Should i be grateful

Learn how gratitude can lead to a better life—and a better world—in this new GGSC book. And, second, the genes discussed above are only two out of the possibly hundreds or thousands of genes that could be involved in how we experience a complex emotion like gratitude—besides all the other social factors like religion and culture that are also at play. Emotions are complicated things! So, for example, some parts of the brain might be anatomically different in more grateful people.

Read a special white paper on the science of gratitude —explaining where it comes from, what its benefits are, and how to cultivate it. Learn what stops gratitude. Discover the six habits of highly grateful people. Find out how gratitude can help you through hard times. How grateful are you?

Take our gratitude quiz. Brains of more and less grateful people also show activity differences. In a functional magnetic resonance imaging study by Glenn Fox and colleagues, participants were asked to imagine they were Holocaust survivors who had received shelter or food from strangers. The participants who imagined that they would feel more grateful in these scenarios had more activity in brain regions associated with moral cognition, perspective taking, and reward.

And, in another study by Joel Wong, Joshua Brown , and colleagues, people who expressed more gratitude in a lab setting—as measured by their willingness to give to charity more of the money that they had received from doing an experiment—had more active areas of the brain associated with making mental calculations.

Indeed, it may even be the case that more grateful people have more altruistic brains as well—a recent study by Christina Karns and colleagues found that more grateful people had more activity in brain areas associated with feelings of reward when they were told that a charity would receive money. If you're doing a job you enjoy, you may feel increased pressure to express gratitude to your employer, however misdirected it may be Credit: Alamy.

A job, after all, is essentially a service a person performs to help a company make money. That has such a big toll on wellbeing and health. On the other is toxic positivity. That grey area is a good place for critically examining your gratitude, adds Wood. Is it valuable to me? Is it costly for them? How we work. Should you be grateful for a job?

Gratitude helps people refocus on what they have instead of what they lack. And, although it may feel contrived at first, this mental state grows stronger with use and practice. Write a thank-you note. You can make yourself happier and nurture your relationship with another person by writing a thank-you letter or email expressing your enjoyment and appreciation of that person's impact on your life.

Send it, or better yet, deliver and read it in person if possible. Make a habit of sending at least one gratitude letter a month. Once in a while, write one to yourself. Thank someone mentally. No time to write? It may help just to think about someone who has done something nice for you, and mentally thank the individual. Keep a gratitude journal. Make it a habit to write down or share with a loved one thoughts about the gifts you've received each day.

Count your blessings. Pick a time every week to sit down and write about your blessings — reflecting on what went right or what you are grateful for. Sometimes it helps to pick a number — such as three to five things — that you will identify each week. For example, some people feel very happy and grateful every time the sun is shining, while others barely notice such things at all.

One way scientists measure how often people feel gratitude is by using questionnaires. Research has shown that teenagers and adults who feel grateful more often than others are also happier, get better grades, and have better friendships. They also sleep better, have more energy, and have fewer illnesses and less pain [ 1 ].

If someone is more grateful than someone else, it does not mean that this person is grateful all the time. People who say that they feel grateful a lot of the time still feel negative emotions, like sadness, fear, or anger.

Both positive and negative emotions are part of our lives, but it is possible to increase our overall happiness. One way to do this is to pay more attention to the good things that happen in our life and feel grateful for them. Studies have shown that you can practice being more grateful.

Researchers asked teenagers to write down up to five things they were grateful for every day, for 2 weeks. After the 2 weeks, the teenagers said they felt more satisfied with their lives and happier with their school experiences [ 2 ]. The teenagers who completed the gratitude practice were still happier with their school experiences even three weeks later , when compared with teenagers who did not complete the gratitude practice [ 2 ]. It seems that gratitude has a lasting effect on happiness.

Why does gratitude make you happier and healthier? To come up with an answer to this question, we searched for all of the research papers about gratitude that have already been published. We then put these findings together to show how two different stories also called models or pathways could explain why gratitude leads to a happier life. According to this first story, we would not feel grateful if we did not think about the good things in our life. Studies have shown that people who are more grateful than others will automatically think about the things that happen to them in a more positive way.

How we think about or interpret what happens to us plays a big role in how we feel about the situation. Having the grateful thoughts would be an example of a positive interpretation bias. On the opposite side, some people with depression feel sad and down nearly every day, for long periods of time. These people interpret most things in their life in a negative way, which means they have a negative interpretation bias. In Figure 1 , we show a real-life example of how a positive interpretation bias leads to more happiness after getting a bad grade on a test.

Another positive thinking habit has to do with how much attention you pay to the things around you. For example, someone who is scared of dogs will pay much closer attention when there is a dog on the other side of the street, while someone who is not scared of dogs may not even notice that there is a dog there.

The person who plays close attention to the dog has a negative attention bias. If you are a more grateful person overall, you might pay more attention to the good things that happen around you, which would be a positive attention bias.