Ancient philosophers proposed it, modern researchers have confirmed it: Being thankful is good for you.
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Gratitude is very similar to exercise. We all know it’s good to be grateful and show it—just as we all know it’s good to go to the gym and work out. Both practices will make life better. But just as fitness demands that we make a routine and overcome a natural desire to do nothing, so also we need to make a habit of being grateful, even if we don’t feel it. And not just on one Thursday—all year round.
We have lots of fitness regimens to choose from but, unfortunately, few gratitude workouts. And we rarely find gratitude influencers on social media. As a rule, we need to fashion our own gratitude program. So here’s a start, based on the wisdom of the great philosophers. If you follow these suggestions with a little discipline, you will conquer ingratitude and reap the reward that comes from showing true appreciation.
Who knows? With a bit of effort, you might just become an elite athlete of thankfulness.
Researchers disagree, in fact, about whether gratitude is an emotion per se. It certainly does not seem to be a “basic emotion” like joy or anger, as some emotion researchers have come to understand them. These feelings all have a unique pattern of brain activity as well as a universal and recognizable facial expression, whereas gratitude shows as brain activity but lacks a characteristic visual cue. The psychologist Robert Emmons, the top academic expert in the field, defines gratitude as a combination of recognizing goodness outside ourselves—in people, in nature, in the divine—and affirming it to ourselves and others. To be ungrateful, therefore, is to fail to see goodness, or to see it and fail to affirm it.
One of the most undisputed findings in the social-science literature of happiness is that gratitude reliably increases happiness. The trick is to develop ways to be a more grateful person—that is, to recognize goodness and affirm it in a systematic way.
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To do so is not natural to us, in fact. On the contrary, humans have a “negativity bias,” an evolved tendency to focus more on adverse events than on positive ones. So to practice and reinforce gratitude means working against our natural impulses—much like getting off the couch and lifting weights.
The real question, then, is how to override our negativity bias, recognize goodness, be grateful for it, and consciously avow it. The answer is to adopt purposive gratitude routines. Here are four that great philosophers have proposed.
1. Make thankfulness an interior discipline.
The second-century Roman emperor and Stoic Marcus Aurelius is still remembered today for the words of self-improvement he wrote for himself throughout his adult life, which were collected posthumously as his Meditations. A recurrent theme was his practice of reminding himself as a matter of routine—upon awakening, say—of what was of value in life, no matter what his actual mood was. “Thou shalt persuade thyself, that thou hast all things,” he wrote, “all for thy good.”
The discipline of counting your blessings has been found to improve affect and outlook. You can find many ways to do this; one is the “gratitude list,” on which, much like Aurelius, you write down the good things in your life and then make a habit of checking the list. This practice has even been identified as a tool that may reduce depressive symptoms.
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2. Make it an outward expression.
Another Roman statesman, Marcus Tullius Cicero, asserted in his Pro Plancio in 54 B.C.E. that “gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all the others.” This assertion raises gratitude above the level of a private discipline and argues for integrating it into one’s public behavior. Cicero believed that expressing gratitude was not only virtuous in itself but also a kind of one-stop shopping for the other virtuous qualities we’d like in our lives.
I haven’t myself tested the claim that all virtues stem from gratitude—if I say “thank you” more, will I be more likely to remember to unload the dishwasher?—but a great deal of research shows that acts of thanking others bring us happiness. For example, a study published recently asked adults to write thank-you letters to other people, and found that their sense of well-being was significantly higher than that of adults who didn’t write such letters. The researchers additionally found that expressing thanks to others in this way offered more benefit even than writing an Aurelius-style private gratitude list.
3. Make it a sacred duty.
As a discipline and virtue, gratitude is generally a voluntary act. Yet other philosophers see it more as an obligation. In his 1755 Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men, Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote, “Gratitude is a duty which ought to be paid, but not a right to be exacted.” In other words, Rousseau regarded gratitude much like Jesus treated love or forgiveness: We have a moral obligation to give these things without any expectation of reward or reciprocity.
No academic research I’ve seen has asked whether such selfless duty raises happiness, although many thinkers have asserted this without empirical evidence. “Human happiness and moral duty are inseparably connected,” declared George Washington in 1789. You can probably find cases of altruistic duty so onerous that it has lowered well-being, but fulfilling moral duty can certainly give you a sense of purpose—and purpose unambiguously improves your sense of well-being by reducing negative feelings.
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4. Make it into words of worship.
The 13th-century German Christian mystic Meister Eckhart was known for his ability to explain the metaphysical union between people and God in easy-to-grasp terms. In one of his sermons, he identified the one thing that matters most in prayer: “If a man had no more to do with God than to be thankful, that would suffice.” In other words, if you want to pray but don’t know what to say, just bow your head and say, “Thank you.”
The effects of this kind of prayer have been shown to have significant benefits for well-being. Scholars writing in The Journal of Positive Psychology in 2011 found that gratitude to God, when paired with a religious commitment, was associated with increased positive feelings, lowered negative feelings, and improved mental health. Although researchers haven’t studied whether this could be adapted for nonreligious rites, I strongly suspect that practices in which words of thanks are a mantra or focus of meditation would show similar results.
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Gratitude is not a feeling we have to wait and hope to have. It is a pattern of behavior we should bring into our lives on a regular basis. Let me suggest the following gratitude-workout routine, based on the wisdom above.
First thing, before getting out of bed in the morning, recite a few sentences to frame the day. I like Psalm 118:24: “This is the day the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it.” If you don’t want the religious language, find another such reason to celebrate the day, or write your own.
Maintain a gratitude list that you update once a week. You could tape it to the bottom of your computer screen and glance at it each morning before you start work, pausing briefly on each item.
Make a routine of your outward gratitude in a couple of daily emails or texts, sent before you get to work. You don’t need anything overwrought or dramatic, just a few words showing someone that you noticed something nice they did and appreciated it.
And on the days you aren’t feeling like sending your two thank-you messages? Make it three instead. Then remind yourself that to lighten the load on someone else with your words of thanks is a duty you have accepted.
Write or adopt a gratitude prayer or mantra that you can say throughout the day, especially at trying moments. Maybe it could be “Thank you for my life,” which, believe me, works wonders when you’re sad or afraid. Some people repeat thanks in a foreign language they find sonorous.
If you commit to this regimen, your life will change. You won’t feel grateful at every second (you are still human), but gratitude will become a fixed point around which you live your life. And that will make you a stronger, happier person.
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