The Gratefulness Muscle: You've Got To Use It or Lose It

Thanksgiving has always been my favorite holiday: the food, the family gatherings, the fall weather, and even that obligation to stop, look around, and be thankful for once, instead of our default mode of constantly grasping for more, wanting whatever's around the next bend.

No, Thanksgiving, says, stop, drop and give me 10, or 20, or 30 reasons why your life is a miracle and you're happy it's yours. Count every family member and friend if you have to, but if you don't do the work, your muscles of happiness and grace will atrophy. It's like anything else: if you don't practice gratefulness daily, you won't be able to when you need it, when the pumpkin-scented candlelight is no longer making life look so cozy, when the table's a little emptier.

Rather than a chore, though, I always found the ritual of forced thanks satisfying. Is there something about the mental exercise that is rewarding? Gretchen Rubin, the author of The Happiness Project, spent a year trying out the experts' recommendations for how to get and stay happy, and found that practicing active gratefulness was a key component of emotional well-being.

"Studies show that consistently grateful people are happier and more satisfied with their lives; they even feel more physically healthy and spend more time exercising," she writes in the book.

The connection between physical exercise and gratitude is interesting: is that when we learn to push our bodies to do something uncomfortable regularly, we learn that the rewards are worth it? Feeling actively grateful isn't always fun. It's easier to wallow in self-pity and "why me?" and "why not me?" more often than not. Looking at others' lives and feeling envious, and thus dissatisfied with your own circumstances, is the mental equivalent of sitting on the couch and eating potato chips every day of the week, because, well, why bother? What's the point anyway? I'm never going to be this, do that, or have the other thing.

So how do you get grateful if you aren't blessed with a genetically overdeveloped acceptance muscle? Rubin advises readers to practice it, in other words, to work out. She kept a "gratitude journal," in which she recounted three things she was grateful for, every night before bed. Although the formal and ritual nature at first made her feel that the exercise was too artificial, she found the process illuminating. She noticed after awhile that she forgot to mention some of the basics of a happy life: continued good health, the absence of cancer or disease, the lack of war in her country. By remembering to remember what she had forgotten, she found herself just that much grateful, and happier.

But it's not enough to sit on the grateful couch all year and then try to come out and run a I'm Thankful For These Things Turkey Trot. It's a daily process, and at times a chore, and at times a pleasure. This Thanksgiving I'm personally grateful that I'm grateful, and I'm going to keep trying to get stronger at being thankful. What are you going to do?