Week 8 Post 2

Gratitude has a bigger connection to happiness than almost every other emotion. Gratitude is the ability to feel reverence for things that are given. To be able to feel thankful for others and all they have done for you, and that you have made it where you are with the help of others. The ability to feel grateful predicts greater happiness, life satisfaction, optimism, reduced PTSD in veterans and female college students, prosocial leadership, and greater relationship satisfaction. It has also predicted lower levels of envy, possessiveness, anxiety, and depression. People who can feel grateful for others can also see all of the good and all of the bad and life and choose to see life as a gift still. They see a negative situation and they see that while it might not be the best situation, they have grown so much from another point in their life or they know that they will grow so much from this experience and so they are thankful. They replace the negative emotion of hopelessness with gratitude to make a more positive thinking cycle. As discussed much earlier on, giving makes people happy, and so when people can be grateful for the things they are given, they tend to give more, spreading the bounds of happiness. Throughout many different studies and tests, Phil Watkins has found that grateful people reminisce on positive, savor worthy moments which creates a more prosocial positive feedback loop for judgment. He has also found that after stressful events, grateful people are more likely to engage in positive reinterpretation and growth, less likely to engage in self-blame, less likely to try to disengage from the negative event, and all of this, in turn, leads to less stress and more happiness.

A wide variety of researchers have also found that it has very positive psychological, physical, and social benefits. Psychologically it helps with higher levels of positive emotions, more alert lively feelings, more joy and pleasure, and more optimism and happiness. Physically it has shown help people by supporting stronger immune systems, feeling less bothered by aches and pains, lower blood pressure, more exercise and better care of one's health, and longer and better sleep. Socially it helps people be more helpful, generous and compassionate, more forgiving, more outgoing, and fewer feelings of loneliness and isolation. This is why it is important to cultivate it in everyday life by doing things such as a letter of gratitude letter, gratitude journals, or even saying simple phrases like thank you more. In a study done by Robert Emmons, he had one group keep a gratitude journal, and another group had to list five events that affected them but they didn't add the emotions that were tied to that. At the end of the ten weeks, participants who’d kept a gratitude journal felt happier and more refreshed and excited about life in comparison to the other conditions. In another study done by Eastern Washington University, they had people randomly put into writing groups related to report on an unpleasant, fresh memory. One group wrote about issues that were irrelevant to the memory, one group wrote about the experience related to the memory, and one group focused on the positive parts of that experience. This last group showed more closure and less negative emotional impact that the others who wrote about the negative. This shows that while they felt bad, they also saw the good which cultivates great feelings of happiness. All of these studies show that Gratitude is extremely important to have in life and so it is important to practice it; however, one can.