Personal Development
Expressing gratitude has a lot of proven benefits. Kwit gives you some tips to integrate gratitude into your daily life in order to improve your well-being.
December 2, 2020
Expressing gratitude helps us feel emotions that we believe are more positive, savour our good experiences, improve our health, cope with adversity and build strong relationships. In a nutshell: gratitude helps us feel better. In this article, Kwit helps you understand what gratitude is, what its benefits are, and gives you tips on how to express your gratitude on a daily basis.
Gratitude refers to a general state of appreciation that, according to many studies, is associated with a general sense of well-being.
Robert Emmons, perhaps the world's foremost scientific expert on the subject, believes that gratitude has two key components:
Emmons, like many other scholars, considers the social dimension to be particularly important when it comes to gratitude. According to him, it is "an emotion that strengthens relationships", "because it forces us to see how we have been supported and affirmed by others".
Two psychologists, Dr Emmons from the University of California and Dr. Michael E. McCullough from the University of Miami, have shown that expressing gratitude can have a significant impact on the well-being of some individuals.
Tennen and Afflek found that when people face trauma, if they are able to feel gratitude, then they are able to overcome that adversity and be more resilient.
According to a 2011 study published in Applied Psychology: Health and Well-Being, grateful people sleep better.
Other research has shown that gratitude has other benefits in addition to improved overall well-being: more generosity and fewer depressive symptoms and less stress.
The benefits of gratitude are many, and we all have the ability and opportunity to express it. Let's just take a few moments to focus on everything we have. Let's not forget that expressing gratitude and being grateful is one of the simplest ways to improve our well-being.
Nevertheless, it is important to add a caveat: some studies have shown that gratitude doesn’t act in the same way on all individuals and that it cannot make injustice, loss or pain disappear.
What gratitude can do, however, is give us hope. Research shows that focusing on the positive, instead of focusing only on the negative, can boost our optimism.
Gratitude is a way for everyone to appreciate what they have. It helps us focus on the positive instead of focusing on what we are missing. Although expressing gratitude may seem artificial and even futile, it is about developing a mental state of optimism that is gradually reinforced with use and practice.
Here are some simple and effective ways to cultivate this state of mind, proposed by Bono. G, McCullough. M, two researchers in psychology: