How gratitude can make your life better

Gratitude.

Nearly everyone wants to show it.

But let’s be honest – it can be pretty hard to be thankful every day, when there’s stress at work, you’re rushing to get some errands done, and you don’t know what’s for dinner.

What if there was a better way?

Ben Allen chats with Janice Kaplan – she’s the author of Transforming Health’s Summer Read “The Gratitude Diaries: How a Year Looking on the Bright Side Can Transform Your Life.”

 

Interview highlights

 

Why gratitude?

“Well gratitude is very much the basis for so many of the things that make us happy. We can’t change the events in our lives. We can’t change all of the events that are happening around us.”

“But we can change our own attitude towards them and our own perspective on them, and realizing that and realizing that you have that control over your life is probably a great first step to making yourself happier and changing so many of those other things that you might want to.”

When you feel yourself slipping, what do you do?

“Sure, as soon as the book was over, I did slip a little bit. When I feel myself starting to get grumpy, when I feel myself starting to get frustrated, I stop and I go, ‘Hey wait a minute, can you think of any reason to be grateful right now?’

“And just making yourself stop and think that changes your attitude a little bit. And I find that for me, very powerful.”

“For other people, I think writing a gratitude journal at night, really having something physical to do, write down three things that made you grateful that day. That’s very powerful also, because it changes your whole day. Even if you’re going to write down one thing, it’s in the back of your mind all day. You start looking at things a little bit differently.”

Some might look at this and say, well it’s easy for her to have gratitude, two homes, reached many career goals, loving husband who’s a doctor, she’s talked with the actor Matt Damon, and on and on.

What would you say to those who are skeptical of taking the advice from you?

“The first is look at yourself. Isn’t there somebody who could say the same about you? Isn’t there somebody who’s in a lesser position than you who could look at you and say wow look at all you have, I don’t have all of that, you should be grateful.”

“So I think comparing ourselves to others isn’t the way to decide what gratitude should be. We have to realize that there’s always somebody in a better position than we are and there’s always somebody in a worse position than we are. And what we want to do is to be able to grateful and appreciate where we are right now and what we have right now.”

“That doesn’t mean we can’t want more. That doesn’t mean we can’t hope for other things, but appreciating where we are as the people we are is so important.”

“One other point: you’re right. My goal in gratitude was to have my life go from good to better. It’s not the situation you’re in, it’s your ability to find the goodness in whatever problems you have.”