{"id":9997,"date":"2019-06-19T10:03:44","date_gmt":"2019-06-19T18:03:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.scotthyoung.com\/blog\/?p=9997"},"modified":"2019-06-18T08:28:28","modified_gmt":"2019-06-18T16:28:28","slug":"4-steps-gratitude","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.scotthyoung.com\/blog\/2019\/06\/19\/4-steps-gratitude\/","title":{"rendered":"4 Actionable Steps To Feel Happy, Content and Grateful"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Question: Each one of us would like to be thankful and feel gratitude for all the things that we have today. But why is it so common to only notice everything wrong\/missing in our lives? What are some ways to practice gratitude and feel content with what we have?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Our minds were designed by evolution to noticed problems. If you were living out on the Savannah, those who noticed problems (and tried to fix them) or potential problems (and tried to avoid them) lasted longer than those who spent the day being grateful for the sunshine.<\/p>\n

The problem is that this attitude of constantly noticing problems and dangers is out of sync with our modern reality. We aren\u2019t going to be eaten by a lion. Yet our minds are still living in a different era.<\/p>\n

Gratitude isn\u2019t just a practice of saying thanks. It\u2019s also a practice of shifting your attention away, if only transiently, from the incessant focus on problems and danger and onto the things which are good. However, since our minds evolved powerful problem detectors, but weak gratitude muscles, this shift in attention is rarely an automatic one. It takes a lot of practice, and likely some intervention, to make gratitude a habit.<\/p>\n

Here are some helpful tips for implementing gratitude:<\/p>\n

1. Start by adjusting your reference point.<\/h2>\n

We often compare ourselves to other people. Others are in a relationship, we are alone. Others have a great job, we\u2019re broke. Others have admiration and respect, people don\u2019t like us. Yet these comparisons usually lack imagination. They point out how you compare to your imagination of a handful of people near you.<\/p>\n

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In contrast, I often find it helpful to broaden my scope. Even when things weren\u2019t great in my life, they were still a lot better than they are for much of the world. Even if you feel like you don\u2019t live in great conditions, there were many points in time when things could have been much, much worse. Since gratitude is a relative experience, it\u2019s often useful to recognize how many things aren\u2019t<\/em> problems in your life, but you just never notice them.<\/p>\n

2. Avoid the \u201cFriends Paradox\u201d<\/h2>\n

The \u201cfriends paradox\u201d refers to a phenomenon in sociology where your friends always have more friends (on average) than you do. That\u2019s because, some people will, on average, have more friends than other people, but since they have more friends they will disproportionately be friends with people who have less friends than they do. The result is that your social surroundings always seem to be populated with more popular and social people than you.<\/p>\n

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This has a lot of implications on our relative perceptions (and thus gratitude) because we get a distorted picture of what\u2019s typical. College students, for instance, frequently overestimate the prevalence of binge drinking and promiscuity, simply because the people who party the most are easier to see. The more typical, boring, student stays and home and isn\u2019t noticed.<\/p>\n

The next time you think the average person is better off than you, ask yourself whether you might not simply be ignoring the problems and pains of others, simply because they aren\u2019t as visible as the success people want you to see.<\/p>\n

3. Don\u2019t be like the monkeys.<\/h2>\n

Here\u2019s a video of an experiment involving monkeys. The monkeys like both cucumbers and grapes, but they prefer grapes. You can train the monkeys to do a task which has a nice piece of cucumber as a reward and they\u2019ll be happy to do it. Given one of the monkeys a grape, however, and the other monkeys will no longer accept cucumbers.<\/p>\n

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