Research Has Shown Time and Time Again
Research has shown time and time again that existence grateful is good for your health, mood and general well-beingness. In fact, it's one of the easiest things yous can do to increase your mental health. But if you lot can't remember the final time y'all sent a real thank-y'all note, a recent study may explain why.
The research, published recently in Psychological Science, says people chronically underestimate the power of expressing gratitude and overestimate how awkward it volition be, which may keep them from engaging in the simple only impactful practice.
"Saying thanks can better somebody'due south own happiness, and it can ameliorate the well-being of another person as well — fifty-fifty more than we anticipate, in fact," says study co-author Amit Kumar, an assistant professor of marketing at the Academy of Texas at Austin'due south McCombs School of Business. "If both parties are benefitting from this, I think that's the type of action we should be pursuing more often in our everyday lives."
Kumar's inquiry involved a series of experiments. Each i differed slightly, but the full general concept remained the aforementioned: People were asked to send a letter to someone in their life, expressing gratitude. Before sending the messages, the writers were asked about how they expected the recipient to react. Then, the researchers polled the recipients about their actual reactions.
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They plant that writers consistently misjudged how their letters would land, overestimating awkwardness and underestimating the recipients' reported mood and surprise at receiving the note. Kumar says that imbalance points to dissimilar priorities and concerns from writers and recipients.
"[Writers] think about things similar, 'Am I going to get the words merely right and am I going to be clear?' That might exist a bulwark to really sitting down and writing the thing," he says. "But when you lot're the recipient of something like a gratitude alphabetic character, you lot tend to evaluate things on the ground of warmth and prosocial intent. As long equally somebody's expression is sincere and warm and friendly, recipients are often going to have a very positive reaction to that." (For what it's worth, the study also found that recipients tended to view the letters as warmer and more than clear than the writers thought they would.)
The researchers also surveyed writers earlier and afterwards they composed their notes, and found that writing the gratitude messages consistently put them in more positive spirits — a finding in keeping with plenty of existing enquiry on the mood-enhancing effects of gratitude.
The new study didn't wait at whether other forms of expressing gratitude — similar sending a quick text bulletin, or thanking someone in person — would have different effects. Just Kumar says the broader takeaway is that we shouldn't let our ain self-consciousness stand in the style of giving genuine cheers. To brand information technology easier to follow through, he suggests keeping cards on hand, so you tin can compose a annotation whenever the mood strikes.
"Writing gratitude letters seems to come at little or no existent cost. People were composing these actually thoughtful messages in but a matter of minutes," Kumar says. "The broader message is that people should express gratitude more oftentimes, and precisely how y'all become about doing that might not matter that much."
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Source: https://time.com/5383208/thank-you-notes-gratitude/
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