Gratitude—A Half Step from Happiness

So you want to be happy. That’s good: your happiness matters and you will make others happier when you are happy. But how do you do it—how do you become happy? You may have noticed, but it doesn’t do much good just telling yourself to cheer up. Creating an internal state of joy on demand is unfortunately impossible. But you can in fact create something very close to it, especially with practice. You can create a feeling of gratitude—of appreciation for your life as it is right now, or at least for some aspect of it. Developing a regular practice of gratitude can be the foundation of your happiness, and I say that because it has been for me. As I said in What Is Happiness, the key to our work in becoming happier is reducing the amount of time we spend in the grip of negative emotions. A feeling of gratitude that we can produce on more than just our birthday or Thanksgiving (two days that for many people actually bring stress and disappointment) will make it much easier to put on the back burner all of the feelings of anger, anxiety, and more that want to run our minds from morning until night. It will then act as a shield (though truthfully an imperfect one) against their return to the front burner.

The essence of feeling happy is that you’re good with how things are right now—you’re not filled with desire for something different. Think about the times you’ve been happy and you’ll see the truth of this statement. Whether it was when you were laughing with friends, or had received a great gift, or achieved something you’d been working toward: when you felt happy in those moments, things were great just as they existed. You hadn’t suddenly come under the delusion that everything in the world was perfect—you still had problems and things you needed to do—but your focus was on the great feeling of the moment.

Gratitude is just like that. When you feel grateful, you are so happy with some aspect, or many aspects, of your life that this happiness outweighs the difficulties your life still presents. This effect is true even with small triggers—little things that inspire our gratitude. A coworker can give us a cookie and joke with us for five minutes and we’ll feel great for a while even if that day is going terribly otherwise. Tony Robbins says that he meditates on gratitude for twenty minutes every morning because you can’t feel grateful and angry at the same time. I agree, but I don’t think he goes far enough. You can’t feel grateful and angry, anxious, afraid, jealous, regretful, etc. Gratitude dominates your perspective in the way that those negative emotions want to. As I spoke about in What Is Happiness, the key strategy to improving our happiness is reducing how much time we get caught up in the negative.

So gratitude is essentially another word for happiness, and here is its crucial strength: you can learn to summon it. You can’t just call up happiness by thinking happy thoughts, but you can learn to bring a feeling of gratefulness into your mind. This difference is the key. Gratitude is a feeling largely based on our conscious thoughts. We notice and evaluate something (though in the moment we don’t think of it like that), then gratitude springs from our evaluation. So what we want to do is spend more time noticing and properly evaluating the good aspects of our lives. (And it’s not your fault that you’re probably not great at practicing gratitude. We’re not taught to use it much.) The more time we spend looking at those aspects of our lives that we’re lucky to have, and the more we realize how lucky we are to have them, the less time we’ll get caught up with negative feelings and the more time we’ll spend happy. It’s simple and it’s actually easy, but it takes regular practice.

It’s very important as you open your mind to this practice that you lose the idea that gratitude is a “should”. Try not to think that I’m forcing you to do a chore or that I’m telling you to make lists of the good things in your life because you should do so and you’re a selfish person if you don’t. I do teach my kids to say thank you to a person who does something for them. Ideally, they actually feel grateful, but I think we all agree that people should—for the sake of showing appreciation and making social interactions go better—say thank you whether they feel it or not. But that’s not what I’m talking about here. What we’re doing here is improving our happiness by learning to appreciate our lives much more than we typically do.

So how do we practice gratitude? You want to start writing gratitude lists. I’m certainly not criticizing Tony Robbins and his gratitude meditation, but I strongly encourage you to do a written practice rather than just sitting for ten or twenty minutes and thinking grateful thoughts. It’s not that such a practice is useless, but if you’re doing it all in your mind, it’s very easy—inevitable really—to lose your focus and spend most of your time with your thoughts wandering, often getting caught up in thoughts that are actually unpleasant. (Anyone who has worked on a meditation practice knows just how much their mind wanders. See Be Here Now for more talk about staying in this moment and how challenging that can be.) Also, writing things out stimulates more of our brains than simply thinking a thought, and helps us to remember information better. You might think that you’re not trying to learn or remember anything because you’re the one coming up with the grateful thoughts in the first place—they’re already in your head—but you are in fact trying to imprint on your brain the good aspects of your life or the good events in your day that you’re writing on your list. It’s very easy for us to forget all about these good things as we go through our lives dealing with responsibilities and frustrations. So by writing our list, we’re telling our brains, “Here are some good things in your life that you haven’t been thinking about. Notice them now and remember them later.” Writing down a list of things to be grateful for makes you 1) think of good things in your life that you wouldn’t otherwise have brought to your attention, 2) engage with those thoughts as you do the work of writing them out, and 3) keep them at some not-too-buried level as you go about the rest of your day.

As I do the practice, there’s no definite number of items that has to go on my list. Instead, I take a blank piece of paper, fold it in half—so now I’m looking at 5.5” by 8.5” of blank paper—and make myself fill that half page. (I tend to write small. If you write big, maybe do the whole page.) I usually use scratch paper from mail I receive, my work, etc., and I just recycle the paper when I’m done. I’m certainly not forbidding you to use a journal or keeping your lists in a file, but the work here is not about having a chance to review later what you’ve written. You’re going for the effect that doing the work has on your brain today. I write at the top the date and “Things to be grateful for today”, underline it, and start writing items. I tend to go chronologically just to make the task easier. “Last night I went out to dinner with some friends. We ate good food and had a fun time.” “I got a good night’s sleep.” (Often a problem for me, so certainly something to appreciate.) “This morning I baked biscuits for Ava, Maya, (my daughters) and myself.” I’ll write anything down that is good, even if it’s trivial—“Someone brought donuts to work”—and I’ll also put big parts of my life: “I have a job that is rewarding and provides a good income.” “My kids are happy and healthy.” “I live in an environment that is safe and has access to good healthcare.” (We tend not to think about these larger aspects of our lives until something goes wrong with them, but that’s not required: we can learn to appreciate them while we have them. The saying “You don’t appreciate something until it’s gone” shows a natural human tendency, but not an inevitability.) And many times it can make sense to write an event or its opposite: “I got to spend time time with the kids last night,” or “I got to have time to myself last night.” “I went to work today and earned money for rent, groceries, and burritos,” or “I got the day off today and watched a movie at home.” We’re really quite lucky when either of two outcomes is good. (I often put the fact that I’m working today on my list to remind myself of how lucky I am to have a good job when others don’t, but I find it more meaningful if I put some of the things I use my money for.)

If, instead of a space you have to fill, you prefer to set a number of items, that’s great—just use a number like ten, not three. Here is a key point to understand whichever method you choose: the practice is much more beneficial if it’s not too easy. If you start a practice in which every evening you write down three things to be grateful for, that practice won’t be as useful as it could be. It’s certainly not useless: you are spending more time noting good things in your life than most people do. And it’s often useful to start a new habit with baby steps because an easy task is one that you’re more likely to do it. The problem is that, even for people who don’t express gratitude often, it’s pretty easy to come up with three items. “I didn’t hit any traffic coming home tonight. I have a job that pays my bills. My husband cooked dinner tonight.” But you don’t want this work to be too easy. It’s actually better if you run out of steam halfway down the page or on point seven because then you have to think, “What else is good in my life, today or in general?” At that point, you will have to look for the good in little things in your life—“I got to take a hot shower this morning,” “I made it to work on time even though I left late”—or maybe in big things—“I have easy access to clean, drinkable water,” “I live in an apartment that is warm and safe.” If you tell yourself that you must get to the end of your list once you start, and you don’t make it too easy to get there, then you will have to start expanding your view of what in your life is worth appreciating. You shouldn’t write down anything that isn’t actually worthwhile (“The garbage in my kitchen doesn’t smell that bad”), but you should search your brain to find things until you have gotten to the bottom of the page or reached item ten.

Even though I’ve written more than a thousand gratitude lists by now, I still have to put thought into getting through a list. It doesn’t come automatically and it wouldn’t serve its purpose if it did. It is by thinking about them that I imprint these memories as positive experiences in my brain. (We often don’t know what to make of experiences until we tell ourselves how to interpret them.) It is by having to think about my day that I open my eyes to the things that make my life so good.

Again, expanding your understanding of what’s good in your life is a critical benefit to the practice. If you don’t push yourself to do it, you’re leaving a lot of happiness on the table. Yes, it’s useful to bring to the front of your mind things that you already value so that you can spend a little more time appreciating them than you normally do. But it’s at least as useful to widen your gaze—to build your understanding of just how many things in your life reflect your good fortune and can bring you pleasure if you take notice. You might realize how many people in your community or in the world don’t get to have these things, or remember a time when you didn’t. Again, I’m not making you take on a burden: so many people don’t have what you have, so you “should” feel grateful or else you’re a bad person. I’m saying that you don’t want to make the common mistake of blowing past all the things that can make you appreciate your life as you rush to focus on what’s going wrong.

One question that often comes up is, “Why should I feel grateful for something that I achieved through my own effort?” Well, I am not one to knock personal achievement or to say that you shouldn’t praise yourself when you have accomplished something through hard work. But I do think we should realize when we’ve been lucky to have opportunities that others haven’t had. If, like me, you went back to school as an adult in order to move to a new career, you should praise yourself for your willingness to do so, but it’s still worth noting that not everyone has that opportunity.

Now this list, even with some thinking required, shouldn’t take a long time—about ten minutes. If some days you have half an hour available and really want to write every aspect of your life you can think of that makes you feel grateful, feel free—and you might find use in that exercise—but that’s not the regular practice I’m encouraging here. It would be very hard for most people to keep that up. Not only are you not trying to write fifty items, you’re not spending lots of time trying to relive the experiences you’re writing about. You’re not trying to recreate the emotions you felt while at your friend’s birthday party, or taste again the flavors you experienced as you ate a donut this morning. Sometimes you will get a rush of pleasure as you bring good experiences to mind or as you think of people in your life that you care about. In fact sometimes we can enjoy experiences more while we’re writing our list than we had in the moment because in the midst of the experience we were too distracted or stressed out by side issues to enjoy ourselves as we should have. But the goal with the list is not to recreate the pleasure of the moment, but to create a new sense of happiness that comes from understanding just how much you have to appreciate. You’re not going to write your list and get a wave of good feeling that will last through the rest of your day. I certainly don’t. The emotional bump that I get when I write my list can actually seem very small. But the cumulative effect of doing my lists day after day means that I walk through my life with an eye out for the good things that come up and an easy ability to call good things to mind. When bad events happen—small or big—or bad feelings come, my understanding of how much good I have in my life quickly asserts itself so that I’m not carried away for long by the negative. And as we know from What Is Happiness, this reduction in how much time we spend caught up in our negative emotions is the real key to living a happier life.

To express again the point I just made: the point of writing a gratitude list and noting the good things that happened in your day or in your life is not to fill you with ecstasy. It’s not like being handed a thousand dollars. You’ll likely won’t feel much different when you finish than when you started. So what is the point? If you have actually engaged in the process, what you have done is reduced or possibly even cleared away feelings you’ve had about how crappy your day is going, about how crappy things go for you in general, and about how unlucky you tend to be. Remember, you can’t feel grateful and scared, guilty, bitter, etc. at the same time. These emotions can keep going in the background when you’re writing your list, but you will (for a little while at least) take away their control of your thoughts. By consistently engaging in the practice, you will diminish how much those emotions ever do get control of your mind. Writing a list daily (or at five times a week) will give you many opportunities to open your eyes and reduce the hold of negative emotions, and the overall effect is cumulative. If you also decide to open yourself up to grateful thoughts at other times of the day when you’re not writing your list, you will spread this appreciation throughout all of your experience, which is of course the real purpose.

So engaging in a gratitude practice is about changing your perspective on your life and experiences. I’d like to tell a couple of stories that aren’t about writing lists, but rather about how easily we miss what’s right in front of us. The first one I got from the FX show The Old Man. One of the characters tells it, though not to give a lesson about gratitude.

A mother and her son are walking along a beach. It’s not on a sunny day, but rather one when the wind is blowing and the waves are crashing on the shore. They’re having a nice time walking along and watching the ocean when the boy gets so excited that he rushes down the sand to jump in the pounding waves. The mother calls out and then chases after him, but he’s too quick. He leaps and splashes out into the water and, before she can get to him, a large wave crashes down and he disappears. She make her way to where he was, but he doesn’t come up. She desperately searches through the water, but can’t find him. Finally, she goes back up to the sand. She kneels down and prays: “God, please. That boy is all I have. Please bring him back to me.” A moment later, she lifts her head and looks out over the water. She sees, coming from the horizon, two points of light. As they approach, she can make out that they are angels flying toward her. When they get to a point a few hundred feet from where she’s kneeling, they dive down into the water. Seconds later, they come up, carrying her son between them. They carry him to the beach and gently place him on the sand in front of her, then fly up into heaven in a burst of light. The woman stares at her son standing before her, alive and well. Then she looks up at the sky and says, “He had a hat.”

So obviously that’s a punchline, and we’re supposed to laugh at this completely unappreciative person who doesn’t register that a miracle just occurred. But I say that’s exactly how we are. We obsess about the trivial and ignore the remarkable good fortune that slaps us in the face. We will ruin our day and our interactions with people we care about over things as trivial as lost hats. Our minds are built to look right past positive events or wonderful parts of our lives and say, “What’s wrong with this situation and how much can I obsess about it?” You might think that’s not you, and I sincerely hope it’s not, but it’s most of us and I suggest you observe yourself closely before you decide. Or you might argue that having this critical perspective makes us effective at improving our lives, but I think not. We often can’t solve even the smallest issues that are “making” us stressed. (Of course, it’s not the issues that are making us stressed—we are doing it to ourselves.) It’s really not about solving the problem, but rather having a focus for our complaints. Even if you could diminish the occurrence of small frustrations, would it be worth the price of turning away from what we can appreciate in our lives in order to cycle our aggravating thoughts? No, but that’s how we behave.

Now you might think that you don’t have miracles happen in your life. What makes the woman in the story ridiculous is that she has two angels bring her son back from death and she can’t even appreciate it. If something like that happened to you, you would appreciate it and not go asking about a hat. But in regards to what is miraculous in your life, I urge you not to constrain yourself to impossible events that only occur through supernatural intervention. I think you should consider what already exists in your life and that other people might consider a miracle if it suddenly appeared in theirs. I know that I’m throwing around the word “miracle” a lot. I’m not a religious person myself, but I’m trying to capture the idea of something that is amazing and wonderful, and that—like in the story about the mom on the beach—we overlook in order to focus on what we think is  missing.

Let me go to my second story, which comes from my work as a nurse. A few years ago I had to have a right total hip replacement. I was diagnosed at forty-two (an unusually young age) with advanced osteoarthritis and by forty-five was bone on bone. Many people expressed to me how unfortunate this situation was for me. Not long before having my surgery, I worked with a patient who had several admissions to the hospital for pain management. She was thirty-eight and had had abdominal surgeries and chemotherapy to combat the metastatic cancer from which she was suffering. She was very thin because she couldn’t take in enough nutrients to maintain a healthy weight and, as I said, she was in tremendous pain. When she was admitted, she was put on something called a Dilaudid PCA drip, which you’re only given when you’re really hurting. This woman was fighting for her life because she had three children who were under eighteen. (Perhaps her story resonates with me so much because I do as well.) She wanted to live so she could spend time with them, for their sake and her own. Well, I went and had my surgery and spent three months on disability so that I could have a full recovery. Soon after returning to work, I asked a coworker if that patient had been back and was told that she had indeed come back to the hospital, but then gone home on hospice care because there wasn’t any more that anyone could do for her. So she passed away while I was at home doing physical therapy exercises and spending time with my baby daughter.

Now it’s easy to feel compassion when you hear stories like this one, and practicing compassion is good in of itself, but what does this story have to do with this article? I’m certainly not asking you to feel grateful for this woman’s suffering and death. I have spent a fair bit of time thinking about that patient, and at some point the following scenario came to my head: As I, her nurse, am walking out of her room one day, a little angel lands on her shoulder and says, “I’ll tell you a secret. That nurse who is walking out the door is going to have surgery soon and he’s going to die on the operating table. He’s forty-six and people will think it’s awful that he died so young, leaving behind three children. But if you want, we can give you his life. We won’t turn you into him, but we can get rid of this cancer thing, free you of your pain, make you able to eat what you want, most importantly make you able to be with your kids, as long as you agree to die at forty-six with no complaints. Is that a deal?” If any such offer had been given to this woman, she truly would have seen it as a miracle. Eight more years with her family with the only price a little bit of leg pain? What a gift! Had she made such a sudden recovery, everyone indeed would have called it miraculous and assumed that she must be so grateful. And surely she would have been.

Now obviously she didn’t get that offer: she went home on hospice and passed away. Now here’s the point: I’ve never had cancer, so no one expects me to be feel grateful. In fact, as I said, when people heard that I needed a hip replacement in my mid forties, they told me how unfortunate it was. They didn’t say—I don’t think it occurred to them to say—that I was extremely fortunate to live at a time in history and in a part of the world with incredibly safe and effective surgeries to solve my condition, with pain medicines when I needed them, and with disability insurance to help me pay my bills. It certainly never occurred to them to say that I should feel how lucky I am not to die in pain at thirty-eight. I’ve never had cancer, and I’m not even slightly expected to feel grateful that I haven’t died of cancer by my current age of forty-nine. But as far as I’m concerned, that’s crazy.

The thinking goes like this: If you have terminal cancer, but suddenly make an unexpected recovery, you should live in gratitude for a long time—maybe your whole life. But if you’ve never had cancer, you don’t need to feel any gratitude at all for being alive and well. If your child disappears in the ocean and two angels save him, you should feel tremendous gratitude. But if your child never drowned, you don’t need to feel any particular gratitude that they’re happy and healthy. You can just pretend that that’s the norm—that you’re somehow owed it—so there’s no need to feel grateful. And therefore it’s totally reasonable to get mad if he loses his hat at the beach or when other inconsequential negatives arise. Do you see how nuts this is? “Nothing like that has ever happened to me, so there’s no reason I should feel grateful.” The only reason this way of thinking is considered sane is that it’s the norm.

Now you might think I’m going back on my word here and giving you a “should”: many people in the world have it much worse than you so you’re supposed to feel grateful for what you have or else you’re a self-centered person. I’m not saying that at all. You can suffer from this crazy way of thinking and still be a perfectly nice person who helps others and puts their needs above your own. I promise that I’ve told you this story so you can learn to be happier. The whole point of this article is that appreciating our lives helps us resist being dominated by unhappy emotions. The particular point I’m making here is that we spend just about our whole lives completely ignoring the wonderful things that had to occur to give us the lives we have. Occasionally we hear a story like the one I’ve just told, or watch a movie with something similar, and we realize just how lucky we are. Our eyes open for a moment and we spend ten minutes, an hour, or half a day not worrying about all of the trivial things that usually push our emotions around. But then we go back to hating our job, or thinking about the $40 someone never paid us back, or wishing we had new clothes. I’m not telling you that you will get to a place where little things don’t aggravate you or you won’t wish for the things you don’t have—I can pretty much guarantee that thoughts like those will always occur to you. I’m telling you that you can learn to keep your eyes open to the wonderful aspects of your life. You can learn to spend more of your time with these positive reflections guiding your emotions and protecting—again, imperfectly—your brain from hijack by negative thoughts.

Now you might think that you don’t want to use the suffering of others to improve your own happiness. If it’s not clear, I absolutely am not encouraging you to gain pleasure from other people’s suffering. I’m not arguing for schadenfreude. That’s not what I feel when I think about the woman from this story and so many of my patients whose lives are much harder than mine. But if you think that you can’t look at people who face terrible challenges and learn from what you see, you’re giving up on such an obvious education about what the world is like. You’re not being disrespectful to someone who lacks clean drinking water when you see them and realize how lucky you are to have such easy access to it. You’re not using someone whose child is sick when you feel grateful that your children are healthy. Opening your eyes to suffering of others can indeed help you be happier in your own life through greater appreciation for what you have. It also makes you more likely to help others who suffer in ways that you do not.

And what am I saying in this article to people who are themselves suffering terribly? What can I say to parents of a child with cancer, to people who are being abused, or to those who live in pain? Does this gratitude work have any answers that can lead to happiness through such terrible circumstances? I will say that it is of course very hard to find gratitude or happiness when you are the ongoing victim of violence, or when you have to watch someone you love become more and more ill. If it is possible, the priority has to be doing what you can to solve the situation. So if you are being abused in your relationship or in your environment, you have to get out if it is at all possible. If such a solution is not possible, I still believe that appreciation for the parts of your life that are worth appreciating, now and in the past, is one of the ways that you can make yourself happier than you would otherwise be. This is not a practice that is only useful in good times.

In my work, I have seen many older patients come into the hospital with a significant reduction in their quality of life. Perhaps they have a debilitating stroke, or it turns out that the last two months of exhaustion and weight loss are explained by stage IV cancer, or perhaps their ongoing dementia has reached a point that life is extremely hard for both them and their family. These are very difficult situations—all the more so because people so often never seem to have thought they might occur. It is worth reflecting in these times that we are lucky to have the medical care that is available to us, even though that care cannot solve some of our biggest problems. We can also remember and appreciate the good times we have had in our lives and the time spent with the people we care about. It is worth remembering what people often forget in these moments: it is not just the last days or months of our life that define it.

Now, it might be hard to believe thousands of words into this article, but I actually have a fair bit more to say about your gratitude practice. I realize, though, that I’m already running ridiculously long, so I will wrap up. Remember that this work of writing gratitude lists is simple: it is neither difficult nor time consuming. It won’t spark a remarkable feeling of joy in the moment (well maybe sometimes), but, if done consistently, will make you more and more appreciative of the good things in your life and so will make you less controlled by the negative thoughts that are always ready to push you around. And this practice, while I’m putting it on the happiness side of the site—the side that works on your hedonic, in the moment happiness—will also improve the happiness you feel with your life overall. You just have to write your lists regularly and give it time.

Let’s finish with a quick review of the mantra I introduced in the What Is This Website. The mantra goes like this: you matter, this work matters, and you can do this work. One, you are just going to accept as a baseline that you are worthwhile. Two, since you have worth, your happiness matters and working to improve it is worthwhile. Three, you have the ability to spend ten minutes a day writing gratitude lists in order to make yourself happier.

That’s it. Thanks for sticking it out through such a long article. Go listen to the podcast if you want to hear it as well as read it. See you next time.