CHAPTER 7
Count Your Blessings

Thankful people find the most good

When I was about ten and having one of those woe-is-me days, I was moping around complaining that some kids in our neighborhood were sporting some really cool jeans called Levi’s. I, on the other hand, was wearing cheaper and dorky-looking jeans made by another company. How shameful. I complained about having to wear uncool jeans only when my dad wasn’t around. He’d have cuffed me upside the head and told me how hard he worked to buy those jeans, and that I should be happy to have clothes.

My mom, quite a bit gentler, smiled and softly told me some family history. She told me about growing up on a farm in Missouri, how difficult life was, and how little they had. The pictures she showed me made the point even more strongly. She said I not only had more things, but a more comfortable life, and more opportunity. Then she said, “The happiest people in the world aren’t the ones who have the most. The happiest people are the ones who are the most thankful for what they have.” Those words stuck with me.

My mom seemed to be ahead of her time in understanding how gratitude plays a major role in well-being and happiness. Her common sense has been borne out by important findings from extensive research that has since been done on gratitude.

When you’re thankful, you tune in more to the goodness around you. We quickly and naturally notice the negatives of life. But with a little rewiring and a little diligence, we can train ourselves to see that the positives far outnumber the negatives. Once this becomes a habit, the good around us seems to increase. You won’t even have to look for it. It will start finding you.

What Research Tells Us about the Effects of Gratitude

“Giving Thanks Can Make You Happier”—This is actually a headline rather than a quote. Among the many resources for mental health and happiness I recently discovered is Harvard Health Publishing, a consumer health division of Harvard Medical School. I particularly like its motto: “Trusted advice for a healthier life.” It regularly publishes articles on its website dealing with a variety of health matters. The relationship between thankfulness and happiness is found in the category called Mind and Mood.

Here’s a quote that summarizes the article cited above: “In positive psychology research, gratitude is strongly and consistently associated with greater happiness. Gratitude helps people feel more positive emotions, relish good experiences, improve their health, deal with adversity, and build strong relationships.” That seems like a pretty good argument for developing and maintaining thankfulness.

In one such study, participants were divided into three groups. Each group was given a writing assignment over the next ten weeks. One group wrote about their daily irritations; another wrote about how events affected them, whether positive or negative; and the third group wrote about what they were grateful for during each week of the study. It’s probably no surprise that those who wrote about gratitude felt more optimistic in general, and better about their own lives. Several reported feeling healthier physically as well.

Dr. Robert Emmons, a psychology professor at the University of California, Davis, is often described as the world’s leading scientific expert on the psychology of gratitude. He has also written a number of books on the subject, including The Little Book of Gratitude: Create a Life of Happiness and Wellbeing by Giving Thanks. Dr. Michael McCullough, a psychology professor at the University of Miami, has collaborated with Emmons and has also researched and written about how gratitude and forgiveness contribute to happiness.

Dr. Martin Seligman of the University of Pennsylvania has also conducted research on thankfulness. In one of his studies, he asked more than 400 people to write and hand deliver a letter of appreciation to someone who had influenced them in a positive way, but whom they had never thanked properly. He was surprised that of all the strategies he employed, this one had the strongest and longest-lasting positive effects. The people who wrote the letters reported a huge surge in their happiness scores. This particular expression of thankfulness results in the ultimate win-win scenario. The person receiving the letter is both surprised and deeply touched, and the person delivering it increases in happiness by bringing such joy to someone deserving it.

One unexpected, but not surprising, result of these many studies on gratitude is that the people who participate in the studies and then see the results report later that they have an increased awareness of the good around them. It isn’t so much that they now look harder for the good; they simply notice it more. It has been there all along.

I own several excellent books about thankfulness and gratitude and have enjoyed reading each. What surprised me most in these books was the extent of the research conducted in recent years, which highlights two points: first, the many benefits of being thankful, and second, the recommendations for increasing thankfulness and well-being in yourself. Here are a few of those recommendations.

• Send a hand-written note of thanks to someone who has enhanced your life.

• Keep a gratitude journal for at least twenty-one days. At the end of each day, jot down the events, things, and people you’re thankful for.

• Pray and/or meditate. Depending on your beliefs, try either of these by sitting quietly with your eyes closed and focus on the people, activities, and things that add joy to your life. The more you do this, the more effective it becomes.

• Put a short quote or message about gratitude on your nightstand. Read it just before you turn off the lights. Read it again when you wake up in the morning.

• Look for the good around you throughout an average day. Try to notice the things you normally take for granted.

• Take a walk through your residence, be it a home, apartment, or other. Look at everything in each room. Are you thankful you have these things?

• Carry a pocket reminder.

I have two examples of this last recommendation. A Jewish friend of mine carries a small coin in his pocket at all times. On one side it has the Star of David; on the other side are the words Modeh Ani, which means “I give thanks.”

A woman at one of my speaking engagements shared her story about rocks with me—not Pet Rocks, but Thank Rocks. She keeps a smooth rock about the size of a baseball on her desk. It has the word THANK painted on it. She keeps a smaller one in her purse. She said with a big smile, “We all need reminders to help us pay attention to the good in our lives.”

In case you’re wondering, you can buy religious and non-religious coins or stones with a message of thankfulness on them, and you can order custom engraved stones online.

A Routine Day Experiment in Noticing the Good

In my early days of teaching psychology, I began to wonder what leaders in the field had to say about thankfulness. Did it have anything to do with mental health or happiness? This was before the field of positive psychology had emerged. The most positive form of psychology then was humanistic psychology, also called human potential psychology. One of the leaders of this school of thought was Abraham Maslow, whose primary belief was that the average person sells her/himself short and is capable of achieving more success and happiness in life. He is famous for his theory of the hierarchy of needs and the term self-actualization, which means coming closer to reaching one’s potential for a meaningful and joyful life. Maslow was, and still is, one of my heroes. His research and writing had a huge impact on my teaching and on my life. Near the end of his career and life, which sadly ended at age sixty-two, he wrote, “The most fortunate are those who have a wonderful capacity to appreciate again and again, freshly and naively, the basic goods of life, with awe, pleasure, wonder, and even ecstasy.”

Wanting to share this capacity to appreciate what Maslow wrote about, I asked my high school and adult students how many times in a routine day they stopped to think about these basic goods of life. This led to a wonderful, eye-opening discussion about what those goods are.

My instructions were: As you go through your day, from getting up in the morning to going to bed that evening, write down one or more things you’re thankful for relating to each activity. I asked them to bring their lists to the next class. To put it mildly, the ensuing discussions were among the happiest and most meaningful in my teaching career. Both the kids and adults were equally amazed at how many good things they usually overlook in an average day. I can sum them up in three comments:

1. “We sure take a lot of the good things all around us every day for granted.”

2. “We should stop and think once in a while about how good we have it.”

3. “We complain about so many of these things. We should be giving thanks for them.”

Can You Go One Day without Complaining?

Another meaningful assignment related to our thankfulness exercise was the Bruce Diaso Challenge: Go 24 Hours without Complaining. I named it after Bruce because, in all the years I knew him, no one ever heard him complain about anything. After telling both my high school and adult students Bruce’s story, I issued the challenge.

It led to a lively discussion about whether anyone could do it or not. The first high school student who spoke up said, “I don’t think I could go five minutes without complaining.” Then we heard, “I don’t know; not complaining for a whole day would really be hard.” Another one said, “Not hard, impossible.” We all laughed. I asked them if they wanted to give it a try, and most did.

I’ve been issuing the Bruce Diaso Challenge for more than fifty years. It took me twenty-three years to find someone who could do it. Her name is Grace. Since then I’ve found about six more people who succeeded. Most people give up in the first hour.

Does this make the assignment a failure? No—it was a huge success. Here’s what both the kids and the adults have said about it:

• “I didn’t realize how much I complain.”

• “I guess complaining is really a habit—a bad one.”

• “I think we’re conditioned to complain.”

• “We live in a culture of complaint.”

• “It seems like everybody complains way too much.”

And my favorite: “I told my dad that our homework assignment was to go twenty-four hours without complaining. He asked, ‘What the hell kind of assignment is that? I thought they were supposed to teach you something of value in school.’” Just a reminder that you can’t win ’em all.

The Opposite of Complaining Is Expressing Thanks

Let’s wrap this up by returning to thankfulness, especially expressing it. Not long after the Bruce Diaso Challenge came another of my favorite assignments. I gave each of my students a paper with four columns on it. Each column had twenty blanks underneath. Here’s what the headings mean.

Things (1). Any material object that you or your family owns that you’re thankful for. I urged students to mentally walk through their homes, look at everything they have, and ask themselves: “Would I want to be without this?” Small things take on new meaning.

Things (2). These are also material objects, but don’t belong to you or your family. You have access to them because they’re part of your community and are intended for the common good. Examples: paved roads, stores of all types, groceries, parks, schools, places of worship, banks, and so on.

People. Any person in your life who has had a positive influence on you. It must be someone you know, or have known, personally. They could be alive or no longer with us. This column isn’t about celebrities you don’t know.

Other. This one may stump you for a while, but once you get the hang of it, it will increase your appreciation for your free choices. Other means an intangible—that is, what you have but can’t touch. Examples are freedom, love, kindness, learning, and opportunity.

I urge you to give this exercise a try. Not all in one sitting—just do it when you feel the need for a lift. I have former students, some now in their sixties, who tell me they’ve filled several sheets (eighty blanks on each), and keep adding as they go along. Stories like that warm a teacher’s heart.

I’ve done this exercise with people of all ages and in many walks of life all over the United States and in several other countries. After almost every presentation people stay to share a personal story about learning to be more thankful. A teacher in Cartagena, Colombia, wrote this quote on the back of her business card and gave it to me several years ago: