Gratitude can increase joy, even if it feels a little cringe

Gratitude is arguably as quintessential to Thanksgiving as turkey, cranberry sauce and the kumbaya story of Pilgrims and Native Americans coming together. The word “thanks” is, after all, right there in the holiday’s name. Yet if the idea of counting your blessings or writing a heartfelt letter to a loved one fills you with dread, you’re not alone.

“It feels cringe,” says Sarah Schnitker, a personality psychologist at Baylor University in Waco, Texas.

But, alas, all those annoying holiday articles extolling gratitude’s benefits aren’t wrong. Giving thanks has been linked with numerous well-being benefits, including stronger relationships, resilience and even improved blood pressure. “You name it, and there is a study that has established a relationship between the two things,” says Michael McCullough, a social psychologist at the University of California, San Diego.

Some of those benefits are probably inflated, as many studies lack rigor, McCullough acknowledges. Even in well-studied interventions, the gratitude happiness boost remains small and fleeting. And gratitude may not be the best bet for treating more serious mental health challenges, research suggests.

But gratitude can generate “small moments of joy,” McCullough says. And a daily gratitude practice could, in theory, allow those small moments to add up to something larger.

That’s important to consider given that, out of the hundreds of interventions scientists have tested — including exercise, meditation and time in nature — few show a clear link with happiness. Gratitude appears to be one of the few exceptions.

So what is a well-meaning cynic to do?

Think of gratitude like exercise, says social psychologist Anthony Ahrens of American University in Washington, D.C. Some people prefer running, others walking and others a game of pickleball. Even if some exercises improve health more than others, the best exercise is the one a person actually does. Gratitude follows the same logic. Some gratitude practices boost happiness more than others, McCullough and his team reported in May in the Journal of Positive Psychology. But they all work better than nothing.

“Folks need to search for how gratitude might work in their own lives,” says Ahrens, who was not involved in that research.

How do scientists define gratitude?

Social scientists began studying gratitude some two decades ago with the rise of positive psychology, which emphasizes improving positive emotions over decreasing negative ones. Researchers wanted to know if gratitude could boost well-being.

But first, they had to conceptualize the emotion. Initial efforts defined gratitude as giving thanks to another person to repay a social debt — essentially a scientific exploration of the proverb “You scratch my back, and I’ll scratch yours.”

Social gratitude probably evolved as a way for humans to solidify the bonds necessary for survival, McCullough says. “Its basic function is to establish friendships.”

Many people, though, bristle at the thought of being indebted to another person. That’s especially true for people who value autonomy or who come from cultures where social indebtedness incurs guilt.

In recent years, some social scientists have begun exploring gratitude to more abstract beneficiaries, such as God, beauty and nature — what they call transcendent gratitude. Western psychology typically operates from a more secular position, Schnitker says. But for many people around the world, a cornerstone of gratitude involves thanking something larger than oneself.

Which gratitude habits boost mood the most?

Gratitude interventions seeking to bolster gratitude toward others or a higher power have both been shown to improve mood.

For instance, in their May study, McCullough and his team ranked seven gratitude interventions by how effective they were at lifting positive emotions, such as happiness, contentedness and joy. Writing a text or letter of gratitude to a recipient bolstered positive emotions the most, while writing lists of one’s blessings bolstered them the least. Falling in the middle were gratitude to God and a mental subtraction task, in which people listed five things they felt thankful for and then imagined their lives without those things.

But the team did not control for individual leanings and beliefs. Taking atheists out of the participant pool, for instance, would almost certainly have strengthened the gratitude to God interventions, McCullough says.

That’s exactly what Schnitker and her team found in a month-long study of over 800 people. The researchers excluded participants who did not believe in God and then divided the remaining participants into several groups. One group wrote weekly gratitude lists to no one in particular, a second group wrote gratitude letters to people and a third group wrote gratitude letters to God. Writing gratitude letters to God resulted in greater positive emotions than writing lists and writing letters to others, the team reported in a paper posted this summer to PsyArXiv.org.

How to tailor your thankfulness

Choosing the right gratitude adventure, then, may require some introspection. Atheists writing letters to God may feel more confused than thankful. But writing letters to nature could provide an alternative, Schnitker suspects. And those who struggle to send physical thank-you notes could instead opt to shoot off a quick text.

Just as people shape their exercise regimen to their fitness goals — a marathon runner will probably pick a different workout routine than an acrobat — people should shape their gratitude regimen to their sense of who they want to be in the world, Ahrens says.

It’s worth remembering that, absent attention to gratitude, negative emotions can easily take over. Kids are better at punishing those they think wronged them than thanking those who helped them, researchers reported in 2019 in Psychological Science.

“Gratitude has to be taught. It’s not something that’s natural,” says Nadia Chernyak, a cognitive developmental psychologist at the University of California, Irvine. “Yet grudges are really natural.”

And for those who prefer grumbling over gratitude: beware. While most control conditions in McCullough’s study had no effect on emotions, good or bad, one condition — listing daily hassles — caused positive emotions to plummet. “If you want to make somebody grumpy, we know just the trick,” McCullough jokes.

So perhaps this holiday season ask yourself: Do I want a dose of joy or a dose of misery? Then proceed accordingly.