Expressing Gratitude

It is the day after Thanksgiving, and I am sitting at the office and reflecting on the day. I could not help but think about the concept of gratitude and thankfulness. I have been seeing many Facebook posts of friends and acquaintances giving thanks for things throughout the month of November and have enjoyed reading them all. As a psychologist, it made me wonder about the effects of being grateful. Anecdotally, I know that concepts like gratitude must help with happiness and overall well being, but I was pretty sure that it also must be empirically supported as well.

I found an article examining the link between Gratitude and Well Being (Sansone & Sansone, 2010) and wanted to share some of the results here. First, it is important to look at how they define gratitude in their article. They defined gratitude as the appreciation of what is valuable and meaningful to oneself and represents a general state of thankfulness and/or appreciation. Sansone and Sansone (2010) then also listed a handful of studies that demonstrated that gratitude is linked to more positive well being. One of the studies showed that a group journaling about things they were grateful for, had higher well being scores than those that journaled about either negative life events or neutral life events. A similar study showed that this same result held true for adolescents and another study demonstrated that it held true for adults in Taiwan.

Looking at these results, it makes me think of my own way of expressing gratitude to others, but also recognizing it internally. Although these studies do not directly examine the link between posting about your gratitude on Facebook and higher well being, the idea would make it think that it may hold true. It left me wondering if in our own lives, it may be nice to stop each day and think of one or two things you are thankful for today. Some people may write them down for others to see, some may write them down for themselves, and some may just hold them in their heart....but all could have a positive effect.

Thanksgiving is a time to think of gratitude and thankfulness, but I am hoping that it is something that I and others think about throughout the year and not for just one month or around one holiday.