Expressing gratitude is an easy way to generate feel-good well-being within us. "Thank you". It's that simple, but you have to mean it.

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Gratitude means to express good will towards ourselves or others from receiving something, be it an object, a meal, or being thankful to be graced with life. By appreciating what we have, we generate our own satisfaction, joy and well-being about our lives and where we are. We appreciate the positive good things that grace our lives, be it from giving to ourselves, having received from others, or imagining some other external source to direct gratitude towards in order to generate a positive inner-state.

Past Studies

There have been many studies regarding gratitude and the feel-good state of well-being it invokes. Giving gratitude has also become a trendy thing to do as popularized by self-help and self-improvement personalities, as well as so-called "spiritual" and new age movements. Bookstores and the Internet have a plethora of options to help you find gratitude in life.

You can make new friends by acknowledging their contribution. We feel better about ourselves, and can care more about our physical health that goes along with the positive psychological self-assessment of gratitude, helping us be more positively healthy. We benefit a lot ourselves by being grateful, but being grateful to others also has people feel appreciated and they too will feel-good.

Showing gratitude can generate positive perceptions from us appreciating others. There are previous studies that show how gratitude has affected people or not. Employees can feel motivated to work harder in some cases of management appreciation. But gratitude doesn't always guarantee a positive feedback, as this feeling can be self-induced (we are grateful) or induced from external stimulus (someone is grateful to us). Divorced women with a gratitude journal didn't show more life-satisfaction. Children or teens delivering a thank you note to someone who helped their lives tended to make the receiver of thanks more happy and feel-good, but the ones giving the gratitude did not see an improvement to their well-being.

Also, one study had a group of people think of what they were grateful for and write it in a journal during the week, while a second group wrote about their daily irritations that they were displeased with rather than grateful for. After 10 weeks, the first group was happier, more optimistic, felt better about their lives, and were doing more exercise. Exercise also releases endorphins that make us feel-good similar to morphine. The second group that focused on their aggravations had less exercise.

Recent Review of Studies

A recent article reviewed the current studies and knowledge on gratitude. They confirm gratitude is consistently associated with positive social, psychological and health benefits. People tend to be more willing to help others, be more optimistic about a situation, exercise more, and also have less visits to the doctor. There is an increase in satisfaction, vitality, hope, sleep and optimism, as well as a decrease in depression, anxiety, envy and job-related stress and burnout.

Gratitude may also contribute to long-term success in relationships, which makes sense since people appreciate being appreciated, which tends to create a feedback of gratitude and appreciation between people, igniting a whirlwind of positivity that can keep going. Even if it's a "now and then" expression of gratitude for a relationship partner, the effect can last up to 6 months, acting as a boost to our relationships. But as mentioned previously, not everyone is affected positively by expressing gratitude, such as some kids or divorced women not indicating a positive correlation with gratitude and well-being. It wasn't a negative effect, just neutral no change. Regardless, it's easy to give gratitude which can potentially enhance our relationships with anyone with interact with.

Emotions and the Message

Gratitude is associated with happiness, joy, and other positive states that get felt after an evaluation of what we have. Emotions are the result of thinking about a situation or stimulus and deriving meaning about it which is expressed as a feeling. We derive gratitude from evaluating certain parts of our lives and then that way of thinking about something gives certain meaning to us and changes our psycho-physiological state to experience a feeling.

As the authors write, "to experience it, one must receive a message, and interpret the message." Stimulus from out environment induced information into our perception, which we then evaluate and derive some meaning about, such as interpreting gratitude in this case. In other cases, we might not generate that meaning or message of gratitude from what happens in our lives.

Reflect on your present blessings, on which every man has many, not on your past misfortunes, of which all men have some.
- Charles Dickens

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The Pleasure-Trap and Emotional Manipulations

One thing I want to add is how self-induced positive emotions can work to live in a rosy-colored positivity mask of sorts. I've talked about the pleasure-trap before, as well as how language is magic that can entice and manipulate our psychological and emotional states.

There are many negative realities that we must face in life. Recognizing these possibly irritating and displeasing aspects of our personal life -- or the collective state of the planet -- can take us away from that self-induced feel-good state. As a result, we can be willfully averse to looking at the negative in our lives, and choose to willfully ignore, deny, dismiss, reject and deflect what is happening.

Mind Power

The mind is powerful. The placebo-effect demonstrates how strong the psychological dimension is to affect the physical and physiological dimension of who we are. We can believe what we want, regardless of the truth in reality. We can induce feel-good states to overcome a negative situation, like a heart-break, and also induce a false perception of how things are.

Our house could be burning down, but we can choose to ignore that stimulus of information to have us evaluate our reality as happy, good, and not even feel sad, angry, or hurt by a loss. The affinity for always being in a positive mindset is very enticing but takes us away from an honest evaluation of what is going on in the world or in ourselves. It's important to face the negative things so that they are honestly evaluated as such, instead of glossing over it with a positivity brush and acting as if nothing bad just happened.

Positive and Negative

Emotions have a range of expressions to for us to feel the evaluations and meaning of what happens to us. We can create our own meaning (accurate or not) and excuse what is happening as well, where "everything is good" or "everything is just how it's supposed to be", etc. We can see the world as it is and feel it honestly, the good and the bad, the beauty and the horror, the light and the dark, etc. Or we can also self-delude ourselves and deceive ourselves with our own emotional attachment to the positive while avoiding some or all negative evaluations of reality.

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If you want to read more on gratitude, check out the links below, or go google it up. There is plenty on gratitude.

I will leave you with my usual parting message that I add to most of my posts:

Thank you for your time and attention! I appreciate the knowledge reaching more people. Take care. Peace.

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References:

• Expressing gratitude makes us healthier: Who wouldn't be grateful for that?
• In Praise of Gratitude
• What is Gratitude and What Is Its Role in Positive Psychology?
• Stephen M. Yoshimura, Kassandra Berzins. Grateful experiences and expressions: the role of gratitude expressions in the link between gratitude experiences and well-being. Review of Communication, 2017; 17 (2): 106 DOI: 10.1080/15358593.2017.1293836