Say 'Thank You' More

Can we boost our happiness with 2 mins a day?

In his book, The Happiness Advantage, Shawn Anchor wrote about how what we expose our brains to can shape how we see the world.

"In a study at Harvard Medical School’s Department of Psychiatry, researchers paid 27 people to play Tetris for multiple hours a day, three days in a row. For days after the study, some participants literally couldn’t stop dreaming about shapes falling from the sky. Other’s couldn’t stop seeing these shapes everywhere, even in their waking hours. Quite simply, they couldn’t stop seeing their world as being made up of sequences of Tetris blocks.”

"This isn’t a vision problem - playing hour after hour of Tetris actually changes the wiring of the brain. As subsequent studies found, the consistent play was creating new neural pathways, new connections that warped the way they viewed real-life situations."

The point is this: our brains will notice more what it was primed to notice.

So if you're brain is primed for negativity, it will notice more negativity. If you're brain is primed for positivity, it will notice more positivity.

The good news is that we can train our brains to scan the world and notice the positives. And one of the best ways to infuse positivity in our lives is to practice daily gratitude.

"One study found that participants who wrote down three good things each day for a week were happier and less depressed at the one month, three-month, and six-month follow-ups. More amazing: Even after stopping the exercise, they remained significantly happier and showed higher levels of optimism. The better they got at scanning the world for good things to write down, the more good things they saw, without even trying, wherever they looked."

"Countless other studies have shown that consistently grateful people are more energetic, emotionally intelligent, forgiving, and less likely to be depressed, anxious, or lonely."

A Simple Daily Gratitude Practice

Write down a list of three good things you've noticed in the past 24 hours. "Things that brought small or large laughs, feelings of accomplishment at work, a strengthened connection with family, a glimmer of hope for the future."

You can also follow Tim Ferris' version: list at least three not-so-obvious things you're thankful for in the past 24 hours. Why focus on often-ignored things? So you train you're brain to feel grateful even in ordinary days, as most of our days are boring, and extraordinary days are rare.

Or, you may also try Ryan Holidays' version: thank what you hate.

"It’s easy to be thankful for family, for health, for life, even if we regularly take these things for granted. It’s easy to express gratitude for someone who has done something kind for you, or whose work you admire. We might not do it often enough, but in a sense, we are obligated to be grateful for such things. It is far harder to be grateful for things we didn’t want to happen or to people who have hurt us. But there were benefits hidden in these situations and these interactions too. And if there wasn’t, even if the situations were unconscionably and irredeemably bad there is always some bit of us that knows that we can be grateful that at least it wasn’t even worse."

Or, you can combine them all:

Give thanks for the obvious and the often-ignored, and for the bad situation you're in and the people who made you suffer.

Despite everything bad, you can choose to feel happy. Because happiness is not just an emotion - but can also be a work-ethic.

The more we say thank you, and the less we think of what's missing, the more happiness we can feel at the present.

And having the power to influence how you feel will give you more confidence to believe that whatever happens in your life, you will be fine.

All is well. Everything shall pass.