My daughter started teaching me about gratitude from the moment she was conceived. In my late 30s, I suffered a heartbreaking miscarriage and a frightening diagnosis of cervical cancer. I had resigned myself to the fact that I might never have a child when the latest in a long line of pregnancy tests came back positive.
Scotia arrived two months early, weighing just three and a half pounds. A short time later, she was diagnosed with a rare stomach disorder and had to undergo surgery.
When she finally came home to the nursery we’d so lovingly prepared for her, I was overwhelmed with gratitude. That groundswell of emotion has coloured my life, and changed it immeasurably.
Experience positive emotions
"Count your blessings" is something we're taught from an early age.
It's definitely a sentiment we'd do well to cultivate, say the experts. Preliminary findings suggest that if we actively try to become more grateful in our everyday lives, we'll reap lots of benefits.
"Grateful people experience higher levels of positive emotions, such as joy, enthusiasm, love, happiness and optimism," says Robert A. Emmons, a leading gratitude researcher and author of Thanks! How the New Science of Gratitude Can Make You Happier (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2007).
How to stay positive
Still, maintaining a grateful disposition isn't always easy. Life is busy, our expectations high, and we often take the important things – family, health and home – for granted.
There's also a wealth of research that suggests we aren't as good at knowing what makes us happy as we could be, says John Zelenski, a psychologist who runs Carleton University’s Happiness Lab in Ottawa. "There's a general tendency to think that material goods will make us happier than they actually do," he says.
In other words, even though we think that we may want a big-screen TV, it doesn't make us grateful in the way that a weekend with friends would. "In North America, we're more focused on ourselves as autonomous individuals, and see ourselves as responsible when good things happen.That may be good for our self-esteem, but it doesn't promote gratefulness," he adds.
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