If there’s one truth that nearly every field of psychology agrees on, it’s this: grateful people are happier people.

Few topics have been studied more thoroughly than the relationship between gratitude and happiness. The results are stunningly consistent. People who practice gratitude are less anxious, less depressed, sleep better, exercise more, and have stronger relationships.

But notice that word — practice.

It’s not just the attitude of gratitude that changes your life.

It’s the activity of gratitude. You can’t directly change your attitude by force of will. You can change your activity by force of will. Do what happy people do and you too will become happy. One of the things all happy people do is to engage in the activity of gratitude until it becomes automatic. 

You can feel grateful for a moment, but when you practice gratitude until it becomes a habit, happiness becomes automatic. It becomes effortless — baked into the rhythm of your thinking.

The Science of Gratitude

Dr. Robert Emmons, a psychologist at the University of California, Davis, is widely considered the world’s leading expert on gratitude. Early in his career, he and Dr. Michael McCullough of the University of Miami set out to test something that had never been measured before: What happens when people intentionally focus on thankfulness?

They divided participants into three groups:

One group wrote down things they were grateful for each day.

Another wrote about things that irritated them.

The third simply recorded daily events.

After just ten weeks, the gratitude group reported being 25% happier. They exercised more, slept longer, and had fewer health complaints. Their relationships improved, and their outlook on life grew brighter.

Emmons later wrote, “Gratitude blocks toxic emotions such as envy, resentment, regret, and depression. It’s impossible to feel envious and grateful at the same time.” Here are eight more quotes from Emmons book, Gratitude Works:

Gratitude is important not only because it helps us feel good but also because it inspires us to do good. Gratitude heals, energizes, and transforms lives in myriad ways consistent with the notion that virtue is its own reward and produces other rewards.

For example, people who rate themselves as having a grateful disposition perceive themselves as having more socially helpful characteristics, expressed by their empathetic behavior and emotional support for friends within the last month. In our research, when people report feeling grateful, thankful, and appreciative in their daily lives, they also feel more loving, forgiving, joyful, and enthusiastic. Notably, the family, friends, partners, and others who surround them consistently report that people who practice gratitude are viewed as more helpful, more outgoing, more optimistic, and more trustworthy.             

At the core of these practices is memory. Gratitude is about remembering. If there is a crisis of gratitude in contemporary life, as some have claimed, it is because we are collectively forgetful. We have lost a strong sense of gratitude about the freedoms we enjoy, a lack of gratitude toward those who lost their lives in the fight for freedom, and a lack of gratitude for all the material advantages we have. Furthermore, we don’t even realize that we have become forgetful because we can’t ever remember being different. The machinery in our minds that causes us to forget our benefits operates so seamlessly that we cannot detect its workings. However, grateful people draw on positive memories of being the recipients of benevolence, a giftedness that is neither earned nor deserved. This is why religious traditions are able to so effectively cultivate gratitude—litanies of remembrance encourage gratitude and religions do litanies very well. The scriptures, sayings, and sacraments-of-faith traditions inculcate gratefulness by drawing believers into a remembered relationship with a Supreme Being and with members of their faith community.               

People are 25 percent happier if they keep gratitude journals, sleep one-half hour more per evening, and exercise 33 percent more each week compared to persons who are not keeping these journals.               

We have also found that when people experience gratitude, they feel more loving, more forgiving, and closer to God. Dozens of research studies with diverse participant groups have also revealed that the practice of gratitude leads to the following: 

• Increased feelings of energy, alertness, enthusiasm, and vigor 
• Success in achieving personal goals 
• Better coping with stress 
• A sense of closure in traumatic memories 
• Bolstered feelings of self-worth and self-confidence 
• Solidified and secure social relationships 
• Generosity and helpfulness 
• Prolonging of the enjoyment produced by pleasurable experiences 
• Improved cardiac health through increases in vagal tone 
• Greater sense of purpose and resilience.               

Studies published in the most rigorous scientific publications show that the gratitude visit can increase happiness and decrease depression in the letter writer for as long as three months after the visit!               

A number of recent studies have found that materialism can put people in an emotional debt in that the greater they place a value on materialistic pursuits, the more at risk they are for depression and other distressing emotional states including envy and hostility. Gratitude, though, can help reduce this cost.               

In one study, Texas Tech University psychologist Jeff Larsen gave undergraduates a list of fifty-two different material items, such as a car, a stereo, or a bed, and asked them to indicate whether they possessed them. If the students owned a car, the researchers asked them to rate how much they wanted the car they had. If they didn’t have a car, they were asked to rate how much they wanted one. The people who wanted more of what they had were happier than those who wanted less of what they had. However, the students who had more of what they want tended to be happier than those who had less of what they wanted. Wanting more and wanting what one already has are very different. It is not materialism per se that is the enemy of gratitude but rather a lack of appreciation for what one already possesses. Wanting things to be different than how they are right now is the formula for regret and rumination, not gratitude.

Emmons’ study launched an entire field of research. Neuroscientists at Indiana University found that when people practiced gratitude regularly, their brains physically changed. The areas associated with joy, empathy, and contentment became more active — not just during gratitude exercises, but weeks and months afterward.

Gratitude, it turns out, is not just an emotion. It’s a mental muscle. And like any muscle, it grows stronger with use. For happy people, gratitude is not effort. It is a habit.