Increase Your Happiness By Shortening Your Gaps Between Gratitude

Photo by Lucas Lenzi on Unsplash

My phone buzzed in my pocket. I took it out and saw the reminder alert pop up on my screen. “What are you grateful for right now?” I smiled, checked off the reminder, and put my phone away.

Three hours later, the same thing happened.

That was enough to change my whole day, and I believe it would be enough to change yours as well.

There has been a lot of research and writing about the power of gratitude. Forbes writes that the practice of gratitude can raise your happiness by 25%. A Huff Post writer points out that gratitude has transformative power, while Dr. Lisa Firestone in Psychology Today highlights the healing powers of gratitude.

The idea of gratitude or being characterized as a grateful person is appealing. Who doesn't want to be more thankful? But there is a gap between our ideals and our execution.

One of the more popular methods for practicing gratitude that has received wide attention over the past years has been the Gratitude Journal. The Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkley published that:

“studies have traced a range of impressive benefits to the simple act of writing down the things for which we’re grateful — benefits including better sleep, fewer symptoms of illness, and more happiness among adults and kids alike.”

If you go on Amazon and search Gratitude Journal, you can find dozens of products from the popular Happiness Project to your standard lined notebook that each claim to help kickstart your pursuit of being a grateful person.

I’ve used many of the journals myself. I’ve fully adopted the habit of journaling into my daily rhythms. In fact, I’ve journaled consistently for the last 1600 days or 4.5 years.

I love my habit of journaling. Has it helped me along the way to process and think and dream? Of course. But has it transformed me into a drastically more generous person? I don’t think so.

But here’s what has.

Distracted and Deterred

We live in a rushed and distracted world. Research shows that you are distracted every 40 seconds when working in front of a computer or screen which means that you will have likely gotten distracted before you are done reading this article. Nearly 75% of Millennials and Gen Zers feel consistently distracted.

This is alarming because gratitude and busy-ness don’t work well together.

Due to our hectic schedules, we tend to relegate gratitude as a practice best done in hindsight. If you can find the time, you may spend a few minutes writing in a gratitude journal and looking back on things that have already happened, things that you feel like you should be grateful for.

Distractions deter us from making gratitude a part of our present realities. There is value in looking back and being thankful. Reclaiming a healthy perspective of your past creates strong emotional benefits.

But if you want to become a grateful person and actually increase your happiness, you’ll need to find a way to make gratitude a more consistent part of your daily life, even more so than spending a few minutes each day journaling and reflecting.

Gaps between Gratitude

If you have any doubt about how much is being thrown at you every day, refer to these numbers published by Fast Company:

“In 2011, Americans took in five times as much information every day as they did in 1986 — the equivalent of 174 newspapers. During our leisure time, not counting work, each of us processes 34 gigabytes, or 100,000 words, every day. The world’s 21,274 television stations produce 85,000 hours of original programming every day as we watch an average of five hours of television daily, the equivalent of 20 gigabytes of audio-video images.”

The scariest detail in that barrage is that those numbers come from almost a decade ago. We have built a world in which it is almost humanly impossible to actively think on one consistent thought throughout the day.

If we’re grateful in the morning, we’re stressed again in the evening.

Waiting 24 hours to get to our next gratitude journal session is too long in today’s information and distraction heavy society. The Gratitude Journal may have worked in 2011, but the gaps between our gratitude have become too long to sustain any long-forming habit of gratitude in our lives.

The answer to this problem isn’t to wipe your calendar and erase your email inbox. You can’t run away from the information revolution. But you can adapt your practices so that you are more proactive than reactive. The hard truth is that if you don’t intentionally adapt, you will get swept along whatever current is the loudest and brightest until one day you find yourself far out at sea without any land in sight.

I have found that setting reminders throughout the day has worked well for me. As has making appointments on my calendar for “gratitude breaks.”

I’ve even heard of friends setting up emails to be sent to them in the future with a reminder to be grateful. That’s a bit too much for me as I don’t want another email flooding my inbox, but if that works for you, start sending yourself future emails.

The goal of each of these activities is to shorten the gap between your expressions of gratitude. If you journal in the morning before you go to work, then you’ll want something that triggers your mind to prioritize gratitude by around lunch time or a few hours later.

You’ll likely want another trigger in the afternoon and potentially one before your night wraps up as well. You may think to yourself: “3–4 moments of gratitude throughout the day is way too many!”

To that, I would point out the following: how many emails do you get each day? How many text messages? How many ads do you watch (knowingly or unknowingly)? You pick up your phone between 80–100 times a day. Getting into a rhythm of practicing gratitude 3–4 times a day won’t hurt you. In fact, it quite easily could become the most impactful influence on your happiness.

Gratitude Doesn’t Have To Be Big

Most studies on gratitude link to its practice, not its scale. This means that you don’t have to come up with a list of 50 things to be grateful for every 3 hours. It also means that being grateful for using a certain type of pen can be just as effective as being grateful for having breath in your lungs.

Scale isn’t as important as practice.

So start small. Make it your goal to be grateful for one thing every few hours. Find a way to remind yourself of the practice on a consistent basis and give it a shot. Everyone wants to be happier, and shortening the gaps in your gratitude can go a long way to making that possible.