You Can Force Yourself to Be More Grateful for Your Life.
Thanksgiving is over, so you can forget about feeling grateful for the generosity of life for another year. Or, you can continue to work with this muscle; with practice, you can become happier and more grateful for your life.
Sometimes it’s hard to think about what’s good in your life. Oddly enough, this even happens to people who, as you would say, have a clearly better life than your own – more money, more friends, more status. That’s because gratitude isn’t necessarily a marker of real life blessings – it’s more like a mutant’s ability to experience positive feelings more intensely than usual, according to an article by Arthur S. Brooks for the New York Times .
A 2014 article in the journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience identified a gene variant (CD38) associated with gratitude. Some people simply have an increased genetic tendency to experience, according to the researchers, “global relationship satisfaction, perceived partner responses, and positive emotions (especially love).”
If you are not genetically predisposed to happiness, do not despair (no more than usual). There are things you can do to develop the abilities you already have.
Go through the motions
Telling someone to “pretend” to be happy is fraught with advice, especially since many people with mental health problems may lack the help they need if they agree with it. If you are depressed, be honest about it and talk to your doctor.
But there is another shade of meaning in the fact that you have to pretend until you do it . Sometimes acting like you’re happy and grateful is like starting the engine. Instead of getting out of bed and sitting on the couch and watching the news, you can stand by the window and hum a song, stretch, or laugh out loud. Small deeds accumulate, and our body notices them.
For example, Brooks cites a famous 1993 experiment that showed that even a mechanical movement of a smile can sometimes make us happier. It stimulates brain activity associated with positive emotions. Expressing gratitude, even if you don’t really feel it, can do the same:
According to a study published in the journal Cerebral Cortex, gratitude stimulates the hypothalamus (a key part of the brain that regulates stress) and the ventral tegmental region (part of our “reward circuitry” that induces feelings of pleasure).
Until you start to feel it, pretend and real gratitude can appear.
Makes lists
There’s a reason a gratitude journal is a thing. Taking the time to list what you are grateful for every day will have a significant impact on the way you feel about your life. Brooks cites a 2003 study that asked a group of people to keep a weekly list of things they were grateful for. Others were asked to keep a weekly list of annoying or neutral things. At the end of the 10-week study, the gratitude group “got significantly more life satisfaction” than the group that tracked all the crap.
Attaching a pen to paper will make you think about what you like in life, not what you hate. Even if they’re small, your mind spends time in a positive place rather than a negative one, which sets you up for a better day.
To express gratitude
The diary, or list, is what Brooks calls “inner gratitude,” but that’s just part of the puzzle. Outward gratitude is when we seek to thank others or say out loud what we are grateful for. Or by email:
Psychologist Martin Seligman, father of the field known as “positive psychology”, provides some practical advice on how to do this. In his bestseller True Happiness, he encourages readers to systematically express gratitude in letters to loved ones and colleagues. The disciplined way to put this into practice is to make it routine, like your morning coffee. Send two short emails each morning to friends, family, or colleagues thanking them for what they are doing.
Imagine that you thank the person you care about every day for what they do for the world. Not only will this give you the opportunity to focus on something good, but it will most likely cheer them up. In fact, Brooks recommends trying to say thank you when faced with anger. Apparently, people with “low emotional security” who tend to lash out in a collision will melt into a puddle as soon as they hear a sweet thanks. This could include your own brain.