that wasn’t told a prompt to write about in their journal.
They then measured participants’ reactions in three different categories – 1) life as a whole, 2) upcoming week, and 3) physical symptoms of the participants. In other words, participants in all three groups were asked “how do you feel about life overall” and “how do you feel about your upcoming week” over time and all of their responses were recorded. In addition, several physical symptoms for illness, both physiologically and psychologically, were measured for all three of the groups.
What do you think the results were like?
In this experiment, they found that there was no significant difference in the participants affect towards their life as a whole and their upcoming week for the control group and the group that wrote about negative events. They found that the group that gratitude journaled, just once a week, to reflect on 5 events that they felt grateful for had far greater positive affect for both life as a whole and for their upcoming week.
You might argue that this is not that compelling, since most people would predict that people who reflected on good events throughout their week might be slightly happier in their mood. But what is even more amazing was the third measure they used – physical symptoms. The researchers found that those who wrote about 5 events they were grateful for had significantly fewer physical symptoms of illness than those who wrote about their hassles or those who weren’t given a prompt to write about.
Here's the full PDF article for the study if you would like to examine their methodology in greater depth - https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/pdfs/GratitudePDFs/6Emmons-BlessingsBurdens.pdf
That’s spectacular. To summarize, in a seminal research paper about gratitude, researchers discovered that gratitude journaling causes people to have greater positive affect towards their upcoming weeks and life as a whole and reduces their physical ailments and symptoms.
Now the question is why? Why does gratitude journaling carry such amazing boosts in your psychological and physical wellbeing? You can think of happiness as what we have divided by what we want. Those people who feel that they have nothing and want everything are probably going to be unhappier, whereas those people who feel satisfied with everything they have in life – their relationships, their safety, their comfort – are probably going to be happier. When people start doing better in their life, one result is increasing aspirations and upward comparisons – constantly focusing on what more they can be, rather than appreciating all the things that they have already. Think about times you went to Facebook or Instagram and you felt so unhappy or jealous from other people’s vacations or physique – those social comparisons can sometimes cloud your own ability to feel grateful and realize what you already have.
So my best suggestion would be to take a piece of paper, or open up a Word document, or download a diary app, and start writing about what made your day feel great. Write about specific things in your life that made you feel happy, and write about all the ways that you feel lucky and fortunate and appreciative of the universe. You can always write about things that you feel sad or disappointed about too, but making a habit of recognizing and writing about the great things in life will make your happiness a consistent practice.
Best of luck, I hope you think about something that made you happy. I myself feel very grateful that you read through this post, and please reach out if you have any questions. Thank you so much!
Naman
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