Do We Need to Do More Than Count Our Blessings?

We often think that the key to gratitude is counting our blessings. When we’re feeling down, we’re told to focus on the good things in our life—our family and friends, the roof over our heads, the food in our bellies. Counting our blessings is supposed to help us feel more grateful for them.

But research suggests that it’s not just thinking about the good things in our lives that matters; how we think about our blessings can make a big difference.

We need to do more than just count our blessings; we also need to be surprised by them.

Why is this?

We have an amazing ability to adapt to our situation. When things become overly familiar to us, they lose their hold over us and we return relatively quickly to our normal level of happiness.

The problem is that while adaptation can make us feel better about negative events over time, it can also make us feel less happy about positive events over time.

Fortunately, researchers have found a way to combat our tendency to adapt to positive events: By thinking about ways in which an event might not have happened, the event will seem more surprising to us and we will feel more fortunate that it occurred.

We can see this at work in a study by University of Illinois psychologist Minkyung Koo and colleagues. They found that when participants were instructed to merely describe a positive event in their life or to think about why it occurred, they actually felt worse than participants who were instructed to think about why a positive life event might never have happened.

This was not what people thought would happen

At the beginning of the study, the researchers asked the participants to predict how they would feel if they thought about the presence of a positive event in their life and how they would feel if they thought about the possibility that the positive life event had never occurred. People predicted that thinking about the presence of a positive life event would make them feel good and thinking about the possibility that the positive life event had never occurred would make them feel bad.

And it makes sense why we would believe this. As the researchers note, “On the face of it, thinking about the absence of a positive event seems unpleasant; why should we rain on our own parades by mentally subtracting from our lives things we value? It seems better to think about the presence of a good thing than the absence of that thing.”

According to the researchers, this might help explain why we typically don’t do the kind of “what if” thinking after positive events that we do after negative events. We think that asking “What if this good thing had never happened?” will make us feel bad. In reality, however, it can actually help us feel even better about it.

There are benefits to unadapting to the good things in life. So, don’t just count your blessings. Instead, be surprised by them.

Want to try it yourself? 

Here is the surprising prompt Koo and colleagues used in their study:

Think of something specific you feel grateful for. Now think of “ways that this thing or event might never have happened or might never have been part of your life” and “ways in which it is SURPRISING that this thing or event is part of your life.”

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Also published on Medium.