How Being Grateful Makes Your Life More Peaceful?

Numerous advantages can result from gratitude, including better relationships and improved mental and physical health. Gratitude is often considered a feeling experienced when things are going well and is closely related to security and contentment. But does it become helpful once life gets in the way?

Researchers found that gratitude is more than just optimism or positive thinking when they looked into why gratitude has such vast advantages. Gratitude may be so powerful because it improves our ability to control challenging emotions. Gratitude enhances our capacity to handle difficult, unpleasant, and frustrating circumstances.

According to this study, being grateful makes us feel good and helps us cope with difficult times. Grateful people often handle stress more intelligently and control their negative emotions more effectively.

Four strategies can help you control your emotions

1. Appreciation and stress

Numerous coping mechanisms can help us deal with stress, some healthier than others. According to research, gratitude may enable us to use healthier coping mechanisms.

In a 2007 study published in the Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, psychologist Alex Wood and associates surveyed 236 undergraduate students about their level of gratitude and general coping strategies for stressful situations.

Researchers discovered that those who felt more gratitude were better able to actively address their issues or look for the positive than those who felt less. Furthermore, those who expressed gratitude more frequently were less inclined to give up on finding solutions and turn to self-blame.

Why do people who are grateful pick constructive coping mechanisms? One explanation is that people naturally have an optimistic outlook on life when they are grateful. "Perceiving the world as beautiful is more likely to increase the willingness to deal effectively with problems," write Wood and his coworkers.

In other words, grateful people are less likely to avoid or withdraw from their problems because they feel more optimistic about successfully resolving them.

Wood and colleagues suggest that the impact of happy emotions on our psychological state is another explanation. According to Professor Barbara Fredrickson's broaden-and-build theory, gratefulness and other positive emotions encourage innovative and creative thinking.

By doing this, we can develop resources for when times are tough. We may find it simpler to find the positive side of stressful or negative events if gratitude fosters creative thinking. According to a 2009 study of 201 college students, those who were more thankful at the beginning of the study could better switch out negative thoughts for optimistic ones to deal with stress over the following month.

2. Appreciation and supporting others 

The search for support systems may be a positive aspect of a grateful attitude. According to the research done by Wood and colleagues, those who expressed gratitude were more likely to connect with others when under stress than those who did not express gratitude.

According to a 2019 study published in the Journal of Positive Psychology by author Nathan Deichert and colleagues, gratitude may enhance the benefits of receiving social support.

In this new study, participants wrote in their journals for five minutes about gratitude or a neutral subject before performing a stressful task, like giving a speech. During the speech, some participants got encouragement from their friends and received compliments.

Researchers discovered that when participants received social support, their stress levels were at their lowest. They have also previously written about gratitude, suggesting that it may increase the advantages we derive from other people's kindness.

According to Wood and his colleagues, grateful people value the people who support them, which explains why they seek assistance because they may think that others will assist them again in the future. According to psychologist Sarah Algoe's theory, gratitude serves a variety of purposes, including helping us recognize the people in our lives who are there to support us and fostering stronger bonds with them.

3. Gratitude and how you react to bad things

Studies show that grateful people appear to adopt healthy coping mechanisms when under stress and may experience negative emotions differently due to their gratitude.

In a 2019 study published in the Journal of Positive Psychology by Paulo Boggio and colleagues, 71 undergraduate students participated in a writing exercise twice weekly for four weeks. The participants' writings were either expressions of gratitude or mundane, unemotional experiences. Then, a series of both positive and negative images were displayed to them.

They gave the participants instructions to only view certain images. In the case of other emotions, they gave the participants the directive to try to intensify their positive emotions in response to those emotions or lessen their negative emotions in response to those emotions. The participants completed a brief assessment of their emotions following the presentation of each image.

Researchers discovered that people who wrote daily gratitude journals for a month were better at controlling their emotional responses to unpleasant images. According to the researchers, the reason for this may be that participants' development of an "overall positive attitude toward life" as a result of their gratitude made it possible for them to protect their emotional state.

But another factor could have been to blame. When the researchers looked at the kinds of words participants used in their writing, a significant pattern appeared in the findings. Participants who wrote about what they were grateful for used words associated with cognitive processes more than those who wrote about neutral topics.

The researchers hypothesize that the grateful group may have been better at articulating words when viewing negative images. For example, the words with which they express their opinion on the topic or the words that talk about cause and effect, and these types of words are essential in the process of re-evaluating adverse events. Grateful people tend to use this healthy emotion regulation technique, which may be crucial in helping them control their unpleasant emotions.

4. Patience and gratitude

What product would you choose if you were trying to decide between two versions of a new product: one currently on the market and one that is cheaper and better online but won't be delivered to you for a few weeks?

The ability of individuals to control their impatience and postpone rewarding themselves in the present is known as a delay of gratification. As part of this emotion regulation technique, people must switch out more emotional ways of thinking for less emotional ones. People who perform better on the delayed gratification test as children tend to be better at handling stress than adults.

In a 2014 study published in the Journal of Psychological Science, 75 participants were asked to reflect on when they felt appreciative, happy, or what they typically did in a day. The participants then chose between small, short-term rewards (less money but sooner), or larger long-term rewards(more money, but later). Participants were asked, for example, "Would you prefer to receive $40 right away or $55 62 days from now?"

Researchers discovered that participants who expressed gratitude in their writing were more inclined to select more enormous rewards that required a longer wait time than happy or neutral group participants. In other words, being grateful helps us manage our patients.

Even though it may seem counterintuitive to focus on our blessings during the most trying times, doing so has several positive effects, including better adjustment, a stronger sense of social support, and a reduction in negative emotions and impatience. In other words, there may be occasions when we most need to express our gratitude but find it challenging to do so.