The Woohoo! Report

By Lauren Aaronson

As a child, Chris Peterson absolutely hated writing thank-you notes. His aversion continued right into his 40s, until one day he knew he had to face it.

A psychology professor at the University of Michigan, Peterson regularly gave his students an unusual homework assignment. He asked them to write a “gratitude letter,” a kind of belated thank-you note to someone in their lives. Studies show such letters provide long-lasting mood boosts to the writers. Indeed, after the exercise, Peterson says his students feel happier “100 percent of the time.”

But what Peterson didn’t tell his students was that he couldn’t bring himself to write his own letters. “I just thought it would be corny to do,” he remembers.

When he finally forced himself to put pen to paper, Peterson avoided embarrassing sentiments by “cloaking it all in humor.” His thanks wound up feeling insincere and didn’t cheer him. When he tried again, he says, “I spoke from the heart.”

The Snowball Effect

Gratitude is a sentiment we’d all do well to cultivate, according to positive psychologists, mental health clinicians and researchers who seek to help everyone create more joy in life. Feeling thankful and expressing that thanks makes you happier and heartier—not hokier.

The biggest bonuses come from experiencing gratitude habitually, but natural ingrates needn’t despair. Simple exercises can give even skeptics a short-term mood boost, and “once you get started, you find more and more things to be grateful for,” says Robert Emmons, a leading gratitude researcher at the University of California at Davis.

In gratitude letters like those penned by Peterson and his students, writers detail the kindnesses of someone they’ve never properly thanked. Read this letter aloud to the person you’re thanking, Peterson says, and you’ll see measurable improvements in your mood. Studies show that for a full month after a “gratitude visit” (in which a person makes an appointment to read the letter to the recipient), happiness levels tend to go up, while boredom and other negative feelings go down. In fact, the gratitude visit is more effective than any other exercise in positive psychology.

Your Happiness List

Gratitude needn’t be directed at another person to hit its mark. Take just a few minutes each day to jot down things that make you thankful, from the generosity of friends to the food on your table or the right to vote. After a few weeks, people who follow this routine “feel better about themselves, have more energy and feel more alert,” Emmons says. Feeling thankful even brings physical changes, studies show. List-keepers sleep better, exercise more and gain a general contentment that may counteract stress and contribute to overall health.

Gratitude exercises do call for a certain amount of openness. Emmons remembers one woman who wrote the same gratitude list every day: “my cat, my dog and my apartment.” In addition to slighting her dog as second-best, the woman probably didn’t feel the fruits of gratitude, Emmons says, because she didn’t put much thought or care into her task. Exercises “can be done with skepticism, but not with cynicism,” Peterson notes.

At First, Fake It

For people who want to activate their gratitude, but feel slightly silly about the exercises, Peterson advises, “fake it until you can make it.” Say “thank you” enough, he reasons, and your mind will fall in line with your words. Think you don’t have anyone to thank? Gratitude “doesn’t depend on circumstances,” Emmons says.

You can be grateful for just about anything that you’ve received in part because of someone or something else. You may feel grateful to your neighbor for a car pool, to luck for meeting your spouse, to nature for a scenic view or to fate or a higher power for your safety. Thankfulness helps you see that you’re an object of love and care. Says Emmons: “Your self-esteem is bolstered when you say, ‘Hey, people have done things for me.’”

A conscious focus on gratitude may also remind you of unassuming pluses that get lost in the ups and downs of a busy life. “The most important blessings are the ones that are most consistent,” such as family, health and home, says Philip Watkins, an Eastern Washington University psychologist. “And those are the ones we take for granted.” Grateful reflection helps you pick out and savor the good in life, even if the good isn’t flashy.

What’s more, gratitude turns your attention to what you do have instead of what you don’t, Watkins suggests. Consistently ungrateful people tend to think that material goods, such as a big-screen TV, or winning the lottery will make them happy. On the other hand, people who recognize the blessings they have tend to think they’ll get happiness from things like fulfilling relationships—which, research shows, are the real sources of satisfaction. Because grateful people don’t fixate on money or material goods, they may cut back on envy and nagging comparisons with the Joneses.

Get Noticed

Gratitude may chase away thoughts far worse than a desire for a big-screen TV. Traumatic memories fade into the background for people who regularly feel grateful, Watkins’s experiments show. Troublesome thoughts pop up less frequently and with less intensity, which suggests that gratitude may enhance emotional healing. Thankfulness helps the brain fully process events, Watkins speculates. Grateful people achieve closure by making sense of negative events so that they mesh with a generally positive outlook.

When individuals start a daily gratitude journal, they begin to feel a greater sense of connectedness to the world. “The differences are noticed by others,” Emmons says. “People who know them say they’re more helpful.” Thankfulness may launch a happy cycle in which rich friendships bring joy, which gives you more to be grateful for, which fortifies your friendships once again.

Even a simple “thank you” spurs people to act in compassionate ways they might not otherwise consider. People thanked for giving directions help more willingly in the future, social workers who get thank-you letters visit their clients more often, and diners whose waiters write “thanks” on the check give bigger tips.

Call it corny, but gratitude just may be the glue that holds society together.

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By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

The World Economic Forum here in Davos is the kind of place where if you let yourself get distracted while walking by a European prime minister on your left, you could end up tripping over a famous gazillionaire — and then spilling your coffee onto the king on your right. But perhaps the most remarkable people to attend aren’t the world leaders or other bigwigs.

Rather, they are the social entrepreneurs. Davos, which has always been uncanny in peeking just ahead of the curve to reflect the zeitgeist of the moment, swarmed with them.

So what’s a social entrepreneur? Let me give a few examples among those at the forum in Davos.

In Africa, where children die of diarrhea from bad sanitation, Isaac Durojaiye runs a franchise system for public toilets. He supplies mobile toilets to slum areas, where unemployed young people charge a small fee for their use. The operators keep 60 percent of the income and pass the rest back to Mr. Durojaiye’s company, Dignified Mobile Toilets, which uses the money to buy new toilets.

Nic Frances runs a group that aims to cut carbon emissions in 70 percent of Australian households over 10 years. His group, Easy Being Green, gives out low-energy light bulbs and low-flow shower heads — after the household signs over the rights to the carbon emissions the equipment will save. The group then sells those carbon credits to industry to finance its activities, and it is now aiming to expand globally.

In the U.S., Gillian Caldwell and her group, Witness, train people around the world to use video cameras to document human rights abuses. The resulting videos have drawn public attention to issues like child soldiers and the treatment of the mentally ill. Now Ms. Caldwell aims to create a sort of YouTube for human rights video clips.

Social entrepreneurs like Ms. Caldwell resemble traditional do-gooders in their yearning to make the world a better place, but sound like chief executives when they talk about metrics to assess cost-effectiveness. Many also generate income to finance expansion.

”We’re totally self-sustaining,” said Mirai Chatterjee, a dynamo who is coordinator of the Self-Employed Women’s Association in India. ”From Day 1 our idea was to run a strong economic organization.” Ms. Chatterjee’s organization now has nearly 1 million members, owns a bank, runs 100 day care centers, trains midwives and provides health insurance for 200,000 women. It is empowering women and fighting poverty across a growing swath of rural India, and its down-to-earth approach is characteristic of social entrepreneurs.

”Politics is failing to solve all the big issues,” said Jim Wallis, who wrote ”God’s Politics” and runs Sojourners, which pushes social justice issues. ”So when that happens, social movements rise up.”

Muhammad Yunus, who won the Nobel Peace Prize last year, demonstrated with Grameen Bank the power of microfinancing. His bank has helped raise incomes, secure property rights for women, lower population growth and raise education standards across Bangladesh — and now the success is rippling around the globe.

One of those inspired by Mr. Yunus, for example, was Roshaneh Zafar, a young Pakistani economist. She quit her job and started Kashf, a microfinance institution that now gives hundreds of thousands of Pakistani women a route out of poverty.

Ms. Zafar also received help from Ashoka, a hugely influential organization for social entrepreneurs started by an American, Bill Drayton (who describes social entrepreneurs as ”the most important historical force at work today”). Ashoka is one of a growing number of donor groups that offer the equivalent of venture capital for social entrepreneurs.

”The key with social entrepreneurs is their pragmatic approach,” said Pamela Hartigan of the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship, which is affiliated with the World Economic Forum. ”They’re not out there with protest banners; they’re actually developing concrete solutions.”

When I travel around the world, I’m blown away by how these people are transforming lives. A growing number of the best and brightest university graduates in the U.S. and abroad are moving into this area (many clutching the book “How to Change the World“, a bible in the field).

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