HOW ONE WORD MAKES YOU HAPPY

A year or so ago, we didn't have any children yet and so we had oceans of time, my love decided to write a letter (well, it was an email but letter sounds so romantic) to the father of a childhood friend during Christmas.

That man had been a very important factor for him at times when his youth was a bit shaky, and he had never actually told him that, hence the letter. He received a response very quickly from a moved recipient, which made my beloved feel even better.

According to psychologists, this is the exercise to become a happier person. It may sound a bit convoluted, but it turns out that the more grateful you are and the more often you express your gratitude, the happier you become.

“If you are a bit cynical, you are probably thinking now: happy people have more reason to be grateful.”

Here are some values attributed to grateful people. They have positive emotions and similar expectations for the future, they experience much less fear and the chance of depression is much smaller, they are kinder and more empathetic, more helpful, not jealous, and also not materialistic. Wow. If you want to know how your gratitude stands, you can take this test at psychologiemagazine.nl/tests.

If you are a bit cynical, you are probably thinking now: happy people have more reason to be grateful. Easy, right? But that's not how it works. After a lot of research, it has been shown that happiness is a result of gratitude. Moreover, you can train gratitude and thus work on your own sense of happiness.

What should you do?

What works very well is to write down every day, or maybe every week but at least regularly, what you are grateful for. I did it for a while with a colleague when we were going through tough times at work. We gave each other a notebook and counted our happy points in it. It turned out that in all that dull misery, there were still quite a few things we had managed to achieve together. Or as the Americans say: every cloud has a silver lining.

Another and slightly less known method is the gratitude letter. There is the story of a divorced woman who writes to her ex that she regrets that they lost each other, but that she is immensely grateful to him for the children he has given her.

I remember a beautiful woman who played golf at the golf club where I once worked when I was studying. She was stunning and had no children. As I suspected because she had been ill. At Christmas, she bought a large bouquet of roses and gave a rose to everyone who played an important role in her life, no matter how small, and thanked them for that year. I served her coffee every Saturday and received a rose in return.

December seems like a nice month to say thank you. It's free and it makes us all happier.