It’s that time of year: to make the obligatory Facebook posts, Instagram stories, tweets and toasts (albeit, virtual this year) about what we’re grateful for. We’ll talk about what a challenging year this has been, what we’ve learned and what we’re thankful for. Thursday morning, we’ll open our morning newspapers and our virtual news feeds to stories rehashing the not-so-new research on how being grateful makes us happier, more productive at work and helps us live longer.
The posts, articles, text, emails and calls that will keep our phones abuzz on Thursday will suggest we’re all thankful. And not just thankful — utterly overwhelmed by our gratitude.
When it comes to gratitude, Thursday is America’s annual command performance.
But if we’re so “grateful,” then why are Americans so unhappy? You might be tempted to argue that it’s the pandemic and the ensuing economic crisis, social isolation, unemployment and spike in divorce rates.
If you made such an argument, you wouldn’t be wrong: 2020 has been a wild roller coaster ride we’re all dying to get off of. But you also wouldn’t be right. The pandemic hasn’t made us unhappy. It has simply made us unhappier.
That’s because America’s unhappiness problem isn’t new. In fact, not only are we less happy than our peer nations but also, according to U.S. News & World Report, our happiness ratings have been decreasing annually for years. We dropped from #13 in 2017 to #19 in the 2019 report. Although I don’t have a crystal ball, my hunch is that 2020 is not going to be a great year for us, as the United States has been hit harder by the virus and economic crisis than other countries who beat us on happiness scores in the best of times.
So why aren’t we happy?
Look no further than the content on your phone by Thursday at noon: we all have a lot to be grateful for, and that’s just the problem. It’s counterintuitive, but all that great stuff can actually numb us out to our own happiness over time. It’s a phenomenon called hedonistic adaptation: the more positivity we have in our lives, the more the “good stuff” that once brought us intense joy and gratitude becomes a part of our baseline operating expectation for our lives. Remember how excited you were when you landed that big job or promotion… and then how it became “just work” again a few months later? Or the new relationship that made you ecstatic when the romance was new… but then became just “normal life” a year (or thirty) later?
Due to hedonistic adaptation, to get that next rush of intense joy or gratitude, each “happiness rush” needs to be bigger and bolder than the last. So is it any surprise that when the bar to happiness keeps climbing higher and higher, it’s harder to actually feel happy day in and day out?
No. In fact, it’s a miracle that we can feel happy at all! Like joy addicts, we can fall into a trap where we’re either on the ends-too-quickly rush of a new happiness “high” or desperately seeking out the next one from the depths of our crashed-out low.
How do we break the cycle?
With hedonistic adaptation, we’re conditioned to think that joy is the conduit to lasting contentment: if we can just get that next happiness “high,” it will sustain us. But that’s exactly how our hedonistic adaptation fails us and keeps us on its endless repeat loop in the process.
We break the cycle when we flip the script: instead of letting joy be our conduit to contentment, we let contentment be our conduit to joy.
We break the cycle when we flip the script: instead of letting joy be our conduit to contentment, we let contentment be our conduit to joy.
This isn’t a new idea, but it’s one we’re not practicing enough. As it is famously discussed in Pirkei Avot, cultivating gratitude in our lives is the key to contentment, “Who is rich? He who is happy with his lot.” We need to spend less of our energy working towards the next happiness “high” and more of our energy practicing gratitude and contentment.
That’s why instead of going big this year, I challenge you to go small. Unlike the big events of our happiness “highs,” cultivating contentment is all about micro shifts in our mindset. As noted in the Zohar, the Hebrew word for joy (besimchah) also spells thought (machshavat) when the letters are rearranged.
Gratitude doesn’t have to be a once-a-year, public social media extravaganza — as Thanksgiving would have us assume. It is actually far more powerful as a quiet, daily practice. It’s as simple as writing down something you’re grateful for, picking up the phone to tell somebody you care about them instead of just liking their latest post, telling somebody at work you appreciate them or even building awareness about what you most appreciate in yourself. And there’s no better day to start than Thursday, the day of thanks itself.
These shifts take practice and be warned: like breaking any other bad habit in our life, it can feel hard at the beginning. It’s hard to feel satisfied when our hedonistic adaptation keeps us addicted to the next big happiness “high.” It’s hard to be content in the middle of a global pandemic with so much loss and hardship.
To be clear, cultivating contentment doesn’t mean that our lives are suddenly rainbows and butterflies all the time. But we have more choice in our feelings than we often recognize. As Viktor Frankel famously reflected, “Everything can be taken from a person but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
This Thanksgiving, if you want to really practice gratitude, try cultivating contentment. Some days will be easier than others. When joy feels far and you feel tempted to search for that next happiness “high” outside of yourself, remember that contentment is always closer than you think it is. “Who is rich? He who is happy with his lot.”
Randi Braun is an executive coach, consultant, speaker and the founder of Something Major.
