Gratitude is the Antidote: The Happiness Hack Backed By Research

It did not make sense.

I had quit my job to chase my wanderlust. I was living in Colombia surrounded by beautiful women, cheap booze, great food and unlimited supply of drugs. The weather was perfect. I was living the dream. This was supposed to be paradise.

I had everything I had hoped for except happiness.

I was miserable.

Walking around the streets of Medellin, trying to make sense of it, I came across a podcast by Tim Ferriss.

His book, “Four Hour Work Week” convinced me to start my journey as a digital nomad. He got me into this mess, I was hoping he would get me out of it.

Tim said in his podcast:

I have had fans who have listened to everything I have talked about, who reach out to me and tell me that THIS was the big game changer.

Tim is a best-selling author who has a podcast with over 100 million downloads. He dissects performance, health, finance, work and more. Despite his wide-array of advices, his audience call this single piece of advice , “THE Big Game Changer”.

I was curious to find out what it was.

The game changer he described was a 5 minute daily practice where he wrote down the things he was grateful for.

That’s it.

I was confused. What was the deal here? How can that 5 minute activity be the “Big Game Changer”. I had to figure it out.

The first thing that surprised me as I dove into the research behind the science of gratitude was the sheer volume of information. Gratitude is increasingly being interrogated by scientists and physicians as a key to human well being.

I found countless double-blind, placebo-controlled studies that showed correlations between a daily practice of gratitude and increase in happiness and sleep quality.

After few hours of wandering on the streets, I said, “What the heck?, Let’s give it shot.”

I sat down in a cafe and found an exercise called “gratitude letters”.

Martin Seligman, the father of positive psychology, has shown “gratitude letters” to have a profound positive impact on well-being. I followed his simple instructions and wrote a gratitude letter to an old high school friend through Facebook.

To say that the transformation was incredible, would be an understatement.

In 15 minutes my entire mindset shifted.

Don’t believe me? Try it for yourself or watch a live experiment to see the power of gratitude.

Gratitude is powerful because it shifts your attention. The unfortunate truth about the human mind is that it lives in a default state of psychic entropy. When we are left alone, with no demands on attention, the basic disorder of the mind reveals itself. With nothing to do, the mind begins to follow random patterns. Attention will be attracted to whatever is most problematic at the moment: it will focus on some real or imaginary pain, on recent grudges or long-term frustrations.

If you choose to spend your attention ruminating on the all negative events in your lives, you are going to have an unfulfilling life.

On the other hand, if you use gratitude to rewire your brain, you can shift your thoughts towards positivity.

Most people need their external circumstances to be perfect in order to be joyful. Then there is me, who is miserable despite having all the luck in the world.

Gratitude, however, is independent of external circumstances. It makes ordinary moments in our lives joyful.

It switches our default state of mind from entropy to appreciation.

Dr. Melanie Greenberg writes,

Feeling and expressing gratitude turns our mental focus to the positive, which compensates for our brains’ natural tendency to focus on threats, worries, and negative aspects of life. As such, gratitude creates positive emotions like joy, love, and contentment which research shows can undo the grip of negative emotions like anxiety. Fostering gratitude can also broaden your thinking, and create positive cycles of thinking and behaving in healthy, positive ways.

Gratitude is the antidote. When you are experiencing true feelings of gratitude, there is no room for anything else. It is impossible to be grateful and angry at the same time, it is impossible to be grateful and fearful at the same time.

Gratitude realigns your attention to focus on the positive.

In his book “The Happiness Advantage”, psychologist Shawn Achor shows that happier brains are more creative, resilient, and even more alert. Where a negative brain sees problems, a happier brain sees possibilities. New avenues to success open up and you find creative solutions to help yourself reach your goals faster than you ever dreamed possible in a positive state of mind.

Gratitude is not just a thought experiment performed in labs.

Mark Zuckerberg had taken up to write a gratitude letter every single day in 2014.

Former Campbell’s Soup CEO, says he wrote at least 30,000 thank-you notes to employees over the course of his 10-year career leading the soup giant.

Tony Robbins, lifestyle coach and author of “Money: Master the Game”, often shares his 3 minute daily gratitude practice as one of the most powerful tools in his psychological toolset.

Gratitude Works!

The Practice

Gratitude has been a “Game Changer” in my life. I keep a daily journal in Evernote where I answer a specific set of questions. Here is a simple widget that showcases my daily gratitude practice.

The key is however setting aside 3–5 minutes to express gratitude every single day. Repeatedly engaging in a behavior creates structural changes in the brain through a process called neuroplasticity.

Neuroplasticity is considered to be one of the most important discoveries of neuroscience in the past 20 years. Studies show that learning new skills such as how to juggle or speak a foreign language can cause the brain to grow in new ways.

But this brain transformation isn’t only affected by what we do — it can also come about due to how we think and feel. “Our lifestyle and behavior can significantly influence the way that our brain is shaped,” says Fadel Zeidan, PhD. “We have different pathways that can facilitate different behaviors.”

If you overuse the regions associated with depression and rumination, then the pathways for happiness — which aren’t being used — become weaker.

Conversely, if you repeatedly engage regions associated with gratitude, it strengthens the neural pathway for happiness. And thus neuroscience backs the popular notion that, “We are what we repeatedly do”.

Neuroplasticity prolongs the benefits of gratitude exercises far beyond the 5 minutes you engage in the exercise. It changes your perception of the world.

I have found that attaching the practice to an existing habit increases my chance to stick with it. I do it either first thing in the morning or right after lunch.

• My free app, “21 Day Gratitude Challenge”, based on the research of Professor Robert Emmons is a great tool to get started.
• But if you prefer paper, I recommend Five Minute Journal.
• I often use Evernote, you can use this template to get started.
• If you don’t want to write your gratitude, Tony Robbin’s simple visualization technique might serve you. I have found this technique especially useful as a morning practice, before getting out of bed.

The method you adopt does not matter but moving your attention away from entitlement to gratitude can transform your life.

Entitlement is optional

It’s not forced on us, it’s something we choose.

And we rarely benefit from that choice.

That emergency surgery, the one that saved your life, when the ruptured appendix was removed — the doctor left a scar.

We can choose to be grateful for our next breath.

Or we can find a way to be enraged, to point out that given how much it costs and how much training the doctor had, that scar really ought to be a lot smaller. And on top of that, he wasn’t very nice. We’re entitled to a nice doctor!

Or we can choose to be grateful.

Entitlement gets us nothing but heartache. It blinds us to what’s possible. It insulates us from the magic of gratitude. And most of all, it lets us off the hook, pushing us away from taking responsibility (and action) and toward apportioning blame and anger instead.

Gratitude, on the other hand, is just as valid a choice. Except that gratitude makes us open to possibility. It brings us closer to others. And it makes us happier.

There’s a simple hack at work here: We’re not grateful because we’re happy. We’re happy because we’re grateful.

~Seth Godin

If you are reading this, you have plenty of things to be grateful for. For one, you do not have to to worry about where your next meal will come from. Even your next breath is a gift, it is not guaranteed neither is your health, wealth or family.

We have a choice in every moment on how we can spend our attention.

A choice to either live in entropy, ruminating on our problems or to live joyfully by focusing on our blessings.

A choice to be miserable, or to be happy.

Choose Wisely.