The Gratitude Diaries

“I don’t feel like complaining,” I said, surprising myself as much as her. “I can’t change what happened, so it feels good to change how I think about it.” Susan took a long sip of coffee. She

“I don’t feel like complaining,” I said, surprising myself as much as her. “I can’t change what happened, so it feels good to change how I think about it.”

The conclusion: “Around 18.5 per cent of individual differences in people’s happiness could be predicted by the amount of gratitude they feel.” Now, that made me stop. Being 18.5 percent happier is a lot of happier. Pulling a number out of the air, I figured my happiness right now at about 76 percent. So being more grateful would bring me to over 90, a solid A. What was it going to take to raise my grade? One of the consistent findings in the research was the value of keeping a gratitude journal. Researchers have found that people who write down three things they’re grateful for every night (or even a few times a week) improve their well-being and lower their risk of depression. The results have been repeated over and over. Keeping a gratitude journal can even dramatically improve your ability to get a good night’s sleep.

down every night changed her perspective on the whole day.

she eagerly told me about her gratitude journal. Every single night, she wrote down one thing that had made her grateful. Just one! No matter how busy or tired she might be, she could handle writing down a couple of lines. And she’d found that knowing she had to write something down every night changed her perspective on the whole day.

But if I planned to have any effect on our relationship, I had to express thanks to more than my journal. In the survey I’d done and discussed on the Today show, we’d asked men about their marriages, and the largest number (77 percent) said they’d be very grateful if their wives just showed love and affection. That beat everything else by a large margin, including making dinner, planning a vacation, or taking care of chores. I was better with roasting a chicken than with telling my husband I appreciated him. I wasn’t the only one. Fewer than half the women

But if I planned to have any effect on our relationship, I had to express thanks to more than my journal. In the survey I’d done and discussed on the Today show, we’d asked men about their marriages, and the largest number (77 percent) said they’d be very grateful if their wives just showed love and affection. That beat everything else by a large margin, including making dinner, planning a vacation, or taking care of chores. I was better with roasting a chicken than with telling my husband I appreciated him. I wasn’t the only one. Fewer than half the women in the survey regularly said “Thanks” to their husbands.

an ardent “Yes.” “We’re learning that whatever the brain does a lot, it gets good at,” he said. “If through gratitude, you create a positive mood,

“We’re learning that whatever the brain does a lot, it gets good at,” he said. “If through gratitude, you create a positive mood, you reinforce the brain pathways that will then generate more positive feelings. You can think of gratitude as a form of mental exercise that primes the mind for positivity.”

For those willing to give it a try, he suggested sending a daily sentence-completion e-mail to their partners with two sentences. The first sentence: One thing you did lately that I appreciated was . . . The second: One moment when I felt extra positive about you was . . . He made sure to do the exercise every morning for his own wife, Lisa, also a marriage counselor. When I asked, he didn’t mind sharing what he had written to her that very morning, in part to show that daily thanks didn’t have to be earth-shattering. Completing the first sentence, he appreciated that Lisa had rushed around doing errands the previous day. “Maybe that didn’t make me feel all warm and fuzzy, but it was raining and she was busy and I could see that she took one for the team,” he said.

A few years earlier, Damon was in South Africa, shooting the Clint Eastwood–directed movie Invictus. Damon played a white rugby star who became a key player in Nelson Mandela’s efforts to heal the wounds of postapartheid South Africa. His family had come on location, and Damon thought about taking his oldest daughter, Alexia, then only ten, to tour the impoverished townships of Johannesburg with him. He asked his costar Morgan Freeman (who was playing Mandela in the movie) what he should say to her to explain the misery and poverty. What reason could he give for why her life was so different from theirs? “Morgan said to me, ‘You don’t have to tell her anything. Just let her see. That’s all the education anyone needs.’ And it was the best advice I could have gotten. She just looked and looked and took it in. Those kinds of experiences can be life changing.”

mental gymnastics necessary for those distinctions.” In one study done with his colleague Peter Blake at Boston University, he brought little kids (ages four to eight) into his lab and gave them a gift, like a sticker book or temporary tattoo. Some were told the gift was a thank-you for coming to the lab—what Dunham called “a straight exchange relationship.” The others were told that another child had given them the gift and was sharing his favorite toy. Next, the children played a game where they were given ten Starburst candies, and they could take all of them or share some with another child. And bingo. The kids who felt they’d received a gift from another child—as opposed to payment for coming to the lab—were more likely to share. Dunham was excited to see that even with very young children, a bit of gratitude made them want to do something for someone else.

The bottom line might simply be this: To raise grateful kids, be grateful for your kids.

effect. “You get relatively ungrateful people like me and have them do gratitude journals and letters and visits and see if their well-being increases,” he explained. Several studies have shown that the interventions have an effect that lingers for days, weeks, or even months. I mentioned that my gratitude journal was already changing my attitude and helping me refocus on the positive. “Very good,” he said with a nod. “And here’s another variant. As you go through the day, take photos of the things that

“You get relatively ungrateful people like me and have them do gratitude journals and letters and visits and see if their well-being increases,” he explained. Several studies have shown that the interventions have an effect that lingers for days, weeks, or even months. I mentioned that my gratitude journal was already changing my attitude and helping me refocus on the positive. “Very good,” he said with a nod. “And here’s another variant. As you go through the day, take photos of the things that you might write about in your journal that night. Doing something has a stronger effect than just thinking about it.”

All the excitement around the article and the praise I got for publishing it made me reflect that good ideas—even “original” ones—came from somewhere. The seed for mine occurred years earlier when a rabbi we knew talked about writing an “ethical will.” Typical wills dealt with money and property, he said, but shouldn’t we also leave our children a record of our values and hopes, our dreams for their future? He read aloud the letter he had written to his then toddler daughter, talking about morals and values and the kind of person he hoped she’d marry. Moved by both his sense and his sensibility, I went home and wrote my own ethical wills to Zach and Matt, then just four and two. Tears streaked down my cheeks as I tried to imagine not being with them as they grew, so I used this letter to tell them what I thought mattered, what I hoped they would find in life. I sealed the envelopes and put them in a safe.*

Professor Kahneman has found that the ending of an experience has an undue effect on our overall memory of it. So, for example, if you have a medical procedure that ends with a burst of pain, you’ll remember the procedure as much worse than if that same pain occurred in the middle. And he found that the remembering self isn’t affected by how long an event lasts. What matters is its intensity—its high points and low points. Those neurons that make anything new and different stay in our minds can work to your advantage. For example, taking several short trips in a year is likely to give you more peak experiences—and grateful memories—than one long but unremarkable vacation.

Science and research can always win me over, so I thoroughly accepted the idea of spending on experiences rather than stuff. But something kept nagging at me. Ah, yes, the voice of my frugal and prudent mother. Ever practical, she had always believed in putting hard-earned dollars toward possessions that lasted. She considered vacations and parties and fancy evenings out to be fleeting frivolities that vanished with the wind. “Spend on things you’ll see every day,” she lectured me when I was younger, claiming that’s what her mother had taught her, too. My mother rarely traveled, but she had great sofas. I now understood that Mom was right about investing in things that endured—she was just wrong about what endures. Sofas get old and stained, and the problem with spending on objects you see every day is that you stop seeing them. Possessions recede into the background, but experiences stay vivid in our memories. Maybe the vacation you took to Miami extended only five days, but you can’t really measure by clock or calendar. If it becomes part of your memory and part of who you are, it can make you grateful forever. Short-lived? Not at all. Poignantly, when my dad got very ill at the end of his life, I sat with him in the hospital, holding his hand and reminiscing about what had made him happy. He talked about his children and his wife and even described one of their very rare trips—a cruise to Alaska. He had glowing memories of glacial scenery and dinner under the stars. On the list of what made him grateful, he never mentioned the furniture.

I finally understood that it wasn’t the frayed baby blanket that made me grateful but the memory of the sweet baby who used it. The day we moved, I stood by as every single item I still owned was piled into a van. If you measured life by stuff acquired, mine had just driven away. Once the house stood completely empty, Ron and I did a final walk-through—and felt strangely detached from the empty rooms. “So it wasn’t the house that made us happy—it was the people in it,” I said as we closed the door for the last time. All the things I’d given away didn’t matter, because I got to keep what did—the memories of birthday parties and laughter and family hugs. We decorated our new apartment in Manhattan with clean, minimalist lines, and people who visited marveled at the spare, open feel. One friend twirled around and said, “I feel like I can breathe in here!” I also liked being able to breathe.

We’re likely to be grateful when good scenarios occur, but maybe we can also make them happen. Imagine, for example, that you’re out of work and headed to a coffee shop to get advice from a former colleague. As you arrive, you notice a twenty-dollar bill on the ground, and since there’s no way to identify the owner, you happily tuck it in your wallet. Well, that’s nice. You start to feel a little lucky. Your friend hasn’t arrived, so you sit down alone and chat with the man at the next table, who is also alone. He laughs at your stories about searching for a job and ultimately gives you his card and says to call if he can ever help. Turns out he’s an executive at a company where you’d love to work. You wait for your friend a little longer, then leave happy that the world is on your side. You’ll call him tomorrow. The same day could happen a different way. Anxious to meet your contact, you rush into the coffee shop and never see the twenty-dollar bill. You’re too tense to talk to your neighbor so never know that your dream job is just a hello away. When the person you were to meet doesn’t show up, you slink away, embarrassed and dispirited. How can you be grateful to the world when good things never happen?

Conant tried to move away from the standard business model of focusing on problems. “It’s usually the ten percent of things that go wrong that get ninety percent of the attention,” he told me—and he preferred to celebrate the 90 percent (hopefully) that went right. Despite our usual instinct that makes the bad outweigh the good, Conant wanted to change the mentality and focus on the cherries in the bowl rather than the occasional cockroach. And though he was responsible for a $2 billion company with twenty thousand employees, he made it personal—writing thank-you notes to employees for work done well. Doug and a staff member watched for positive news around the company, and when he heard about something he admired, he sent his thanks. He figures he wrote ten to twenty handwritten thank-you notes every single day, six days a week, for the ten years he was CEO. “If you do the math, that will take you way north of thirty thousand thank-you notes that I wrote,” he told me. Celebrating what went right became the new corporate culture.

The law partner probably thought that withholding thanks showed his strength. I think it showed his insecurity.

“Thinking about the past or future are really the only two ways people can be upset by the world,” Dr. Liponis told me.

So the simple medical line goes this way: Gratitude lowers stress. Less stress means less inflammation. Less inflammation means you are not as susceptible to disease.