Gratitude
🎈Benefits of gratitude: How gratitude can change our lifes
Seriously? All that? Yes.
Here are "some" examples of benefits that were compiled by aggregating the results of more than 40 research studies on gratitude
1. Gratitude makes us happier.
A 5-minute a daily gratitude journal can increase your long-term well-being by more than 10 % (that’s the same impact as doubling your income!)
How can a free five-minute activity compare? Gratitude improves our health, relationships, emotions, personality, and career. Sure, having more money can be pretty awesome, but because of hedonic adaptation we quickly get used to it and stop having as much fun and happiness as we did at first. Gratitude makes us feel more gratitude.
2. Gratitude makes people like us.
Gratitude generates social capital – in two studies with 243 total participants, those who were 10% more grateful than average had 17.5% more social capital.
Gratitude makes us nicer, more trusting, more social, and more appreciative.
3. Gratitude makes us healthier
4. Gratitude strengthens our emotions.
Gratitude reduces feelings of envy, makes our memories happier, lets us experience good feelings, and helps us bounce back from stress.
5. Gratitude makes us more optimistic.
Gratitude is strongly correlated with optimism. Optimism in turn makes us happier, improves our health, and has been shown to increase lifespan by as much as a few years.
- In one study of keeping a weekly gratitude journal, participants showed a 5% increase in optimism.
- In another study, keeping a daily gratitude journal resulted in a 15% increase in optimism.
- Optimism is significantly correlated with gratitude (r=.51): increasing one’s level of gratitude increases one’s level of optimism.
6. Gratitude reduces materialism.
Materialism is strongly correlated with reduced well-being and increased rates of mental disorder. There’s nothing wrong with wanting more. The problem with materialism is that it makes people feel less competent, reduces feelings of relatedness and gratitude, reduces their ability to appreciate and enjoy the good in life, generates negative emotions, and makes them more self-centered.
7. Gratitude increases spiritualism.
Spiritual transcendence is highly correlated with feelings of gratitude. That is – the more spiritual you are, the more likely you are to be grateful.
This is for two reasons:
All major religions espouse gratitude as a virtue.
Spirituality spontaneously gives rise to grateful behavior.
8. Gratitude makes us less self-centered.
This is because the very nature of gratitude is to focus on others (on their acts of benevolence). In this regard, gratitude practice can be better than self-esteem therapy. Self-esteem therapy focuses the individual back on themselves: I’m smart, I look good, I can succeed, etc….
9. Gratitude increases self-esteem.
Imagine a world where no one helps you. Despite your asking and pleading, no one helps you.
Now imagine a world where many people help you all of the time for no other reason than that they like you. In which world do you think you would have more self-esteem? Gratitude helps to create a world like that.
10. Gratitude improves your sleep.
Gratitude increases sleep quality, reduces the time required to fall asleep, and increases sleep duration. Said differently, gratitude can help with insomnia.
The key is what’s on our minds as we’re trying to fall asleep. If it’s worries about the kids, or anxiety about work, the level of stress in our body will increase, reducing sleep quality, keeping us awake, and cutting our sleep short.
If it’s thinking about a few things we have to be grateful for today, it will induce the relaxation response, knock us out, and keep us that way.
Yes – gratitude is a (safe and free) sleep aid.
(In one study of 65 subjects with a chronic pain condition, those who were assigned a daily
gratitude journal to be completed at night reported half an hour more sleep than the control group.)
In another study of 400 healthy people, those participants who had higher scores on a gratitude test also had significantly better sleep. They reported faster time to sleep, improved sleep quality, increased sleep duration, and less difficulty staying awake during the day.j1 This is not because their life was simply better – levels of gratitude are more dependent on personality and life perspective than on life situation.
11. Gratitude keeps you away from the doctor.
Positive emotion improves health. The details are complicated, but the overall picture is not – if you want to improve your health, improve your mind. This confidence comes from 137 research studies. Gratitude is a positive emotion.
How does gratitude improve my health?
The science on how is still unclear. Here are two ideas:
- Gratitude reduces levels of stress by activating the parasympathetic nervous system. Stress in turn has been shown to disrupt healthy body functioning (e.g disrupting the hypothalamic-pituitary axis, the immune system, our sleep, etc…).
- Gratitude encourages pro-health behavior like exercising and paying attention to health risks.
12. Gratitude lets you live longer.
Here is what we know: optimism and positive emotion, in general, have been used to successfully predict mortality decades later.
Gratitude is strongly correlated with positive emotion. So, gratitude –> positive emotion –> an extra few months or years on earth. With positive psychology research on the rise, I believe we can expect this claim to be rigorously tested within the next five to ten years.
13. Gratitude helps us bounce back.
Those that have more gratitude have a more pro-active coping style, are more likely to have and seek out social support in times of need, are less likely to develop PTSD, and are more likely to grow in times of stress. In others words, they are more resilient.
14. Gratitude makes us feel good.
Surprise, surprise: gratitude actually feels good. Yet only 20% of Americans rate gratitude as a positive and constructive emotion (compared to 50% of Europeans).
According to gratitude researcher Robert Emmons, gratitude is just happiness that we recognize after-the fact to have been caused by the kindness of others. Gratitude doesn’t just make us happier, it is happiness in and of itself!
15. Gratitude makes our memories happier.
Experiencing gratitude in the present makes us more likely to remember positive memories, and actually transforms some of our neutral or even negative memories into positive ones. In one study, putting people into a grateful mood helped them find closure of upsetting open memories. During these experiences, participants were more likely to recall positive aspects of the memory than usual, and some of the negative and neutral aspects were transformed into positives.
What’s going on with my memory!? It’s called cognitive biases. Here are two great books on the subject: Thinking, Fast and Slow, and Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me).
16. Gratitude makes you friendlier.
There are two main reasons.
Gratitude helps us perceive kindness, which we have a natural tendency to want to reciprocate. Without the feeling of gratitude, we may not recognize when someone is helping us (the same way anger lets us know when someone is trying to harm us).
Gratitude makes us happier and more energetic, both of which are highly linked to pro-social behavior.
17. Gratitude makes you a more effective manager
Effective management requires a toolbox of skills. Criticism comes all too easily to most, while the ability to feel gratitude and express praise is often lacking.
Timely, sincere, specific, behavior-focused praise is often a more powerful method of influencing change than criticism. Specifically, multiple studies have found expressions of gratitude to be highly motivating, while expressions of criticism to be slightly de-motivating but providing more expectation clarification.
More Info: The Science of Praise: A Manager’s Guide To Giving Effective Employee Praise
18. Gratitude improves your decision making.
The above study shows that gratitude motivates improved decision making. Those who cultivate an attitude of gratitude find tokens of appreciation every day, on their own.
🎈How do we practice it at MadKudu?
1. #kudu channel
Thank people that did a great job in our "kudu"(kudos, do you get it?😉) slack channel.
If the people is a team member just @ mention them, if multiple people were working on something do @ mentioning each person.
If possible please include a link/picture with your thanks that points to the subject matter that you are giving thanks for, for example a bag of croissants, or a link to a merge request.
Add emoji reactions to other peoples thank you messages.
Don't thank founders, managers or other executives for something that the company paid for, thank MK instead 🙏🏾
To thank/ congrats someone who is not a team member please mention Fanny/ Eryn, the name of the person, a kind gift and link to their work. For example, "@manager, @fanny: Robert deserves flowers for link". We'll ask for their address saying we want to send some swag. We'll ship it in gift wrap with "Thanks for your great work on link, love from @MK".
Use those value emojis when you see a thank you message ties to MadKudu values, to send it to the kudus channel [4 MK values emojis W in progress + WIP for the reactji channeler]
2. Kudu cards
- Kudus cards are at your disposal in Paris and MV offices to write thanks/ congrats/ sorry to the kudu of your choice, you can either give it to the person either leave it on the box next to Sam/ Fanny's desk and they will be posted on the #kudu channel everyday.
- Every retreat we write some kudu cards, to kudus, clients, candidates, investors, to thank them for their interest, time, feedbacks, support.
3. The what-went-well exercise
At the end of your week Friday - Weekly debrief - 1:1 for kudus, write down three things that went well and explain why. The items can vary from the mundane (your co-worker made coffee for you; your partner picked up a treat for you on the way home from work) to the extraordinary (you won the lotery; your coworker gave birth to a healthy baby).
Next to each positive event, answer the question “Why did this happen?” For example, if you wrote that your partner picked up a treat for you, write “Because s/he’s really thoughtful at times” or “Because I called her/him and reminded him to stop by the grocery store.” Or if you wrote “My coworker gave birth to a healthy baby,” you might give as a cause “She did everything right during pregnancy.”
This exercise may feel awkward at first or you may have trouble focusing on the positive feelings of an event. That’s normal. Just keep at it. It will get easier.
As simple as this exercise may sound, research has shown that doing it daily for a week increases people’s feelings of happiness and gratitude immediately afterward, as well as one week, one month, three months, and even six months later!
4. The grateful opening of the week ritual
During the weekly/ Show and Tell/ Q&A opening: let's start by being grateful.
It could be written in the weekly email (Sam) or during the weekly/ Show and Tell/ Q&A opening (the moderator or someone in the attendance can thank someone or something, for any reason).
Then we'll launch the meeting.
5. The Happy moments channel
Be grateful in our "happy moment" slack channel.
If this is about/ with someone in the MK team just @ mention them.
If possible please include a link/picture with your thanks that points to the subject matter that you are grateful for, for example the sun today, or the result of a merge request working super well.
Add emoji reactions to other peoples gratitude messages.
Use this emoji to comment a happy moment, to send it to the happy moment channel
6. Power retro
During team retros, once a quarter (before or after quarterly reviews), we share about every teammate strengths.
In a room, in silence, we all together move/choose 3 cards to design people strengths.
If we can't arrive to a common result, we can vote. If someone brings a new strength, we remove one card.
At the end, every kudu have 3 strengths people choosed for him/her.
Same exercice can be done in groups, to focus on "build" (what to be improved by each kudu).
(Source: carte des forces: https://pablopernot.fr/2018/08/extrospection-collective/ )
More retros examples here: Retrospectives
🎈You want personally to go further and practice more gratitude/ work on your happiness? Here are some ideas:
- An example of physical journal to boost gratitude: https://stevescott.lpages.co/hh-90-day-gratitude-journal/
- How to wake up happy and motivated: https://www.amazon.fr/Miracle-Morning-Habits-Transform-highest/dp/1473668948/ref=sr_1_1?__mk_fr_FR=ÅMÅŽÕÑ&crid=62IL708B0BEK&keywords=miracle+morning&qid=1555751571&s=english-books&sprefix=miracle%2Caps%2C137&sr=1-1
- A book to read: https://www.amazon.fr/Happier-Human-Science-Backed-Increase-Happiness-ebook/dp/B07PC29CFG/ref=sr_1_1?__mk_fr_FR=ÅMÅŽÕÑ&keywords=Happier+Human&qid=1555751095&s=books&sr=8-1
- A buddhist talks about mindfulness and gratitude: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/buddhist-teacher-jack-kor_n_5249627
- 8 Gratitude Exercises to Unlock the Most Powerful Emotion That Exists: https://www.njlifehacks.com/gratitude-exercises/
- If you’re looking for another way to feel happier: exercising, specifically building a running habit.)