Participants in the gratitude condition also reported getting more hours of sleep each night, spending less time awake before falling asleep, and feeling more refreshed upon awakening. This finding is enormous, in that sleep disturbance and poor sleep quality have been identified as central indicators of poor overall well-being, as well as increased risk for physical disease and premature death. It may sound simplistic, but the evidence cannot be ignored: If you want to sleep more soundly, count blessings, not sheep.
One of the important features of all of these studies is that we randomly assigned participants to conditions. Many people who tend toward pessimism may have been placed in the gratitude group, just as optimists may have been placed in the other conditions. Plus, few studies have been able to successfully create interventions to increase happiness or well-being; we were able to do so with an exercise that required minimal effort. Other studies have corroborated our findings and further testified to gratitude’s benefits, especially for social connections. For example, additional research Mike and I conducted has shown that individuals who report habitually experiencing gratitude engage more frequently in kind or helpful behaviors than do people who experience gratitude less often.
We’ve also identified people with strong dispositions toward gratitude and asked their friends to tell us about them. We then compared their friends’ responses to feedback we received from the friends of less grateful people. According to their friends, grateful people engaged in more supportive, kind, and helpful behaviors (for example, loaning money or providing compassion, sympathy, and emotional support) than did less grateful people. Some particularly informative research has been conducted by David DeSteno and Monica Bartlett at Northeastern University. In their creative studies, participants worked on a computer-generated task; when they were about to receive their score, the screen suddenly went blank. Another person in the room—a “confederate,” someone secretly working with the researchers—“discovered” that the monitor’s plug had been pulled partially out of the power strip and then helped display the participant’s scores. Upon leaving the laboratory, the participants were asked if they would volunteer to assist in another, ostensibly unrelated experiment, which involved completing a tedious and taxing survey.
Compared to people who didn’t receive the favor, including some who were put in a good mood by watching a funny video clip, the people who received the favor and felt grateful toward the confederate were more likely to go through the trouble of filling out the survey. This suggests the unique effects of gratitude in motivating helping behavior, more so than the general effects of simply being in a positive mood.
WHY IS GRATITUDE GOOD?
So why is gratitude good? For two main reasons, I think. First, gratitude strengthens social ties. It cultivates an individual’s sense of interconnectedness. This was beautifully illustrated in a story by Roger, a man we interviewed in our research on patients with chronic neuromuscular disease.
Faced with escalating medical bills and an extended period of unemployment, Roger was on the verge of losing his home—until friends organized a benefit party to raise money for him. He wrote in his gratitude journaclass="underline"
Well the big day came after much anticipation. About 200 people showed up, bought raffle tickets, drank, danced, partied and ate till 1 a.m. closing! We went up on stage to thank everyone amid joy, tears, and hugs. My manager cut me a check for over $35,000 the next week! Without that check my house/car would have been on the market…. We saw so many friends and coworkers it was truly a great night. The $1,000 first prize was donated back to us by the winner (a stranger!). My doctor and nurse also attended and our priest stopped by for a few beers—I keep thinking of more highlights as I write. I truly felt like George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life! I feel myself almost tearing up as I write. My heart warms as I see the people that attended. I also feel a need to help or reach out to others whenever I can help by speaking or just listening.
In Roger’s response to that evening and his desire to help others as a result, we can see how gratitude truly serves as “the moral memory of mankind.”
A second reason supporting the power of gratitude is that gratitude increases one’s sense of personal worth. When we experience gratitude, we understand that another person wishes us well, and in turn, we feel loved and cared for. If someone has incurred a personal cost by helping me out, then how can I not conclude that I have value in that person’s eye?
It might be this link that explains why gratitude can be a powerful antidote to a depressed view of life. One of the reasons gratitude makes us happier is that it forces us to abandon a belief that may accompany severe depression—that the world is devoid of goodness, love, and kindness and is nothing but randomness and cruelty. By recognizing patterns of benevolence, the depressed person may change his or her self-perception (“I guess I’m not such a loser after all”). By feeling grateful, we are acknowledging that someone, somewhere, is being kind to us. And therefore, we can see not just that we are worthy of kindness, but that kindness indeed exists in the world and, therefore, that life may be worth living.
We are receptive beings, dependent on the help of others, on their gifts and their kindness. As such, we are called to gratitude. Life becomes complete when we are able to give to others what we ourselves received in the past. In one of our studies, a 33-year-old woman with spinal muscular atrophy captured this dynamic:
All of my life, people have been involved to assist me in getting dressed, showered, to work/school, etc. It was my hope that one day, I would be able to do something really significant for someone else, like others have always done for me. I met a man who was married and very unhappy. He and his wife had a little boy born to them and then die at 7 months of age. For ten years they remained married, trying to have another baby. They were never able to have a child again. They divorced and he became my friend and lover. He told me of his life’s dream of having another child. I got pregnant from him and had a miscarriage. I got pregnant again and had an ectopic pregnancy. (No loss of my tube, thank God!) A shot took care of the problem. I got pregnant a third time; our beautiful son was born on 12/20/98. I have never felt as grateful for anything in my life. I was actually able to give something back to someone. Me, who was supposed to die before I was 2 years old.
It is gratitude that enables us to receive and it is gratitude that motivates us to return the goodness that we have been given. In short, it is gratitude that enables us to be fully human.
WIRED TO BE INSPIRED
Jonathan Haidt
HERE’S A PUZZLE: Why do we care when a stranger does a good deed for another stranger? Most theories in the social sciences say that people’s actions and feelings are motivated by self-interest. So why are we sometimes moved to tears by the good deeds or heroic actions of others?
I believe we cannot have a full understanding of human morality until we can explain why and how human beings are so powerfully affected by the sight of a stranger helping another stranger. For the past several years, I have studied this feeling, which I call “elevation.” I have defined elevation as a warm, uplifting feeling that people experience when they see unexpected acts of human goodness, kindness, courage, or compassion. It makes a person want to help others and to become a better person himself or herself.