Since I started becoming interested in positive psychology, I’ve learned that focusing on what you’re grateful for really does make you feel happier. A simple daily practice of counting three blessings can make a profound difference to your mood and, as a consequence, your brain chemistry. I should know – I’ve been keeping a gratitude journal for a couple of years now and I can confirm that it encourages your brain to scan for positives rather than negatives. These days I’m much more likely to notice a beautiful sunset than complain about doom and gloom.
Having spent many years exploring mental illness, psychologists are now delving into the science of giving thanks, learning in many experiments that it is one of humanity’s most powerful emotions. It makes you happier and can change your attitude about life, like an emotional reset button.
This is particularly important to know in times of crisis – both personal and global.
“Oprah was right,” said University of Miami psychology professor Michael McCullough, who has studied people who are asked to be regularly thankful. “When you are stopping and counting your blessings, you are sort of hijacking your emotional system.”
And that means hijacking in a good way. Research by McCullough and others finds that giving thanks is a potent emotion that feeds on itself, almost the equivalent of being victorious.
Gratitude research pioneer Robert Emmons, a psychology professor at the University of California, says grateful people “feel more alert, alive, interested, enthusiastic. They also feel more connected to others. Gratitude also serves as a stress buffer – grateful people are less likely to experience envy, anger, resentment, regret and other unpleasant states that produce stress.”
Emmons, who has conducted several studies on people from ages 12 to 80, including those with neuromuscular disease, asked volunteers to keep daily or weekly gratitude diaries. Another group listed hassles, and others just recorded random events. He noticed a significant and consistent difference. About three-quarters of the people studied who regularly counted their blessings scored higher in happiness tests and some even showed improvements in amounts of sleep and exercise.
Christopher Peterson of the University of Michigan studied different gratitude methods and found the biggest immediate improvement in happiness scores was among people who were given one week to write and deliver in person a letter of gratitude to someone who had been especially kind to them, but was never thanked.
Peterson also asked people to write down nightly three things that went well that day and why that went well. That took longer to show any difference in happiness scores over control groups, but after one month the results were significantly better and they stayed better through six months.
Peterson said it worked so well that he is adopted it in his daily life, writing from-the-heart thank you notes, logging his feelings of gratitude: “It was very beneficial for me. I was much more cheerful.”
Emmons actually encourages people to “think of your worst moments, your sorrows, your losses, your sadness and then remember that here you are, able to remember them. You got through the worst day of your life … remember the bad things, then look to see where you are.”
(With gratitude to the Lubbock Avalanche Journal)
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