My quest for happiness in Denmark #9
Keeping a gratitude journal with my Danish husband
In my article #3 on “Trying to hygge”, I mentioned that I started to play a board game, Mastermind, with my Danish husband. It was to introduce a new Danish “hygge” tradition in our lives. (Recap: I am not particularly “hygge type” person, and the board game was sort of the only option…)
After publishing that article, my friends would ask me if we were still playing the game?
To tell you the truth, we are… not. Either my husband and I could communicate by telepathy, or we simply misunderstood the rules of the game (more likely), since we could easily tell the other’s secret arrangement of pins and the game would not last very long.
Instead, my husband and I tried two new things in the evening. One was to listen to music with gigantic speakers filling the room which my husband bought for his hobby. And the other was to start keeping a “gratitude journal”.
What 75-years of research showed about health and happiness
When you read the studies on happiness, it is often concluded that one of the key factors of people’s happiness, is the state of the relationships with people around you.
One such study is “The Harvard Study of Adult Development”, which has continued since 1938. It is the study that has tracked the lives of 724 men by detailed interviews, year after year. Those men belonged to two groups; one is sophomores at Harvard College (the President Kennedy was one of them) and the other is boys from Boston’s poorest neighborhoods. The aim was to find out what kind of elements of their lives brought happiness and health.
Robert Waldinger, the fourth director of the study, summarized the findings of the 75-year-long study in his 2015 TED Talk, saying “good relationships keep us happier and healthier. Period.” According to him, it was not about anything like wealth or fame or working harder and harder.
When he talks about relationships, the number of friends you have or whether or not you are in a committed relationship does not really matter. What is important is the quality of your close relationships. He even says high-conflict marriages is “perhaps worse than getting divorced.”
Making a gratitude journal, which we started instead of the board game, was something I learned at the positive psychology class at Harvard (story #4). In an experiment by two psychologists, Robert Emmons and Michael McCullough, they separated participants into three groups and one group wrote about things they were grateful for that had occurred during the week. After ten weeks, those who wrote about gratitude had increased levels of well-being and also became healthier, compared to the other groups.
What this experiment showed was that the sense of well-being can be changed by shifting your focus of what to pay attention to.
Before I started my project of “being a little happier in the happiest country in the world”, my husband sometimes said “you have changed since you came to Denmark”. According to him, I could somehow better handled the high-pressured job as a journalist in Japan and in the U.S., whereas I became easily grumpy since I moved to Denmark, triggered by smaller everyday problems. When I heard such comments by my husband, I became sad and angry and our conversations often turned hostile.
But looking back, I realized that one of the reasons for such changes, if any, may be because I started to raise a baby in an unfamiliar country. I felt like I had to protect a fragile baby, so I constantly googled the possible bad situations that happened to babies (I do not recommend this), and I always focused on problems before they even happened. And since I was not familiar with the Danish way of raising babies, when for example my husband was behind the deadline of application for the nursery, I confronted him by saying, “This is Denmark, it is your responsibility to figure out the Danish way!”
My husband took care of our baby very well, but still, whenever I found a tiny mistake, I often grilled him really hard…
Having such experiences, I thought that keeping a gratitude journal together might help me change my focus — from what my husband had failed to do, to what he was doing well.
The effect of a gratitude journal after just two months
We started to keep a gratitude journal in January 2019. We don’t do it every night, but whenever our daughter is asleep and we have the time, we sit down on a sofa with a notebook and we tell each other five things that happened during the day for which we are grateful.
One common area that appear frequently is to appreciate the housekeeping work each other does, but there are also random things such as if our three-year-old daughter sang a song for us, or the weather was good (which is rare). And when one of us points this out, the other one also realizes that it is true, so the effect of focusing on what works well can be doubled by doing it together.
Also, what I noticed was that it was difficult to engage with our gratitude journal when I was upset with my husband. So, in order to keep our tradition, I tried more carefully, to time the raising of problems, or to be careful about the tone of the voice when I pointed them out.
After we kept the journal for about two months, I asked my husband if he had noticed any change. He said,
“you have become more positive in general”
And also
“you started to prioritize time with the family”
He also mentioned that since we started to keep a gratitude journal at night, we stopped talking about the “to-do list (or things that are supposed to be done, but actually are not)”, and that made him less stressed right at the end of the day.
Well, that’s pretty good, isn’t it?
When we analyzed what we had listed in the journal, there were interesting differences between the two of us.
My husband tends to appreciate when I spend more time with our family. On the other hand, I tend to appreciate when my husband takes care of our daughter, so that I can have alone time to do stuff for myself.
During the daytime on weekdays, I write articles at a co-working space or meet people (I continue the “life design interviews” in the article #7). But working for 6 hours during the weekday is not enough for me. I used to work really long hours (sometimes more than 12 hours a day) and that may be why I constantly feel like I am lacking the time. So I often end up working in the evening, and then my Danish husband complains that “evenings and the weekend should be family time”.
One of the solutions my husband suggested me was to slow down the writing pace. As you might have noticed, I have slowed down the frequency with which I update this series of articles. I think it was good decision. My husband and I came from very different backgrounds and sometimes it inevitably means that we have very different points of view. Because of that, I try to be flexible when I can. To quote my husband’s words, “it takes two people to have a marriage”.
There are a lot of serious problems in the world. But it is also true that there are many things you can be grateful for, things that might genuinely make the difference in your life, right in front of you.
So for now, I am grateful, that I have a lovely and happy family...
(This series of articles “My quest for happiness in Denmark” is my translation of articles written for the Japanese magazine, Courrier Japon)
