How to Feel More Grateful

Thanksgiving is one of my favorite holidays, because cultivating gratitude is one of the best ways to increase our own happiness, and consequently that of the people around us.

And yet, these days, sometimes gratitude gets a bad rap.

One of the most irritating cultural developments in recent years has been the whole #blessed phenomenon -- as if taking a selfie in front of your private jet and posting it online with #blessed is a way to practice gratitude.

It’s not. Gratitude is not about showboating.

Nor is it about maniacally focusing on the positive and pretending that we live in a problem-free world.

Nor is it saying ‘thank you’ in expectation of future rewards.

But what is it? And how do we experience more of it?

Recently, as part of a Good Morning America segment, I went to a junior high school in Schaumburg, Illinois where they are endeavoring to counteract these trends. As the superintendent told me, it's not enough to teach kids math and reading; you have to teach them how to be successful humans.

In this case, the school brought in a man named Shawn Achor, the author of a best-selling book called The Happiness Advantage. Despite the title, the book is not a cheesy self-help manual telling us all to accentuate the positive. It’s evidence based, practical, and actionable.

First, Achor cites all kinds of data that gratitude can boost energy, improve sleep, and increase both optimism and social connection—two of the greatest predictors of long-term happiness. In one study, gratitude even correlated with a 23 percent drop in headaches, backaches, and fatigue.

Most importantly, spending just two minutes a day spent thinking of things you’re grateful for can train the brain to become happier. In a sense, doing so builds new mental muscles that scan for the positive.

Why do we need new muscles to do this? Because our brains evolved to have a pronounced negativity bias.

Early human] life was precarious, and we needed to be on the lookout for things like saber-toothed tigers. But this threat-detection wiring doesn’t always serve us well in a modern context, where our brains unnecessarily revert into ancient freak-out mode when, say, we’re dissatisfied by our lack of Instagram likes.

Fortunately, Achor has a series of gratitude hacks that anyone can do. I tried two of them out for a week.

First, every day, I wrote a thank-you email to someone I felt really deserved it. And guess what I found? Every time I sent an appreciative email, I received a warm response, dropping a nice hit of dopamine into my inbox, which is otherwise a source of diabolical overwhelm.

Second, every night as my head hit the pillow, instead of engaging in my habitual rumination about whatever problems needed to be solved, I spent several minutes thinking about three new things that had happened during the day for which I was grateful.

After doing this one for a few days, I found the ritual bleeding out into the rest of my day, forcing me to occasionally pull back from my relentless rush to cross things off my to-do list. It contributed to a goal I’d been pursuing for years through my daily meditation practice—trying to cultivate a sort of nostalgia for the present, rather than constantly rueing the past or projecting into the future.

All my life, I’d heard the exhortation to stop and smell the roses, but no one had ever actually told me how to do it.

To be clear, this dose of gratitude did not stop me from worrying and strategizing about all the things that I need to worry and strategize about. Being grateful is definitely not the same as being complacent. Another of my favorite expressions is “The price of security is insecurity.” I still believe that to be true. It’s just that I found gratitude to be a nice corrective when I was taking my worrying too far.

These days, my nightly gratitude ritual is still going strong—and I suspect it is here to stay. I find it incredibly rewarding to have a practice that orients me toward the positive stuff I might otherwise simply experience and expunge.

I encourage you, this Thanksgiving, to give one of these “gratitude hacks” a try for yourself. I don’t know whether they’ve contributed to a 23 percent drop in my headaches, backaches, and fatigue, but I do know that gratitude makes me feel really good. Even, if I may say so myself, #blessed.