Beyond Happiness: Gratitude to Achieve Goals
Surprising benefits of gratitude. And easy ways to practice more gratitude.
"By overwhelming majority, the theme of our next class will be gratitude"
I’m in class for yoga teacher training. We had just conducted a blind vote for the theme of the next yoga class we'd be teaching. Yoga classes often feature a theme that speaks to the mindful aspects of a yoga practice. Among a list of 5-8 possible theme topics, gratitude was was selected via landslide vote.
I was surprised that so many of my classmates had selected gratitude as the theme for our next class. Gratitude seems like something we hear about regularly and are reminded to practice (particularly as Thanksgiving rolls around). It seems easy enough to do as well - just be thankful for stuff, right?
However, if I use myself as an example, gratitude is something we can still practice more. I researched and reflected on some ways to answer the question - how can we incorporate more gratitude in our daily lives?
While I found some tactics towards incorporating more gratitude, I also found research that outlined how gratitude can helps us in a multitude of ways. Turns out there’s more to gratitude than just the good feelings we get.
In this post, I capture a few lesser known ways gratitude benefits us and some tactics to incorporate more gratitude. Much is based off research I found and some is based off my own reflections on the topic.
Beyond happiness
We know gratitude makes us feel good. It feels good when other’s do something for us, and it feels good to express our appreciation. We know it also feels good to receive gratitude for something we’ve done. It’s good vibes all around. But there’s more:
Gratitude facilitates self-control
Self-control feels like an exercise in restraint. We exhibit self-control when we muster willpower and hold ourselves back from distraction on a goal. Thus, we might try tactics to reduce deviation from our desired behavior. Just like the participants in the famous “Marshmallow Test” from famed psychologist Walter Mischel.
In the “Marshmallow Test,” children were offered two choices - they could eat a single marshmallow immediately, or they could wait until the adult returned and they would be given two marshmallows. Hilarity ensues as the children try various tactics to restrain themselves from eating the marshmallow. Children who had the self-control to wait for the second marshmallow went on to have better outcomes later in life (for example, higher education success and better health) than those who couldn’t wait.1
However, practicing gratitude has been shown to also facilitate self-control. In one experiment2, gratitude was shown to increase the ability to delay gratification. Young people were offered a choice of two rewards - a smaller immediate reward, or a larger but delayed reward. Prior to selection of their choice, the participants were asked to either write about something they were grateful for or about other topics. Those who wrote about gratitude chose the larger delayed reward more often. Gratitude increased the participant’s ability towards delayed gratification. In context of the marshmallow experiment, gratitude builds our ability to wait for two marshmallows.
Gratitude also reduces anxiety and worry, which also contributes to increased self-control. Participants of a study who practiced gratitude reported less anxiety and other negative emotions and were better able to stick to a healthy eating program than the control group.3
Gratitude builds relationships
We know gratitude provides us and the targets of our gratitude with good vibes. What’s less apparent is how gratitude helps build and strengthen relationships.
When we practice gratitude towards others, we draw our attention to them - we notice that they are looking out for us and thinking of us. This attention in turn leads us to action that binds us closer to the person we feel gratitude towards. Researcher Sara B. Algoe summarizes gratitude's role in relationships as find-remind-bind.4 Gratitude helps us find and identify people to partner with, it reminds and motivates us to invest in the relationship, and it binds us towards stronger relationships.
Gratitude signals communal relationship norms and may be an evolved mechanism to fuel upward spirals of mutually responsive behaviors between recipient and benefactor.
In this way, gratitude is important for forming and maintaining the most important relationships of our lives, those with the people we interact with every day. - Sara B. Algoe5
Tactics towards more gratitude
Three good things
We can train ourselves to experience more gratitude. Take a few minutes in our day to notice three things we’re grateful for. The process itself is simple, we just need to be mindful to keep the practice as a habit. Over time, we naturally find more things we’re grateful for. The benefits of this practice have been demonstrated to increase feelings of happiness.6
Look at the little things
Often when I discuss gratitude with friends and colleagues, we speak of more significant items in our lives - gratitude for family and friends or perhaps recent happy events. While this makes total sense, we can also notice any number of little events that happen during our day.
For example, I get pretty excited when I cut open an avocado and find it to be at the short yet awesome state of perfect ripeness. It’s a small moment of joy and I’m grateful for the opportunity to enjoy a ripe avocado. It’s a small thing, but the gratitude benefits aren’t small.
Self-gratitude
It’s easy to be grateful for when good things happen to us or when we experience success. However, I’d suggest we also add in gratitude for our efforts, independent of outcomes. We don’t control many outcomes in our lives, but we do control how we show up - the effort we place into how we act every day. It’s a simple act to pause and practice gratitude inwards for our efforts. Whether that’s towards something larger like a delivering an important work project, or something smaller like finishing our laundry.
Eulogy & Resume Virtues
Author David Brooks has a concept that there are two sets of virtues: resume virtues and eulogy virtues. Resume virtues are traits that bring you value in the career marketplace. Traits such as ambition, competitiveness, and results-oriented come to mind. Eulogy virtues are traits that would be spoken about at your funeral. Eulogy virtues are what we’re remember for, and what our those closest to us value in us. These might be traits such as kindness, courage, loving, grateful.
In our busy lives, we rightfully spend a lot of time working towards our resume virtues. Work plays a large part in our lives and we need to feel successful and satisfied with work. We know eulogy virtues are important, yet our workplace cultures place far higher emphasis on resume virtues. And so we spend much of our time developing our resume virtues.
So what do we do about eulogy virtues such as gratitude?
I’d suggest our virtues are not as clean cut as resume or eulogy. The more we recognize that virtues such as gratitude benefit us holistically - in both personal and professional contexts, the more we can strive to strengthen these traits.
Mischel, Walter; Ebbesen, Ebbe B. (1970). "Attention in delay of gratification". Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
DeSteno, D., Y. Li, L. Dickens, and J. S. Lerner. 2014. “Gratitude: A Tool for Reducing Economic Impatience.” Psychological Science.
Fritz, Megan M., et al. (2019) "Gratitude facilitates healthy eating behavior in adolescents and young adults." Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.
Algoe, Sara B. "Find, remind, and bind: The functions of gratitude in everyday relationships." Social and personality psychology compass 6.6 (2012): 455-469.
ibid.
Seligman, Martin EP, et al. "Positive psychology progress: empirical validation of interventions." American psychologist 60.5 (2005): 410.