Gratitude = Happiness

A few weeks ago I attended a short course (1 hour) at work on Making the Most of your Day – Time Management.  I was intrigued.  How much information could be imparted on this subject in one hour!  I was incredibly sceptical.  However, I found it was excellent – actually, I keep upgrading my assessment as time goes on.  This guy had some really good things to say and I have changed some of my work behaviours.  Plus, I’ve noticed some “errors” of my colleagues!  Anyway, the point of this post is not about this particular course, it’s about one that I wasn’t able to attend on Happiness.  I might have attended but it wasn’t held at my location.  So today I was looking at the powerpoint presentation for the course.  One of the slides was called ‘Positive Correlations with Happiness’ from work that Christopher Peterson had done.  There were a couple of items made me think!   Everyone can guess that level of income doesn’t actually make you much happier, neither does education or intelligence.  There is a moderate correlation between happiness and religiousness –it makes sense because potentially having something to believe in increases positive thoughts about life and the world.  Maybe the reason it doesn’t have a larger correlation is because religious people may also find it sad that others don’t share their view etc.  Another moderate is number of friends and level of leisure activity (no mention about level of fitness).  Some of the items that have a large correlation are things like: being employed (this has significant implications in times of high unemployment); sexual activity (!) and self-esteem.  The one that most surprised me was Gratitude!  So the more ‘gratitude’ you have the happier you are likely to be!  See, I knew there was another reason that people are asked to think about things they are grateful for!  It literally makes you happier!  Grateful to the people at work who put these things out!  And I CHOOSE to be happy!