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Introduction to Gratitude and Positive Psychology!

In recent years, especially in the emerging field of positive psychology, researchers have begun to examine gratitude’s relationship to human health and well-being. The results are both thought-provoking and exciting. Gratitude correlates with and promotes positive emotions, most notably happiness. Moreover, gratitude’s benefits to the body fall into two general categories.

Gratitude has an extraordinary effect on stress. It is one of the most frequently cited reasons for expressing gratitude. Keeping a gratitude journal in and of itself is associated with lower stress. Writing in a gratitude journal three or four times a week can raise one’s happiness set point by 50%. It is now believed that gratitude enhances the positive effects of other coping styles because it builds a person’s psychological hardiness.

Finally, as a result of the previous two effects, gratitude bestows a unique ability; it helps us to avoid the negative effects of hedonic adaptation. Hedonic adaptation is our brain’s innate tendency to grow accustomed to everything around us—a powerful principle that ensures the full enjoyment of ice cream but reduces us to mere hamsters on the hedonic treadmill.

After years of hedonic adaptation, we fail to appreciate the good things in our lives. Combine chronic stress, unshakeable discontent, gratification without awe, and hedonic adaptation, and we have a recipe for widespread disillusionment with life. In sum, gratitude enhances our health and well-being, not only as a buffer against stress and a buffer against the pitfalls of hedonic adaptation.

Definition and Importance of Gratitude

Grateful individuals acknowledge the help that they receive and experience a positive emotional connection to benevolent acts of others that may be aimed at inducing their happiness.

Subjectively, grateful individuals report positive mood states including happiness, perceive awareness of their moral and prosocial value, and find their life more meaningful even when faced with difficulty. Practically, a focus on gratitude results in more beneficent and moral acts, a greater sense of altruism, less personal malaise, better coping, and more psychological robustness, as well as more alertness to the stressors and hassles of daily life.

Grateful individuals organize their days around others who give instead of themselves who receive. Gratitude may also have more intrinsic motivational value than self-pity or materialism. Individuals with expressed gratitude are considered attractive, desirable confidants, courteous group members, and conscientious societal contributors.

Overview of Positive Psychology

Research on gratitude in psychology can be traced back to the mid-20th century, and research in the 21st century suggests that expressing gratitude can have both immediate and lasting effects. Positive psychology is a branch of psychology that deals with the nurturing of genius and talent, the best people have to offer, and the uplifting aspects of living rather than just healing and repairing issues or problems.

This paper is an overview of the science around gratitude and its benefits while at the same time discussing how it can be practiced. The paper proposes a six-week method to practice expressing gratitude called the Gratitude Journal. The goal of the Gratitude Journal is to increase personal happiness by making time to stop and smell the roses, so to speak, or to slow down long enough to appreciate and reflect on those things that have brought happiness into one’s life.

The content of the journal is personal to the writer. Benefits observed in research include increased personal happiness, a more positive outlook on life, a romantic relationship boost, an improvement in health and in goal achievement, a lesser focus on materialism, and a decrease in negative feelings such as envy and frustration. Participants were asked to write about experiences where they have shown deep gratitude, for events that have made them joyful, or for opportunities that have made them feel blessed.

Data suggests that those individuals in the group writing about gratitude exhibited an overall higher level of life satisfaction and greater positive emotional levels than individuals in the other group.

A gratitude journal is a tool that individuals can use to train their grateful viewpoint. It comes in a variety of forms, but most commonly, it is a notebook that someone writes in daily. For the visual and artistically minded, it can take the form of drawings instead.

The purpose of the gratitude journal is to write about things that have been experienced that cause the person to feel a sense of deep gratitude. To best build gratitude, no action is required, but it is suggested that a person build a gratitude journal by writing in it at least weekly. Setting a scheduled time to write in the journal, such as before going to bed at night, is an example of a strategy that works.

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