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A sure way to destroy your relationship is to start noticing how the grass seems greener on the other side . . . . if you know what I mean.

Expressing gratitude for what you have counteracts this tendency and inhibits comparing your loved ones to others.

If you are genuinely thankful and appreciative for the positive qualities that your spouse does have, rather than focusing on what they lack, you are less likely to pay attention to, or envy the qualities that your friend’s spouse appears to have.

Experts try to explain the link between gratitude & appreciation and marriage success by suggesting that gratitude can help relationships thrive by promoting a cycle of generosity. When one person is grateful, it is likely to prompt both spouses to think and act in ways that help them signal gratitude to each other and promote a desire to hold onto their relationships.

Here is how this cycle works:

When you feel more grateful –> You want to hold onto your relationship
Moments of gratitude help people recognize the value in their partners and a valuable partner is a partner worth holding onto. A number of studies have found that on days when people feel more appreciative of their partners than typical, they also report increased feelings of commitment to their relationships. And the benefits of gratitude are not just in daily life – the more grateful people are at the beginning of the study, the more committed they are nine months later. So it seems that feelings of...

We have often talked about how important it is to be intentional in long term romantic relationships.

One of the easiest things to fall prey to in marriage is to begin to take each other for granted: to stop noticing all the positive things your spouse does and only pay attention when things are not quite how you like them to be. AND this is also how relationships begin to self-destruct.

On the other hand, an important way to keep your primary relationships fulfilling is to regularly appreciate your spouse and express that appreciation.

Research by Sara Algoe and her colleagues has found that grateful couples are more satisfied in their relationships and feel closer to each other. Other research has found that the more grateful couples are, they more likely they are to be in the same relationship over long term.

Experts say that the benefits of gratitude are maximized when you appreciate not just what your partner does, but also who they are as a person.

So for example, it is not...

Yesterday we discussed how gratitude makes us likable. Today let’s explore this a little further. Author LaDonna Greiner explores the question of what exactly makes grateful people popular and likeable.

Here are some reasons she gives:

1. Grateful people make good teammates.

Grateful people are more likely to pitch in to support their team and do so in a gracious manner since they appreciate the contribution, skills and talents of others. Grateful people recognize that their success rests on the shoulders of many other people.

2.Grateful people share.

They realize that when you give to others in a sincere and pure manner, it comes back to you tenfold. Thankful people are 20% more generous with their time and money than those who are ungrateful.

We like people who share, whether it’s skills or food, insights or a favourite book. Sharing is a likeable trait. Gratitude helps us feel generous and generosity increases popularity.

3. Grateful people create connections.

Greiner...

An attitude of gratitude makes us more likeable and popular.

If you think about the opposite of a grateful person, the above claim makes sense. People who continuously grumble or complain about things are draining. Moreover, most of us when we encounter people who complain, feel compelled to point out their blessings to make them feel better. (this seldom works, by the way, but it does cause us to be exhausted!)

On the other hand, people who are grateful, notice the good in their lives, both in people and in circumstances. Such a person is more likely to be a positive person whose company is sort out by others as they may find themselves uplifted by the positive mood (rather than working to uplift other’s mood)

To put it in terms of psychology, gratitude generates social capital - namely goodwill, fellowship, sympathy, and social intercourse - among the individuals and families who make up a social unit. Studies have found that participants who were just 10% more grateful than...

An attitude of gratitude impacts relationships in many, and sometimes surprising, ways. Over the next few days, we will explore some of them.

Psychologists have begun to explore how gratitude can help build social bonds, strengthen existing relationships and build new ones. This is a very important area of research these days, given the recently discovered link between social relationships, wellbeing and longevity.

Several studies have shown that practicing gratitude can produce feelings of connectedness with others. Feeling gratitude towards people (even if not directly expressed) has the impact of feeling closer to them and reporting higher quality relationships with those people.

Experts like Robert Emmons hypothesize that when you become aware of the value of your friends and family, you are likely to treat them better, producing an "upward spiral," a sort of positive feedback loop, in which strong relationships give you something to be grateful for, and those feelings of...

Human beings are remarkably adaptable creatures. When something bad happens to us, after a while, we tend to get used to the new state of affairs and our happiness goes back to what it was before the negative occurrence.

This is good news, right?

This same tendency of adaptability can work against us when good things happen to us. When our circumstances change for the better – when we start earning more money, find a new love, buy a new car, recover from illness – we experience a boost in happiness and contentment. This boost in happiness though, is short lived. When the novelty or "newness" of this good fortune wears off, we get used to it and we get back to the same level of happiness (or unhappiness) that we were at before the good fortune.

Psychologists call this phenomenon hedonic adaptation. The dictionary defines hedonistic adaptation as the observed tendency of humans to quickly return to a relatively stable level of happiness (or unhappiness) despite major...

Yesterday we talked about how focusing on gratitude even once a week can make us happier. Today, let us try and understand this a bit more.

Gratitude makes us feel more gratitude. And more gratitude means more happiness.

The truth is that the actual boost in gratitude and happiness by spending a 2-5 minutes writing a gratitude journal once a week is small. However, the state of gratitude and happiness felt during those five-minutes is enough to trigger a grateful mood.

And while we are in a grateful mood, we tend to feel gratitude more frequently. We tend to notice more things that are going well in our lives. Our focus changes from scarcity (what is missing) thinking to abundance (what we have) thinking.

In other words, the practice of gratitude triggers positive feedback loops. These feedback loops create recurring feelings of gratitude which tend to more intense and they last longer.

The repeated practice of gratitude has the power to change the initial state of gratitude into a...

We have been hinting at how gratitude improves many markers of mental and emotional wellbeing. In everyday language, wellbeing markers simply mean how happy and satisfied you are.

Did you know that a very short practice of gratitude can boost our happiness levels by 25%?!

The very first study by Robert Emmons was very simple:

Three groups of people were asked to write a short journal entry once a week for ten weeks.

The groups had to briefly describe in a single sentence:

(Group 1) Gratitude condition: five things they were grateful for
(Group 2) Hassles condition: five things they were displeased about
(Group 3) Events condition: five neutral events

Here is how Emmons reported the results:

"What did the first study reveal? At the end of the ten weeks, we examined differences between the three groups on all of the well-being outcomes that we measured at the outset of the study. Participants in the gratitude condition felt better about their lives as a whole and were more optimistic...

As we discussed yesterday, practicing gratitude can counteract our tendency to give up on goals if we do not get instant gratification.

Another very interesting study has looked into how the patience and perseverance developed by gratitude plays out in financial decision making.

David DeSteno of Northwestern University led a study where participants were asked to recall an event that made them feel grateful, happy, or neutral. After writing about this event, they reported their mood and then made a series of financial decisions.

The participants in the study had an interesting choice at the end of the session: they could either take a cash reward right there or they could choose to receive a larger amount of money in the mail at a later date.

The researchers found that those who had experienced gratitude were much more likely to wait for the bigger payout.

DeSteno reported that the "financial patience" of participants in the study had increased by about 12 percent just by recalling...