Wanna do an experiment with me Hubski?
About two or three years ago, my wife and I were listening to a podcast while taking a nice country drive (Dala, if you remember what it was, please share). The focus of the podcast was about a gentleman who decided to live for a certain length of time following old Biblical laws. That meant no shaving, no mixing fibers, so on and so forth. I’m not proposing anything that radical, cause I can’t imagine many people being willing let alone able to make so many big life changes.
One of the things that he talked about though, was saying little prayers of thanks whenever possible. Whenever he turned the ignition on his car and it started, he’d say a prayer of thanks. Whenever he got on an elevator and it worked, he said a prayer of thanks. What struck me as really compelling was he said that his little prayers opened up his eyes to how many things in life really go well that he takes for granted. All of these little things add up to his benefit and he noticed that by paying particular attention to them, he found he had so much to be grateful for. He ended up feeling better about himself and the world around him, and it had an impact on his happiness.
So since it’s November, and here in America at least November is the month we celebrate Thanksgiving, let’s give it a shot. You don’t have to necessarily have to say a prayer of thanks, let alone believe in God or anything, but just take an effort to notice and appreciate all the little things that go right for us, day in and day out. I personally might be a bit overly optimistic about the impact of this experiment myself, but I’m feeling pretty confident that there might be something to this idea. I don't know how well I'll do, but I’m gonna give it a shot.
Honestly, I'm thankful for Hubski and the people who have tolerated my shit and given so much unsolicited and sometimes solicited advice. You all have helped me grow as a person more than you know, and for that I will always have some sort of connection to this site and to the people reading this.
I'm pretty sure you're talking about The Year of Living Bibilically by A.J. Jacobs. I used to listen to the audiobook version of this all the time.
My other favorite of his was The Know-It-All, where he read the encyclopedia from beginning to end to increase his knowledge.
One of the interesting things that he revealed was that he has a tiny touch of OCD so the rituals helped him to take his focus off his OCD. The religious rituals behaved as a ritualistic substitution for his OCD at times. One thing I'm curious about is how he picked the things he prayed about. Was he grateful the car started on a brand new car? Did he pray that his computer started? Did he pray that his chair didn't break when he sat on it? Did he pray that he got up without a sickness? How likely was the thing that didn't happen? There are thousands (or limited only by the imagination really) of things that don't go wrong every day. Taken to an extreme, thinking about them all can get one pretty paranoid. How does one choose?
There's more research on the impact of gratitude on happiness. Here is some research by the positive psychologists in a Harvard article. There are other ways to express gratitude as well as prayers. Some of the other ways are thanking people (both outwardly and inwardly), counting blessings and meditating.
I've started a blog several months ago to write a positive thing every day to help focus me on things I'm grateful for. Before that, I kept a gratitude journal where I wrote 3 things I'm grateful for every evening for 2 years.
Edit: I read the Harvard article more carefully and this part made me laugh out loud.
- There are some notable exceptions to the generally positive results in research on gratitude. One study found that middle-aged divorced women who kept gratitude journals were no more satisfied with their lives than those who did not. Another study found that children and adolescents who wrote and delivered a thank-you letter to someone who made a difference in their lives may have made the other person happier — but did not improve their own well-being. This finding suggests that gratitude is an attainment associated with emotional maturity.
Either this is written really poorly or they're implying that middle-aged divorced women are emotionally immature.
Edit 2: If you like experiments in happiness, you might like Gretchen Rubin's website My experiment in the pursuit of happiness or her book The Happiness Project taken from her website where she experiments on herself with some of the happiness wisdom of the ages.
- There are thousands (or limited only by the imagination really) of things that don't go wrong every day. Taken to an extreme, thinking about them all can get one pretty paranoid. How does one choose?
Yeah. I got pretty overwhelmed my first day, trying to think of everything that goes right. So now I'm just being thankful for the things that make me happy, make me calmed, or go right when going wrong could really screw things up. It's still a lot to keep track of. ;)
I'll strive to be more thankful. Starting with your suggestion here to be more thankful here, since I genuinely believe in the radical power of gratitude.
On that note, I listened to the Planet Money 5-episode podcast series on oil, and came away with so much more appreciation for... the crazy dumb luck of fossil fuels. I know that environmental degradation as a result of our exploitation will be a central, pressing problem for probably many generations, but it's the single thing most responsible for the explosion in the rise of standards of living. And it's just so weird to think that zillions of plankton dying and falling to the ground and then compressing and heating up over thousands, millions, hundreds of millions of years turned into the energy-dense fuel we used to power human ingenuity over the last few hundred years.