I might never have focused on gratitude if Barnaby Marsh, a top executive at the John Templeton Foundation, hadn’t raised the topic with me a couple of years earlier. We met by chance, sitting next to each other at a charity dinner, and a few months later, he took me out to a very elegant afternoon tea to discuss some of the Big Ideas the foundation funded. I had recently left a job at the top spot of a magazine, and I was feeling a little at odds with the world. But the moment he mentioned Gratitude (with a capital G), I looked up from my mint tea. Being grateful sounded like a great idea—a nice replacement for resentment, indignation, and pique. I said I wanted to find out more and suggested the survey. By the end of the tea, I had a whole new mind-set (and an appreciation for cucumber sandwiches).
As I threw myself into the survey and research, I quickly realized that gratitude wasn’t the same as happiness—it has a much deeper resonance. Most of us feel cheered when something nice occurs—a friend sends flowers or we spend an afternoon in the park. But those moments can be fragile and fleeting, and what happens when they’re over? Because it’s not dependent on specific events, gratitude is long lasting and impervious to change or adversity. It requires an active emotional involvement—you can’t be passively grateful, you actually have to stop and feel it, experience the emotion. So it creates an inner richness that’s sustaining in difficult times as well as good ones.
Over the years, my career has gone in three directions, interweaving TV, magazines, and books. I’ve produced network TV shows and even created some popular specials, been the editor in chief of Parade (the largest-circulation magazine in America at the time), and written a dozen novels, a couple of them bestsellers. Good career on paper, but none of it made me stop and say—I’ve arrived! Success at work is all about moving forward. Reach one goal and there’s still another to achieve. Gratitude requires that you take a different approach—relishing the moment and not fretting about the next step.
Savoring what you have is never straightforward. It’s easy to look at someone else and think how lucky they are and how wonderful it would be to have their life and success. But what any of us feel on the inside is rarely the same as what is perceived from the outside.
Until recently, philosophers talked about gratitude but psychologists didn’t spend a lot of time researching it. But in the last dozen years or so, academics have jumped on the subject and made efforts at serious research. The results have been startling. One study after another has connected gratitude to higher levels of happiness and lower levels of depression and stress. An article in the Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology evaluating all the literature in the field concluded that gratitude may have the highest connection to mental health and happiness of any of the personality traits studied. 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.
One of the psychologists who has led this research, Dr. Robert Emmons of the University of California, Davis, jumped into the field early, and quickly became one of the world’s leading scientific experts on gratitude (there weren’t many others). One of his findings is that you don’t need good events in your life in order to feel gratitude. Instead, grateful people reframe whatever happens to them. “They don’t focus on what they’re lacking; they make sure they see the good in what they have,” he told me.
Reframing takes many forms. I’d recently spent a day with Michelle Pfeiffer, the Golden Globe–winning actress known throughout her career for her stunning beauty. (Remember her shiny black suit as Catwoman?) Since I was writing a cover story about her for a women’s magazine, I dared to ask how she felt about getting older. Still extraordinarily beautiful in her mid-fifties (I’d trade with her in a moment), she admitted that it was easy to yearn for the days when she had flawless skin and a perfectly taut body. We looked together at a picture of her at age twenty-five, when she starred with Al Pacino in the blockbuster movie Scarface.
“My breasts were very perky then, weren’t they?” she said, smiling wryly at the photo of herself in a revealing dress.
But she didn’t look back at her younger self with envy. She remembered being terrified and insecure during every moment of that shoot and was glad to be so much more confident now. Different moments in life bring different reasons to be grateful. The gift was to capture what you have when you have it.
“I’m really happily married now. I have a wonderful family and a handful of really close friends. I love my work and that makes me very lucky and blessed. So I get up with a purpose in life—and try to stay away from mirrors,” she said with a smile.
Hers was a lovely and instinctive reframing, an eagerness to focus only on the positive aspects of getting older. It occurred to me that like Michelle Pfeiffer, I could avoid the wrinkles in life by focusing on the joys.
But in both small events and big ones, seeing the good can be a challenge, because a general rule of life is that negative events overshadow positive ones. If ten great things and one lousy one happen in a day, most of us will spend dinner telling our spouse about the lousy one. Nobel Prize–winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman says ruminating on what went wrong makes evolutionary sense. Our ancestors survived by remembering the one poisonous berry they encountered and telling their friends about it. Describing the ten tasty ones didn’t do much good at all. We have simply updated that approach, as evidenced by every parent who has ranted about the one C on a child’s report card while barely noticing the four As.
Many researchers have contributed to the bad-is-stronger-than-good theory, often with colorful explanations. The psychologist Paul Rozin has pointed out that a cockroach can completely spoil a bowl of cherries, but one cherry does nothing to improve the appeal of a bowl of cockroaches. Social media has made the power of a single negative comment very evident. Check out the reviews on a site like Yelp—and then decide whether you’ll have brunch at the new eatery where most people like the pancakes but one guy got sick from a bad egg (or so he claims). Or will you spend a night at a hotel where one reviewer ranted about being stuck in a room with a dirty toilet and a leaky bathtub, even if others liked the comfy bed and the ocean view?
Some psychologists who’ve looked into the question say it takes four positive statements to counterbalance one negative one, and others suggest five. The real ratio probably depends on the individual and the strength of the comments. But I’ve never seen anyone put it at less than three good equals one bad (something to remember when talking to a spouse).
All of which brings us back around to a gratitude diary—since that turns out to be an antidote to our brains’ natural attraction to bad berries and bugs. At the end of the day (quite literally), thinking about what made you thankful forces you to think of the soft bed and the tasty fruit—the cherry, not the cockroach. I liked the concept and I could see how it worked to reframe a day’s events. But it wouldn’t come naturally.
I’d kept journals since I could hold a pen, and as a general rule, I wrote in them when I was irritable, angry, or pissed off. I still had my faux-leather diaries from elementary school with their tiny locks and carefully scrawled Please Keep Out on the covers. Later, I used drugstore-bought notebooks with lined pages and cardboard covers for my private rants, and some
years ago, I found a dozen of them in the back of a closet. A treasure trove of memory! I immediately sat down and began flipping through, but instead of happy remembrances of my younger self, I was stunned to read page after grumbling page of self-centered despair. Events that got me furious, fuming, or in high dudgeon pushed out anything else. Where were all the wonderful experiences from those years? I’d had many joyous moments—I did, honestly!—but I hadn’t bothered to record them.
As I read the journals, I dreaded the idea of anyone else doing the same. I didn’t want my husband or children finding the notebooks and thinking this was my life. Heck, I didn’t want me thinking this was my life. It wasn’t that I planned to rewrite history—I had just written it wrong the first time. So I tossed the grouse-filled notebooks into a large garbage bag and sent those biodegradable pages to molder in a dump somewhere, never to be seen again. (Or so I hoped. Maybe I should have considered the fireplace?)
A gratitude journal would have a different vibe and never have to be relegated to the proverbial (or real) landfill of history. And if Dr. Emmons and his colleagues were right, it would, quite simply, make my life better. I liked the concept, but being a journalist, keeping a gratitude journal also struck me as a little—squishy. A notebook full of appreciative words about glowing sunsets and the smell of fresh-brewed coffee sounded like a Nicholas Sparks novel (not that there’s anything wrong with those . . .).
I called my friend Shana, who has endless energy—she teaches Zumba classes for fun—and is positive and upbeat but definitely not squishy. At age thirty-five, she’s a talented businesswoman and serial entrepreneur—and has kept a gratitude journal for years.
“I love that you’re doing this. Gratitude is completely my thing these days!” she said when I told her about my plan.
Shana and her husband had a new house in New Haven, but she had some meetings coming up in Manhattan, so we agreed to meet at a tapas restaurant near Grand Central Terminal. Shana bounced in, looking as cheerful as always, and after we caught up on important topics (the new tiles she was buying for her bathroom), 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.
As we talked, she picked up one of the tapas—country bread with orange honey and figs and a bit of cream—and took an appreciative bite.
“Mmmm, this is a good example,” she said, licking some honey off her lip. “It’s so delicious that I’m thinking it could be in my journal. Though today it’s more likely that I’ll write about seeing you.”
“I can’t compete with fig montadito,” I said with a laugh. But I got the point. By focusing on reasons to be grateful, Shana saw everything through a different lens. Our natural evolutionary tendency might be to look out for problems and peril, but Shana had redirected her instincts. She was alert to what made her day positive. When she couldn’t find something—because that happens, too—she had to find a way to reframe the day.
“I can be going through a bad patch and feel thankful for nothing,” she admitted. “So maybe I’ll write that I’m glad it didn’t rain very hard or that I have two feet. Honestly, it came down to that once. I was glad I had two feet.”
I told Shana about the journals I had tossed away, and she nodded vigorously. She, too, used to spill her guts in a diary, scrawling melodramatic entries about having the weight of the world on her shoulders. “You know, The gray skies outside reflect the darkness in my soul,” she said, and we both laughed knowingly.
Did Shana’s current gratitude journals reflect a more or less realistic view than the gloomy ones?
When I raised the question, Shana smiled and quoted the famous line from Hamlet: “There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.”
You don’t have to be a Shakespearean scholar to follow Hamlet’s reasoning. When the melancholy prince meets his old pals Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in act 2 and tells them that Denmark is a prison, they’re a little surprised—the palace looks pretty darn good to them. Hamlet gives a little shrug (at least he did when I saw Jude Law play him on Broadway) and makes the comment about goodness or badness being dependent on our perception. Kings get killed, ghosts appear, and moms get remarried, but what really makes those events painful or not is how we look at them. If somebody had told Hamlet to keep a gratitude journal, maybe he would have concentrated on how fortunate he was to be a prince and to have his beautiful girlfriend, Ophelia. Really, it wasn’t such a bad life!
But for some reason, we trust misery more than happiness. We’re fascinated to see Hamlet wander the stage in despair, trying to decide if life is worth living. “To be or not to be” seems more profound than “Gosh, I’m one lucky guy.”
But what makes a great play isn’t necessarily the poetic basis for a happy life.
“Okay, I’m going to start keeping a gratitude journal,” I told Shana. “Any suggestions?”
“Buy a pretty one,” she said as we hugged good-bye.
A few days later, I was at our country home in rural northwest Connecticut and drove over to a nearby town, looking for a diversion from the stormy winter weather. I would have preferred being in the Caribbean, but I made myself appreciate how pretty the snow looked gleaming in the icy fields. Red farmhouses dotted the landscape, as if from a painting. I went to an art gallery I liked, then stopped in a favorite store that sells tea and teapots and other creative gifts. Browsing, I noticed some colorful journals near the cash register.
I thought of Shana’s advice. I had plenty of notebooks at home, but if I wanted to keep a gratitude journal, it needed to be something different, a purposeful purchase, not a leftover from a gift bag. I picked out one with a geometric green cover, fresh and bright. Too pretty to hold anything but positive thoughts.
Before I went to sleep that night, I took out the journal and opened to the first page. Feeling slightly awkward, I wrote, So thankful for . . . , and then paused.
I went over the day in my mind. Should I focus on big things or small ones? A travel reporter I knew once joked with me that the first radio segment he ever did was about Paris. Ten years of broadcasts later, he was about to record one on his favorite apple tart at a small bistro in the seventh arrondissement. In other words, it’s always a good idea to focus.
So thankful for . . .
The chance to start my year of gratitude, with this journal, I wrote.
I started to add, Even though I’m not sure it will work . . .
But I stopped myself. In my gratitude journal, I didn’t need balance or complaints or shades of gray. It was okay to look at only one side of the story. Nobody was keeping score.
I put the journal in a prominent spot on the side of my desk. Experts used to claim that it took just twenty-one days to form a new habit, but a recent study out of University College London found most of us need more than two months and sometimes as many as six to make a real change in behavior. I hoped that at some point in this year, an attitude of gratitude would become completely natural to me. For now, I would embrace the process—and have a nightly rendezvous with my journal.
CHAPTER 2
Falling (Back) in Love with My Husband
Grateful to pursue positivity in my marriage—and get our “happy brains” in sync
Thankful to learn to say thank you to my kind and handsome husband
So grateful that a marriage can get better after many years
As I started to plot my year of living gratefully, I decided the number one topic that needed a more positive approach was my marriage.
Theoretically, I knew that I had many reasons to be grateful at home. My husband was handsome and smart and didn’t mind doing the dishes. We had two wonderful children, Zach and M
att, and that pretty house in rural Connecticut. We were all healthy and loved one another. We laughed together, took hikes in the mountains, and admired sunsets on the beach. Viewed that way, my life could be videotaped for the Hallmark Channel.
But it was also the life I led every day, which made it hard to keep in perspective. Psychologists call it habituation. We get used to something—whether a husband, a house, or a shiny new car—and then forget why it seemed so special in the first place. Brain-scan images show that how we respond to something the tenth time we see it is very different from how we felt the first.
The French novelist Marcel Proust famously said that the real voyage of discovery “consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.” I realized it was time to bring those fresh eyes to the man with whom I shared my bed, my jokes, and my joint checking account.
My first thought was to devote the next few journal entries to my marriage, writing at least one reason every night that I was grateful to have my husband. 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.
Call it common courtesy, but it’s not always so common with the people we love the most. A few more numbers from that same survey tell an interesting story. Some 97 percent of respondents said they would express appreciation to a server in a nice restaurant and an admirable 58 percent were even okay saying thanks to the TSA guy at the airport. When it came to a spouse, the number plunged. Remember that less than half (48 percent) of women expressed gratitude to the person who was supposed to be closest to them.
The Gratitude Diaries Page 2
