Robert A. Emmons

I intend this book to provoke intellectual interest as well as self-examination; I hope to provide you with information that might inspire you to make life-altering decisions.

The scientific literature suggests that happy individuals are also more creative, helpful, charitable, and self-confident, have better self-control, and show greater self-regulatory and coping abilities. Happy people, the facts clearly show, are flourishing and successful people.

Contemporary social science research will remind us that if we overlook gratitude, it will be at our own emotional and psychological peril.

In several studies, depression has been shown to be strongly inversely related to gratitude. The more grateful a person is, the less depressed they are. The more depressed a person is, the less likely they are to go around feeling thankful for life.

It is gratitude that enables us to receive and it is gratitude that motivates us to repay by returning the goodness that we have been given. In short, it is gratitude that enables us to be fully human.

Here’s a frightening statistic: by the age of twenty-one, the average adult will have seen one million TV commercials. By playing on our desires and fears, these ads fabricate needs and cultivate ingratitude for what we have and who we are.

Gratitude is not only an emotion, felt when receiving a benefit gladly, but it is also a stance toward life.

By cultivating gratefulness, we are freed from envy over what we don’t have or who we are not. It doesn’t make life perfect, but with gratitude comes the realization that right now, in this moment, we have enough, are enough.

It may be discouraging at first; sometimes your list will seem impoverished. Corroborating ancient wisdom, though, through research I have found that becoming aware of one’s blessings actually leads to having more to be grateful about.

Gratitude is important not only because it helps us feel good, but also because it helps us 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.

All in all, science confirms that the life-giving practice of gratitude broadens our lives by enabling healing of the past, providing contentment in the present, and delivering hope for the future.

But as the ancient sages and contemporary research tells us, becoming aware of one’s blessings actually leads to having more to be grateful about.

The genetic programming here is not strong. We can all have [more gratitude] and we can have more of it if we systematically train ourselves to pay attention to what is going right in our lives, to see the contributions others make in those good things, and express gratitude verbally and behaviorally.

Angeles Arrien, author of Living in Gratitude: A Journey That Will Change Your Life, describes grateful seeing as ‘the ability to look first at what is good and working in our lives without minimizing or denying the hardships that are also present.’

I believe that gratitude is the best approach to life. When life is going well, it allows us to celebrate and magnify the goodness. When life is going badly, it provides a perspective by which we can view life in its entirety and not be overwhelmed by temporary experiences. And this is what grateful people do. They have learned to transform adversity into opportunity no matter what happens, to see existence itself as a gift.

The lessons that religion teach is that suffering can be transformed and difficult experiences can be reversed or redeemed. ... Abraham Maslow noted that ‘the most important learning experiences . . . were tragedies, deaths, and trauma . . . which forced change in the life-outlook of the person and consequently in everything they did.’