It’s better to appreciate the things we don’t have, than not appreciate the things we have.
- Hussein Adamally
Gratitude is under-rated and under-utilized. Most of us focus on the things we want to achieve in life, the things we have not yet achieved, the things we do not yet have. We hanker after it, gripe about it, and wish we had it, wonder when we will get it and scheme to achieve it. It is all well and good to have goals and to visual them and work towards them, but it is critically important to your happiness to take time to appreciate the things you do have and have already accomplished.
You attract what you focus your interest on and that being appreciative of your successes will encourage more successes into your life. Being grateful has another more immediate function. Being grateful immediately increases your satisfaction with your life and allows you to feel happier, which in turn allows you to accomplish more.
Gratitude refocuses your priorities. Focusing on what you are grateful for also reminds you of your priorities and of what is fundamentally important to you. Often we get caught up worrying or focusing on little things that really are not important to us. Thinking about what we are grateful for allows us to refocus and re-center ourselves on what is important to us.
Gratitude allows you to enjoy the good in your life. Oftentimes we believe that only achieving the big goals; like getting the big promotion, winning the lottery, having the best party; buying a new car can make us happy. But focusing on being appreciative allows you to focus on the many small good things that occur in your day.
When you are busy appreciating and savoring all the good things already in your life, there is little time for hankering about what others have. Take a simple common example. Let’s say you have a regular 20 inch TV, but you want one of those new fandangle, flat screen, plasma items to watch the big game on. Imagine that you keep thinking of how great it would be see the game on that big screen and how you wish you had it you will feel very dissatisfied with the TV you do have and envy all those who have the TV you wish you had. Wont You?
Now imagine instead that you focus on appreciating the fact that you have a TV to watch the game on your own TV, in the comfort of your home where you can sit in your favorite chair and relax and enjoy your game-viewing experience. You will feel more satisfied and appreciate the TV you have rather than being unhappy wishing you had another TV. Being grateful helps reduce envy and resentment and promotes satisfaction and happiness.
Studies have shown that people who take a few minutes each day (for a week) to write down the things that they are thankful for sleep better, exercise more and feel less stressed than the control groups who do not engage in a daily gratitude exercise.
Gratitude improves your emotional well-being. Further experiments have shown that people who practice feeling grateful recover from traumatic events more quickly.
All we want is to be happy in life.
Happiness is not only what we feel when we have what we desire, it is also the very emotion that attracts what we desire to us. Focus less on asking the universe for this or that and more on just being grateful for whatever comes. We will feel such sweet and true joy when we enjoy the present fully than by trying to create for the future.
Many a times, we sabotage the manifestation of our intentions unknowingly by focusing too much on intending.
In a 2009 presentation at the Greater Good Science Center at the University of California, Berkeley, Prof Robert Emmons distinguished between feeling grateful and being grateful. “Feeling grateful is a response to a benefit,” while “being grateful is a way of life.”
Emmons’s research shows that “gratitude has the power to heal, to energize, and to change lives
Just think:
I am wearing clothes others made for me, eating food others grew and prepared for me, using tools others designed and fabricated and taught me how to use, speaking words others defined and explained. The list goes on and on. Any verb I can think of—sleep, play tennis, drive, lecture, watch, bathe—can be followed by a phrase attributing the action to some supporting role by others. There is nothing I do that is thanks to my own efforts alone.
“Most of time [we] fail to notice the efforts of others on [our] behalf.” Why? Because we are caught up in our own suffering. We focus on “what life is denying” and we fail to notice “what life is offering.”
To live a life of gratitude is to open our eyes to the countless ways in which we are supported by the world around us. Such a life provides less space for our own suffering because our attention is more balanced. We are more often occupied with noticing what we are given, thanking those who have helped us, and repaying the world in some concrete way for what we are receiving and have received in the past.
