How Gratitude Can Change Your Life

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As much as I love to cook and to eat, there is probably nothing I dread more in my weekly routine than grocery shopping.

Walking the aisles. Taking items from shelves and putting them into my cart. Taking them out of the cart and loading them onto the conveyor belt.

Taking them off the conveyor belt, to put them into bags, then right back into the cart.

Then, removing them from the cart again to load them into the car.

Hauling them out of the car and into the house, where they are splayed across the kitchen counter.

Finally, it comes full circle, with the sorting and placing on shelves and in drawers in the fridge and pantry.

It’s enough to drive me batty. Sometimes, I feel like it has.

I know. I know.

There are services for this—people I could hire to do it all for me and deliver it to my front door.

That’s not the point.

Because, one day all of that changed.

I don’t know what inspired it, but on that day, I made a choice.

I claimed a cart, squared my shoulders, slapped on a smile, and headed inside. When I walked into that ridiculously-overly-chilled shop—as most grocery shops are—I saw it for what it really is:

Abundance.

And I couldn’t stop smiling. At first, it was a conscious choice. But by the time I was finished, it was a compulsion.

That place I dreaded was crowded with food, with choices galore. And I had the means in my bag to make those choices.

Choosing to focus my attention on that—and on gratitude for it all—transformed a mundane chore to a pleasure.

I know this sounds melodramatic. Hey, that’s me.

But it really caught my attention that day. Gratitude can change you.

There’s a lot of chatter about gratitude these days.

A quick googling of the word “gratitude” reveals a lot about where we’re at. People are keeping gratitude journals, making gratitude jars, writing gratitude letters. They’re growing gratitude trees, reciting gratitude mantras, and reading gratitude books.

In a world where we have so much—too much, maybe—we’re finding that the satisfaction of all the stuff is actually really short lived. When we shift our focus from attaining and becoming onto an appreciation of where we are, how far we’ve come, and how much we’ve already received, we see our lives and the world around us with new eyes. There’s freedom in that.

We know from experience that it feels good to genuinely thank another person for something they’ve done for us. But there’s actually a lot more to it.

How Gratitude Changes You

Robert Emmons, PhD, author of Thanks! How the New Science of Gratitude Can Make You Happier, is considered “the world’s leading scientific expert on gratitude.” His series of studies on this topic reveals that the regular practice of gratitude offers much more than a moment of warm fuzzies. It can improve your overall sense of well-being as well as your physical health (Emmons, and McCullough).

The Many Benefits of Gratitude

Emmons’s studies reveal gratitude to be associated with:

A more positive outlook on life
Greater satisfaction with life
Optimism
Fewer aches and pains
More frequent exercise
Better sleep
Improved relationships

The simple act of writing down five things you’re grateful for on a weekly basis can have profound and lasting effects on your life for the better.

Curious about the effect of gratitude on specific populations, researchers Joel Wong, Ph.D. and Joshua Brown, Ph.D. build upon Emmons’s findings in their own study, which seeks to determine whether gratitude has notable benefits for individuals experiencing mild depression and/or anxiety. Wong and Brown’s findings indicate that gratitude practices—and in this study, the writing of gratitude letters, specifically—contributes to significantly better mental health outcomes than in those who do not practice gratitude (Wong, and Brown).

What This Means for Us

Since that illuminating day, I’ve made many more visits to the grocery shop. Some have been calm, serene even, as I’ve browsed the aisles, list in hand, holding at the forefront of my mind how fortunate I am to be able to fill my cart as much as I do. Other visits, however, have been harried. I’ve felt annoyed by the crowds of fellow shoppers, frustrated by the constant requests of my small children for items not on our list, and restrained by the parameters of our admittedly-generous food budget.

Living in a state of gratitude is not a straight line. Especially for someone who, like me, tends to careen through life, swept along by the latest problem that needs solving or task that needs completing without keeping a view on the bigger picture.

The practice of gratitude is simple—a notebook on the bedside table to write gratitudes each day, a letter to a loved one thanking them for how they’ve affected your life for the better, a state of mind while walking the aisles of the grocery store—but it is a practice. It requires discipline and intentionality.

But like anything, the practice can be developed and strengthened with time. And as we grow our practice of gratitude, our experience of gratitude’s benefits grow with us.

Sources:

Emmons, Robert A., and Michael E. McCullough. "Counting Blessings Versus Burdens: An Experimental Investigation Of Gratitude And Subjective Well-Being In Daily Life.". Journal Of Personality And Social Psychology, vol 84, no. 2, 2003, pp. 377-389. https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/pdfs/GratitudePDFs/6Emmons-BlessingsBurdens.pdf. Accessed 9 Feb 2020.

Wong, Joel, and Joshua Brown. "How Gratitude Changes You And Your Brain". Greater Good, 2017, https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/how_gratitude_changes_you_and_your_brain. Accessed 9 Feb 2020.