"When you are grateful fear disappears and happiness appears."
- Anthony Robbins
Did you know that it is scientifically proven that gratitude can increase your happiness, health, and optimism while improving your relationships and making you optimistic about the future?
I have recently been thinking a lot about the power of gratitude. I have a gratitude board at my house and write in it things that come to mind that I’m grateful for, and it has made quite an impact on me. I tend to focus a lot more on the positive instead of dwelling on the negative. Also, I find that I am happier when I’m grateful and that my gratitude is contagious – when people come over they also write on my board!
So I decided to look up to see if there were any scientific studies out there proving that gratitude makes people happier – and I found one! It was conducted by two doctors - Dr. Robert A. Emmons and Dr. Michael McCollough. They did the study over a period of ten weeks with several hundred people and discovered that gratitude increased people’s happiness by 25%!
They divided people into 3 groups:
- Group One: People in this group were asked to write down five things they were grateful for that had happened in the last week for each of the 10 weeks of the study. This was called the gratitude condition. Things people reported being grateful for included things like the generosity of friends, the sunset through the clouds and the chance to be alive.
- Group Two: People in this group were asked to write down five daily hassles from the previous week. This was the hassles condition. Things people reported in this group included things like taxes, hard to find parking, burned my macaroni and cheese.
- Group Three: This group was asked to simply listed five events that had occurred in the last week, but not told to focus on positive or negative aspects. This was the events or control condition.
Prior to the study people were asked to keep a daily journal and record their physical health, general attitudes and their moods. This was then used to compare their condition after the experiment.
At the end of the study, people in group one, the gratitude condition, were 25% happier – they looked forward and were optimistic about the future, exercised 1.5 more hours a week than the other two groups, and they felt better about their lives.
Was increased happiness really the result of gratitude or simply the result of positive comparisons?
After this study, the doctors decided that even though they were surprised at the results of the study, they could think of reasons of why practicing gratitude may not be so good – including that gratitude reminds us of our debts to others, which may remind us of our dependence and reduce the sense of personal control. Studies have shown that people don’t enjoy feeling indebted to others.
Hence, the doctors saw fit to do a second study. This time, however, group two was asked to write down how they were better off than others instead of writing down their hassles. They called this the downward social comparison group. People were asked to pick people who were less beautiful, healthy, wealthy, etc. than them and record their comparisons. The idea was that in this condition people are making positive comparisons but are not necessarily thinking gratefully (although it can't be ruled out!).
Again, group one, the gratitude group was significantly happier than the other two groups. Not just that, while group one was more likely to serve others and create deeper emotional bonds in their relationships as a result of gratitude, group two, the group that recorded how they were better off than others became a lot more narcissistic and egocentric, and was unlikely to want to serve others.
So, practicing gratitude also increases our desire to do good deeds and improves our relationships.
Gratitude and Health
The doctors decided to conduct a third study. In the first two studies they had used healthy, young college students as their subjects. They wondered if gratitude would increase happiness in people with serious, chronic health problems.
They recruited people who had neuromuscular disorders, often as a delayed result of surviving infection by the polio virus. While not life-threatening the condition can be seriously debilitating, causing joint and muscle pain as well as muscle atrophy. People with this condition have a good reason to be dissatisfied with the hand life has dealt them.
In this study, there were only two control groups. The gratitude group and the control group, where participants recoded their daily experiences.
After the 21 day study, participants in the gratitude condition were found to be more optimistic about the future, more satisfied with their lives and they were even sleeping better!
My conclusion
I have decided that since it is scientifically proven that gratitude increases my happiness, health, and even sleep while also improving my relationships, you bet I’m gonna keep up my gratitude board! I have also decided to record at least three things that I am grateful for everyday, and when I complain I counteract my complaining by saying something that I'm grateful for. I also got a Gratitude iBean™ and planted it to remind myself to be grateful. To find out more about iBean™, go to ibeaninspired.com
