“Be in a state of gratitude for everything that shows up in your life. Be thankful for the storms as well as the smooth sailing. What is the lesson or gift in what you are experiencing right now? Find your joy not in what’s missing in your life but in how you can serve.” Wayne Dyer
Gratitude is the quality of being thankful. It’s a readiness to show appreciation
Gratitude is a foundational element to building wealth. Gratitude allows you to find joy in and focus on what you already have because envy is the stealer of wealth and comparison is the thief of joy. If you are constantly comparing yourself to others you will never have enough. You will feel empty and inadequate. You will not find happiness.
As media mogul Oprah Winfrey explains, “Be thankful for what you have; you’ll end up having more. If you concentrate on what you don’t have, you will never, ever have enough.”
“Gratitude turns what you have into enough.” Unknown
“Mother Theresa talked about how grateful she was to the people she was helping, the sick and dying in the slums of Calcutta, because they enabled her to grow and deepen her spirituality,” explains Robert A. Emmons, Ph.D., is the world’s leading scientific expert on gratitude and professor of psychology at the University of California, Davis.
Like Mother Theresa’s spiritual growth, there are several important reasons that gratitude can have transformative effects on your own life, according to Dr. Emmons. Additionally, there are four effects he sites:
1. Gratitude allows you to appreciate and celebrate the present. It magnifies positive emotions.
Research on emotion shows that positive emotions wear off quickly. Our emotional system likes newness and novelty. It likes change. You adapt to positive life circumstances so that before too long, the new car, the new spouse, the new house—they don’t feel so new and exciting anymore.
But gratitude makes you focus on and appreciate the value of something, and when you appreciate the value of something, you extract more benefits from it; you’re less likely to take it for granted, states Dr. Emmons.
In effect, gratitude allows you to participate more in life. You notice the positives more, and that magnifies the pleasures you get from life. Instead of adapting to goodness, you celebrate goodness. You spend more time watching and doing things with gratitude. Effectively, you become a greater participant in your life as opposed to being a spectator.
2. Gratitude blocks toxic, negative emotions, such as envy, resentment, regret—emotions that can destroy our happiness. A 2008 study by psychologist Alex Wood in the Journal of Research in Personality, showed that gratitude can reduce the frequency and duration of episodes of depression.
You cannot feel envious and grateful at the same time. They’re incompatible feelings. If you’re grateful, you can’t resent someone for having something that you don’t.
3. Grateful people are more stress resistant. There’s a number of studies showing that in the face of serious trauma, adversity, and suffering, if people have a grateful disposition, they’ll recover more quickly. In short, gratitude gives people a perspective from which they can interpret negative life events and help them guard against post-traumatic stress and lasting anxiety.
4. Grateful people have a higher sense of self-worth. When you’re grateful, you have the sense that someone else is looking out for you—someone else has provided for your well-being, or you notice a network of relationships, past and present, of people who are responsible for helping you get to where you are right now.
Once you start to recognize the contributions that other people have made to your life—once you realize that other people have seen the value in you—you can transform the way you see yourself.
Thus, it’s imperative for you to cultivate gratitude and to overcome the challenges to gratitude. You must put conscious and deliberate effort into practicing gratitude.
“Gratitude is the healthiest of all human emotions. The more you express gratitude for what you have, the more likely you will have even more to express gratitude for.” Zig Ziglar
First is to keep a gratitude journal as a way to cultivate gratitude, says Dr. Emmons. This can mean listing just five things for which you’re grateful every week. This practice works because it consciously, intentionally focuses your attention on developing more grateful thinking and on eliminating ungrateful thoughts. It helps guard against taking things for granted; instead, you will see gifts in life as new and exciting. People who live a life of pervasive thankfulness really do experience life differently than people who cheat themselves out of life by not feeling grateful.
Another gratitude exercise is to practice counting your blessings on a regular basis, maybe first thing in the morning, maybe in the evening. What are you grateful for today? You don’t have to write them down on paper.
Additionally, you can use concrete reminders to practice gratitude, says Dr. Emmons. For example, a Vancouver family developed a practice of putting money in “gratitude jars.” At the end of the day, they put spare change into those gratitude jars. They had a regular reminder, a habit, to get them to focus on gratitude. When the jar became full, they gave away the money to a good cause within their community.
Gratitude journals and other gratitude practices seem simple and basic, but studies have shown that people who keep gratitude journals for just three weeks realize results that have been overwhelmingly beneficial in their lives, according to Dr. Emmons.
The bottomline is that having an ‘attitude of gratitude’ is the key ingredient to living your best and most rewarding life. It’s a practice and habit that we must all embrace.
“The ultimate path to enlightment is the cultivation of gratitude. When you’re grateful, fear disappears. When you’re grateful lack disapears. You feel a sense that life is uniquely blessed, but at the same time, you feel like you’re a part of everything that exists and you know that you are not the source of it.” Tony Robbins
References:
- https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/why_gratitude_is_good
- https://thestrive.co/gratitude-quotes/
- https://blog.gratefulness.me/gratitude-quotes/
Robert A. Emmons, Ph.D., is the world’s leading scientific expert on gratitude. He is a professor of psychology at the University of California, Davis, and the founding editor-in-chief of The Journal of Positive Psychology. He is the author of the books Gratitude Works!: A 21-Day Program for Creating Emotional Prosperity and Thanks! How the New Science of Gratitude Can Make You Happier.