Thanksgiving Reflection: If We're So "Grateful" Why Aren't We Happy?
It’s that time of year: to make the obligatory Facebook posts, Instagram stories, tweets and toasts about what we’re grateful for. We’ll talk about what a challenging year this has been, what we’ve learned throughout this pandemic, and what we’re thankful for.
Thursday morning, we’ll open our morning newspapers and our virtual news feeds to stories rehashing the not-so-new research on how being grateful makes us happier, more productive at work and helps us live longer.
The posts, articles, text, emails and calls that will keep our phones abuzz on Thursday will suggest we’re all thankful. And not just thankful — utterly overwhelmed by our gratitude.
When it comes to gratitude, Thursday is America’s annual command performance.
But if we’re so “grateful,” then why are Americans so unhappy? You might be tempted to argue that it’s that pandemic-driven emotional hangover we still just can’t shake off.
If you made such an argument, you wouldn’t be wrong: this pandemic has been a wild roller coaster ride we’re all dying to get off of. But you also wouldn’t be right, because the pandemic hasn’t made us unhappy. It has simply made us unhappier.
That’s because America’s unhappiness problem isn’t new. In fact, not only are we less happy than our peer nations but also, according to U.S. News & World Report, our happiness ratings have been decreasing annually for years. We’ve dropped from #13 to #19 in recent years and, while I don’t have a crystal ball, my hunch is that 2021 is not going to be a great year for us.
So why aren’t we happy?
Look no further than the content on your phone by Thursday at noon: First of all, our social media (over)usage totally robs us of our happiness. Study after study shows us that the more we look at other people’s shiny-social-media-lives the more we long for new things in our own lives. Our constant scrolling and responding to every alert also creates something called “time confetti” whereby we shred what limited leisure time we have into a series of tiny, meaningless distractions instead of finding flow in our uninterrupted relaxation.
Then why doesn’t “being grateful for what we have” work as the antidote?
It’s a phenomenon called hedonistic adaptation: the more positivity we have in our lives, the more the “good stuff” that once brought us intense joy and gratitude becomes a part of our baseline operating expectation for our lives. Remember how excited you were when you landed that big job or promotion… and then how it became “just work” again a few months later? Or the new relationship that made you ecstatic when the romance was new… but then became just “normal life” a year (or twenty) later?
Due to hedonistic adaptation, to get that next rush of intense joy or gratitude, each “happiness rush” needs to be bigger and bolder than the last. So is it any surprise that when the bar to happiness keeps climbing higher and higher, it’s harder to actually feel happy day in and day out?
No. In fact, it’s a miracle that we can feel happy at all! Like joy addicts, we can fall into a trap where we’re either on the ends-too-quickly rush of a new happiness “high” or desperately seeking out the next one from the depths of our crashed-out low.
How do we break the cycle?
With hedonistic adaptation, we’re conditioned to think that joy is the conduit to lasting contentment: if we can just get that next happiness “high,” it will sustain us. But that’s exactly how our hedonistic adaptation fails us and keeps us on its endless repeat loop in the process.
We break the cycle when we flip the script: instead of letting joy be our conduit to contentment, we let contentment be our conduit to joy.
WE BREAK THE CYCLE WHEN WE FLIP THE SCRIPT: INSTEAD OF LETTING JOY BE OUR CONDUIT TO CONTENTMENT, WE LET CONTENTMENT BE OUR CONDUIT TO JOY.
This isn’t a new idea, but it’s one we’re not practicing enough. That’s why instead of going big this year, I challenge you to go small. Unlike the big events of our happiness “highs,” cultivating contentment is all about micro shifts in our mindset.
I know things like keeping a gratitude journal (even though the research shows it works) can feel woo-woo and forced—at least for me. So consider this instead: take a hot second before bed and just think, what was fun today? What was my highlight of the day or week? Let contentment and gratitude organically flow from there, and see where it takes you as an exercise in getting curious vs. another command performance of counting your blessings.
To be clear, cultivating contentment doesn’t mean that our lives are suddenly rainbows and butterflies all the time. But we have more choice in our feelings than we often recognize. As Viktor Frankel famously reflected, “Everything can be taken from a person but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
Randi Braun is a certified executive coach, consultant, speaker, and the CEO of Something Major. Get in touch with Randi via email or social (below). Copyright 2021. All rights reserved.