How to Increase Your Happiness and Well-Being through Gratitude

How to Flourish Newsletter #2 | drjonbeale.com

Highlights:

• Why gratitude exercises are so effective for increasing well-being.
• Simple yet effective gratitude exercises you can implement right away – daily, weekly and less frequently.

Watch | Listen

What is gratitude?

Gratitude is the emotion of thankfulness: it involves showing appreciation for the kindness you receive and a readiness to show kindness in return. It’s a social emotion, involving mutual reciprocation between people, which helps build relationships. It’s a virtuous character skill which is beneficial for our character development, well-being and relations with others. It can be directed at something specific, such as a generous action by a person, or something general, such as life’s opportunities.

Gratitude: the emotion of thankfulness (credit: Getty Images)?

The benefits of gratitude

There’s a substantial body of research showing that practising gratitude has a significant and lasting positive impact on our well-being, and even promotes human flourishing. Gratitude exercises, in which we express or receive gratitude verbally or through writing, can increase our experiences of happiness and other positive emotions, reduce the duration and frequency of depressive episodes, and help us cope better with adversity, by building our resilience to stress and trauma.?

Practising gratitude is particularly beneficial for our psychological well-being and for social connection, which is a determinant of individual and collective well-being. Developing gratitude as a habit can build long-term social connectedness. It’s positively linked with prosocial behaviour: positive and helpful behaviour which promotes social acceptance and friendship.?

Research has shown that gratitude builds social connection (credit: Getty Images Signature)

Gratitude can strengthen bonds and consolidate relationships, and supports group integration. In cultures where greater levels of gratitude are expressed, reciprocity and harmony within and between social groups is more likely.???

On the profound benefits of social connection for our well-being, see this discussion I had with Marc Schulz, Associate Director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development, the world’s longest study on happiness.

Artwork by Kelly Malka

Notable research findings on gratitude exercises

Studies on gratitude have yielded striking results. Two noteworthy research interventions come from positive psychology, the scientific study of human flourishing. In one intervention, participants wrote down three things that went well every day for one week and what caused them to go well. One month after the study, the participants reported an increase in happiness and a decrease in depressive symptoms, which continued for six months. I describe how to do this exercise below.?

The highly effective ‘What Went Well’ gratitude exercise (credit: Getty Images)

In another highly effective intervention, participants wrote a letter of gratitude to someone who had been kind to them, and read it to them in person. Participants reported a boost in happiness and a decrease in depressive symptoms after one week, which continued for a month. The positive changes within that month were even greater than for the participants who wrote down three things that went well during the month following that exercise.?

More recent research has shown that long-form gratitude writing exercises, like writing a gratitude letter, produce higher well-being than writing a list of things we’re grateful for. This may be among the reasons why writing a gratitude letter was more impactful in the month following the intervention.

The highly effective gratitude letter exercise (credit: Getty Images)

Interestingly, recent research has also shown that receiving gratitude is sometimes even more powerful than expressing it. So, if you’re the recipient of a gratitude letter, you might benefit even more than the person who has written it to you. So gratitude practices that involve reciprocation between people, such as writing a gratitude letter to someone and reading it to them, offer significant benefits for the well-being of both parties. I describe how to write a gratitude letter below.

Why is practising gratitude important?

Overcoming negativity bias

Our evolutionary history has led to our minds focusing more on negative features of our environments and lives than positive ones. For example, we are more attentive and reactive to danger than safety, harmful things than harmless things, and to criticism than compliments. We also learn from negative experiences like these more quickly.?

This is for good evolutionary reasons. It’s beneficial for our survival to be more attentive and reactive to things that could pose a threat to us than those that don’t, and to quickly learn from potentially threatening things to avoid them in the future.?

We have evolved to have a negativity bias (credit: Getty Images)

So, we have evolved to have a neurological bias towards negative stimuli. This is called ‘negativity bias’. While this has a powerful impact on our psychology and lives – such as our attention, outlook, moods, memories and interactions with others – we can develop skills to counteract its potency.

One way we can counter this is by cultivating a more positive outlook. This can be done by practising being positive, and research shows that practising gratitude is one of the most effective ways to do this. Gratitude encourages us to focus on the positive aspects of something – a memory, social interaction, or even an experience of adversity.

Gratitude helps us overcome negativity bias by cultivating a more positive outlook (credit: Alfcermed)

Gaining control over happiness

Research on gratitude draws attention to two important points about happiness: it is buildable and is, to some degree, within our control.

These points were powerfully made by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (1934-2021), one of the founding psychologists of positive psychology and widely known as the ‘father of flow’, after his pioneering research that identified the flow state – the psychological state of optimal performance and experience (I’ll post a blog on flow soon). In his 1990 book Flow, Csikszentmihalyi writes:

‘[H]appiness is not something that happens. It is not the result of good fortune or random chance. It is not something that money can buy or power command. It does not depend on outside events, but, rather, on how we interpret them. Happiness, in fact, is a condition that must be prepared for, cultivated, and defended privately by each person. People who learn to control inner experience will be able to determine the quality of their lives, which is as close as any of us can come to being happy.’ (Flow, p. 2.)

The ‘father of flow’, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (1934-2021) (credit: The Flame)

This point about ‘how we interpret’ events is especially pertinent to gratitude. Gratitude practices help us interpret our experiences more positively, by focusing on aspects of them for which we can feel grateful. This can help us overcome our negativity bias.

Do-it-yourself gratitude exercises

Gratitude exercises are incredibly effective for increasing our happiness and well-being, yet can be quickly and easily implemented. The following exercises start with the quickest and progressively involve a greater time commitment. However, they also progressively become more effective for improving our well-being.

Gratitude exercises can be implemented quickly and easily (credit: Dragon Images)

Once a week

For a weekly gratitude exercise, try this: think back over the past week and write down five things you’re grateful for.?

In a 10-week study, the participants who did this every week reported feeling better about their lives, had greater optimism about the week ahead, spent significantly more time exercising, reported fewer physical issues, and slept better and for longer.?

Five Things: an effective gratitude exercise from a 10-week study (credit: Bru-nO)

You can be very brief in what you write down – study participants wrote simple things like ‘waking up this morning’ and ‘the generosity of friends’. I recommend writing specific things you can visualize. Focus on and savour them, and visualize them as you write. Research on gratitude since this study suggests that these actions can increase the positive impact that written gratitude exercises have on our well-being. Do this at the end of the week, during a time you can focus and reflect on the past week.?

For example, you might write about that gift you received from a loved one, reflecting on the thought they must have put into it, the effort they made, and what the gift shows about how much they value and love you. Or you might write about a specific achievement you’re proud of, focusing on the skills you’re grateful to have built which got you there, the people who supported you along the way, and the experiences you’ve had as a result of it.

But if you’re short on time, just write down five brief things.

The 10-week study was co-led by the world’s leading researcher on gratitude, Robert Emmons, several of whose works are linked below.

The world’s leading researcher on gratitude, Robert Emmons (credit: Yale Center for Faith and Culture)

Daily?

The study in which participants wrote down three things that went well and what caused them to go well uses an exercise known as ‘Three Blessings’, ‘Three Good Things’ or ‘What Went Well’ (use ‘WWW’ to remember it).

Do as follows. Find a time when you’ll be able to reflect on what you’re writing. I recommend picking a time outside the busyness of the working day, so either first thing in the morning or after your working day has ended, when you’re winding down for the night. You could also do this during a break in the day – just make sure you’re able to concentrate, and you’re not cramming this in between other tasks where your mind is going to jump straight to something else afterwards.

Write down three things that went well that day (or, if you’re doing this in the morning, the previous day) and – most importantly – why they went well. For the second part, you’re looking to identify specific causal factors that made them go well. Be as specific as possible, visualizing the memory of what went well as you’re recalling it and writing about it.?

The What Went Well gratitude exercise (credit: Darkmoon_Art)

You can write down anything from everyday experiences to rarer accomplishments. For example:

What went well? “I had a fun conversation with my best friend and helped them figure out how to navigate a difficult meeting they have with their boss tomorrow.”

Why? “I listened attentively to them; I made plenty of time for our conversation, in the middle of a busy working day; I care deeply for them; I thought carefully about the advice I gave them; and I focused on their needs rather than offering advice just based on my own experiences.”

The power of this is really felt during the second part, the ‘why’. What Went Well encourages you to focus on your character virtues and how you’re using them to promote good in the world, for example by improving your life or the lives of others. In the example above, virtues such as patience, care, love, attentiveness, generosity, empathy and selflessness all contributed to this going well – virtues we usually ignore when we reflect on our everyday experiences.

You can also complete this exercise without focusing on character virtues. For example:

What went well? “I went for a lovely evening walk in my local park.”

Why? “There was a stunning sunset; I was surrounded by birdsong; I couldn’t hear any traffic; I live close to a beautiful park; it was a warm summer evening; I left my phone at home to take a break from technology; I bumped into my neighbours and love being part of a community where this happens.”

Here, you’re focusing on general things to be grateful for which are often ignored, such as the beauty of a sunset, the tranquillity of birdsong and the restorative power of spending time in nature. You’re also focusing on things that don’t focus on your character virtues, such as living in a friendly community.?

Moments to be grateful for (credit: Getty Images)

Remember the power of this exercise: the study participants who did this every night for just one week reported higher levels of happiness and lower levels of depressive symptoms, which lasted six months.

I did this exercise at the end of almost every day for around 18 months, between 2019 and 2021. It took around 10 minutes a day. That’s how little time you need to do an effective gratitude practice.?

I found, like many others, that this exercise really worked. There wasn’t a good reason to stop – I stopped because I went to Belize for the summer in 2021 and upon returning immediately started a new job and moved house, and this practice got lost by the wayside. (Here’s a talk I gave in Belize on how to use gratitude to increase your happiness.) But I also felt I didn’t ‘need’ to do it anymore, because doing it had helped me cultivate a lens of gratitude through which I’d come to experience life in a more positive way, which I’m grateful (excuse the pun) to maintain today.?

Giving a talk on flourishing on Placencia Beach, Belize, 2021

However, engaging in effective gratitude exercises is highly beneficial for your well-being even when you don’t feel you ‘need’ to do them. Since writing this blog, I’ve returned to doing What Went Well at the end of every day. It’s early enough in the year that I can make this another new year’s resolution!

A reason this exercise is so powerful may be that it involves constructing a narrative about why we are grateful for something. In an excellent overview of recent research on the science of gratitude, Andrew Huberman describes research showing that constructing a narrative is one of the most important features of an effective gratitude practice. If we were to just do the first part, the ‘what’, it wouldn’t involve a narrative: it’d just be a list of things that went well. However, the ‘why’ adds narrative structure: something went well because of certain causal factors.

Constructing a narrative as you write has been shown to make written gratitude exercises more effective (credit: phkorotkova)?

To emphasize the narrative, you could go further than the examples above and write out the causal factors with a clearer narrative structure, rather than just writing a set of reasons. You could write the second example with a more narrative structure as follows:?

Why? “It was a warm, summer evening in my local, beautiful park. The sunset was stunning, with hues of purple, orange, yellow and blue. I was free from the grip of technology, my phone and laptop far from reach back at home. I felt the homeliness of my friendly community when I bumped into my neighbours as I passed the playground. As I walked, I noticed I couldn’t hear the sound of a single car; all I could hear was birdsong.”

This isn’t necessary, though – the participants in the randomized controlled trial who reported positive impacts on their well-being for six months weren’t required to write their responses in this way. You’re already giving the exercise narrative structure by adding the ‘why’. But, if you like, try this more elaborate way of writing your responses to see if it works more effectively – I’m now trying it this way to see if it’s more effective.

One-off exercises

Another powerful exercise, which involves a much clearer and detailed narrative structure and you can do as often or as little as you like, is the ‘gratitude visit’, also known as the ‘gratitude letter’. Given the time commitment and logistical requirements, this will likely be an exercise you do much less frequently than once a week.?

The gratitude letter exercise has been shown to increase happiness and reduce depression within one month (credit: Getty Images)

You’ll need to set aside at least an hour to do this, and several hours if you complete all the steps below. I’ve done this once, and it took me about two hours to draft the letter, about another hour to re-write it nicely, by hand, as a letter I could give to the person to keep, and about another hour to read it to and discuss it with them. That’s about four hours. But you could do this in half that time – say, if you wrote a shorter letter using a computer and printed it out, rather than writing by hand.?

Remember that this is a one-off exercise rather than a daily or weekly practice, so the total time might actually be less than the cumulative total of doing What Went Well every day. If What Went Well takes around 10 minutes a day, that’s a little over an hour a week. It took me about four hours to complete a gratitude visit, which is less than the total time over a month I used to spend doing What Went Well. So if you do this once a month, it’d likely take you less time than doing What Went Well every day. And a month is a good time point for how often to do this: the participants in the first randomized controlled trial on this reported a boost in happiness and a decrease in depressive symptoms after one week, which continued for a month.?

You may find this the most effective exercise. Research has shown that writing about gratitude long-form, for example in a letter, produces higher well-being than writing a gratitude list.

The letter involves five stages:

1. Think of someone in your life whose actions improved your life but you’ve never fully thanked.

This should be someone who ‘did something or said something that changed your life for the better’ – as Martin Seligman puts it in his 2011 book Flourish (p. 30). Seligman co-led the original study on this exercise and is another of the founding psychologists behind positive psychology. The person should be someone you could meet up with.

Think of someone in your life whose actions improved your life but you’ve never fully thanked (credit: Getty Images Signature)

It could be a friend, for that time they let you stay in their apartment for a month while you were between jobs. Or a former colleague, whose advice led to you landing the career you’d always wanted. Or a parent, for encouraging you to take music lessons when you were young, without which you wouldn’t have gone on to maintain a hobby you love or become a professional musician.?

2. Write a gratitude letter to them.

Write about what they did and why you’re grateful to them. Be specific about what the person did and how their actions impacted your life.

Writing a gratitude letter to someone (credit: Cottonbro Studio)

Seligman recommends that the letter is about 300 words (Flourish, p. 30), which is about two thirds of an A4 page of typed text. Feel free to write much more – I did! – but bear in mind that this will also make the fourth and fifth, optional but highly recommended, steps more time-consuming. Just make sure it’s long enough that you’re able to describe in sufficient detail what the person did and why you’re grateful.

3. Deliver the letter to them, in person.

Give it to them in person – don’t send it via email or in the post.

Deliver the gratitude letter to the recipient, in person (credit: Getty Images Signature)?

The next steps are optional, but if you really want to experience the full potential this exercise offers for improving both your and their well-being, do the following:

4. Read the letter to them, in person.

Start to finish, word for word.

Seligman recommends calling the recipient ahead of delivering the letter and telling them you’d like to visit them, but being ‘vague about the purpose of the meeting’ because ‘this exercise is much more fun when it is a surprise’ (Flourish, pp. 30-1). That may be so, but for some recipients, you might want to give a heads-up – this exercise is emotionally intense, for both parties!?

Also, think carefully about where you’re going to read this and make sure you’ve planned enough time. If you or they are likely to break into tears, a busy café during a short afternoon break from work might not be the best choice!?

5. Discuss the letter with them.

Which parts of the letter most resonated with the recipient? What was the significance of the action described in the letter to each of you? How do you feel about each other? Discuss the letter and your feelings with each other.

Read the letter to the recipient, in person, and discuss it with them (credit: corelens)

This exercise is intense. But remember: writing a letter to someone to whom you feel grateful and reading it to them has been shown to make us feel happier and less depressed after one week, and last for one month. The positive changes within a month have been shown to be even higher than in the What Went Well exercise. And the well-being benefits have been shown to be even greater for the recipient. So by doing this, you’re taking steps to improve your own well-being and the well-being of someone who did something kind for you even more. What better way is there to show your gratitude?

There’s no reason you couldn’t do all of the above exercises. My recommendation is to do What Went Well daily, and once you’ve turned that into a daily habit, do a gratitude visit as an additional exercise. I don’t recommend committing to doing the gratitude visit regularly – just think of one person you could do this with, take your time doing it, try it out, reflect on how it went, and then do it again with someone else when you feel ready.

The takeaway

Effective gratitude exercises have a significant and lasting positive impact on our well-being, yet can be implemented quickly and easily. When we engage in gratitude exercises that involve others as recipients of our gratitude, the exercise can benefit them too, sometimes even more than ourselves. Long-form written gratitude exercises are more effective than writing gratitude lists. Constructing a narrative when we express gratitude, for example as we write about what we’re grateful for, makes the practice more effective.

Try some or all of the gratitude exercises above and track how they impact your well-being over time. I’ve linked gratitude measures you can use below.

Which gratitude practices have you done and how did you find them? Did you try any of the above, and if so, what impact did they have on you? If you did a gratitude visit, how did it impact the person you read your gratitude letter to??

I’d love to hear about your experiences in the comments, or any other thoughts you have about gratitude!

drjonbeale.com

Recommended resources

Books:

• Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (HarperCollins, 1990)
• Robert Emmons, Thanks! How Practicing Gratitude Can Make You Happier (Houghton Mifflin Company, 2007)
• Robert Emmons, Gratitude Works! A Twenty-One-Day Program for Creating Emotional Prosperity (Jossey-Bass, 2013) (also available as a training programme, ‘Gratitude Works!’, Heroic, 2013)
• Martin Seligman, Flourish: A New Understanding of Happiness and Wellbeing – and How to Achieve Them (London: Nicholas Brearley Publishing, 2011)
• Robert Waldinger & Marc Schulz, The Good Life and How to Live It: Lessons from the World’s Longest Study on Happiness (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2023)

Peer-reviewed articles:

• Don Davis et al., ‘Thankful for the little things: a meta-analysis of gratitude interventions’ (Journal of Counseling Psychology, 2016)
• Robert Emmons & Michael McCullough, ‘Counting Blessings Versus Burdens: An Experimental Investigation of Gratitude and Subjective Well-Being in Daily Life’ (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2003)
• Ying Hwa Kee, Lung Hung Chen & Ying-Mei Tsai, ‘Relationships between being traditional and sense of gratitude among Taiwanese high school athletes’ (Psychol Rep, 2008)
• Takashi Naito, Janjira Wangwan & Motoko Tani, ‘Gratitude in University Students in Japan and Thailand’ (Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 2005)
• Annie Regan, Lisa Walsh & Sonja Lyobomirsky, ‘Are Some Ways of Expressing Gratitude More Beneficial Than Others? Results From a Randomized Controlled Experiment’ (Affective Science, 2023)
• Laurie Santos & Alexandra Rosati, ‘The Evolutionary Roots of Human Decision Making’ (Annu Rev Psychol., 2015)
• Martin Seligman & Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, ‘Positive Psychology: An Introduction’ (American Psychologist, 2000)
• Martin Seligman, Tracy Steen, Nansook Park & Christopher Peterson, ‘Positive psychology progress: empirical validation of interventions’ (American Psychologist, 2005)
• Tyler VanderWeele, ‘Activities for Flourishing: An Evidence-Based Guide’ (Journal of Positive Psychology & Wellbeing, 2020)?
• Lea Waters, ‘A Review of School-Based Positive Psychology Interventions’ (Australian Educational and Developmental Psychologist, 2011)

Book chapters:

• Sarah Buckingham & Joseph Buckingham, ‘Gratitude, subjective well-being and prosociality: implications for adolescence and education’, in Julia Harrington, Jon Beale, Amy Fancourt & Catherine Lutz (eds.), The ‘BrainCanDo’ Handbook of Teaching and Learning (Routledge, 2021)

Media articles:

• Dean Burnett, ‘You suck! Why criticism is more powerful than praise’, The Guardian, 9 May 2014
• Sue Crites, ‘A Simple Exercise to Feel Happiness and Find Gratitude’, Huffington Post, 6 Jan 2016
• Harvard Health Publishing Staff, ‘Giving thanks can make you happier’, Harvard Medical School, Harvard Health Publishing, 14 Aug 2021
• Robert Emmons, ‘Why Gratitude is Good’, Greater Good Magazine, 20 June 2011
• Robert Emmons, ‘Five Myths about Gratitude’, Greater Good Magazine, 21 Nov 2013
• Michael Craig Miller, ‘In Praise of Gratitude’, Harvard Health Blog, 21 Nov 2012
• Catherine Moore, ‘What is negativity bias and how can it be overcome?’, PositivePsychology.com, 30 Dec 2019
• Rosetta Thurman, ‘Why Gratitude is Good for You’, Stanford Social Innovation Review, 26 Nov 2019
• Mark Travers, ‘Five Insights on Gratitude’, Psychology Today, 23 Dec 2019

Podcasts:

• ‘Lessons from the World’s Longest Study on Happiness, with Dr. Marc Schulz’, Flourish FM, 22 March 2023
• ‘The Science of Gratitude and How to Build a Gratitude Practice’, Andrew Huberman, Huberman Labs, 21 Nov 2021

Gratitude exercises:

• ‘Gratitude Letter’, Greater Good in Action?
• ‘Gratitude Activity’, Human Flourishing Program at Harvard’s Flourishing App

Measuring your gratitude:

• ‘Gratitude Measure’, Human Flourishing Program at Harvard’s Flourishing App
• ‘Gratitude Survey’, UPenn Authentic Happiness Questionnaire Center