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5 Reasons Why Giving Thanks is Good for You
What we can learn from the happiest people we know.
In an article in Parade, psychologist and scientist Matt Killingsworth revealed findings from his Johnnie Walker-backed project, “Joynomics: The Study of Joy and Progress.” According to Killingsworth, the happiest people practice the following:
The human need to express gratitude seems to be a powerful and almost universal phenomenon. But why?
That’s exactly what Robert A. Emmons, Ph.D, a psychology professor at the University of California-Davis, and author of Gratitude Works!: A 21-Day Program for Creating Emotional Prosperity, set out to discover.
“For too long, the concept of gratitude had been ignored,” said Emmons, director of the university’s Emmons Lab, which creates and shares scientific data on gratitude, its causes, and its potential effects on human health and well-being. He calls it “the forgotten factor in the science of well-being."
Emmons is one of the pioneers of research into the ways that gratitude affects our lives. To assess people’s levels of thankfulness, Emmons and his colleague Michael E. McCullough created a questionnaire that allowed them to compare “grateful people” to those who were less so. They also found ways to cultivate gratitude in test subjects — keeping a “gratitude journal,” counting one’s blessings, writing letters of thanks — then studied the changes that occurred as a result.
The results of his studies and others — both psychological and physiological — are fascinating. Here, five reasons why giving thanks is actually good for you.
With benefits like these, maybe we should practice being thankful more than once a year. What else can people do to cultivate more gratitude in their lives?
“Make a commitment to write down at least three things you’re grateful for each day for 30 days. Make each one as specific as possible — there’s value in the details,” Emmons said. “It will shift your reality.”