More Gratitude

We humans seek well-being. An easy way to increase your well-being is to express gratitude. To understand how this is realized, we first need to investigate how well-being is created in general. A definition of subjective well-being is found in the OCED report of 2013 as:

“Good mental states, including all of the various evaluations, positive and negative, that people make of their lives and the affective reactions of people to their experiences. “

The definition covers three aspects:

Life evaluation – a reflective assessment on a person’s life or some specific aspect of it.

Affect – a person’s feelings or emotional states, typically measured with reference to a particular point in time.

Eudaimonia – a sense of meaning and purpose in life, or good psychological functioning

Based on this definition, our well-being, depends on our evaluation of our life in a certain point of time. Many Greek philosopher created theories on how to achieve Eudaimonia – which is commonly translated as happiness. You don’t need to study all theories to improve your personal well-being but simply start to be more conscious about your life assessment. There are two ways of becoming more aware.

Most people try to improve their well-being by focusing on areas of their life in which they are not happy. Our economic system gives us an easy way of short-term improvements of our emotional state and feelings: Consumerism pushes the endorphin level up which gives us a sensation of happiness. This happens not only during shopping, but also when eating food. We feel better, but only for a short period of time, as we quickly come back to our original life assessment. For example, if you are unhappy with your current job situation, you may improve your well-being after a hard day at work with an after-work party. Very often, you will find yourself still unhappy with your job situation the next day. Long-lasting improvement of well-being in areas which you feel unhappy typically needs more time and effort. We feel overwhelmed and not able to cope with these life-changing transformations, like finding a new profession, so we seek the short-term relief.

The easier and simpler way of increasing your overall happiness is to focus on the areas in which you feel already good. This is commonly known as expressing gratitude. By taking the time to say thank you to yourself and to others or writing in your journal every day, for what you are thankful for, you increase your well-being at this point of time. You include more positive evaluations in your overall assessment. This compound of more positive thoughts will soon outweigh the negative ones and you will react on your experiences more affirmatively. For example, your assessment of your physical condition shows, that you are not able to run anymore. However, you can still walk. If you show gratitude for being able to walk and thus making it a positive experience in your life, you will automatically walk more and eventually be physically as healthy as with your previous running.

Gratitude will not solve all your problems in life at once, however it will create a more positive mindset and well-being which will support your grit, motivation and perseverance to make the difficult and tedious changes in your life to reach your personal Eudaimonia.

OECD (2013), OECD Guidelines on Measuring Subjective Well-being, OECD Publishing, Paris, https://doi.org/10.1787/9789264191655-en.