The Feeling of Dissatisfaction#

Everybody’s familiar with the feeling that things aren’t quite right. Maybe you feel you’re not successful enough, your relationship’s not satisfying enough, or you just don’t have the things you crave. It’s a chronic dissatisfaction that makes you look outwards with envy and inwards with disappointment.

Pop culture, advertising, and social media really make this worse. They constantly remind you that:

• Aiming for anything less than your dream job is failure.
• You need to have great experiences constantly.
• You should be conventionally attractive.
• You must have a lot of friends.
• You need to find your soulmate.
• Others have all these things and are truly happy.

On top of that, a vast number of self-improvement products suggest it’s all your fault for not working hard enough on yourself.

Looking for Answers#

In the last two decades, researchers started looking into how we can push back against these feelings.

• The field of positive psychology came about, which studies what makes life worth living.
• Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) was developed to help change negative feelings.

Scientists began asking:

• “Why are some people happier and more satisfied than others?”
• “Are there ways to apply what they’re doing right to the rest of us?”

In this video, we want to talk about one of the strongest predictors of:

• How happy people are.
• How easily they make friends.
• How good they are at dealing with hardship.

Think of it as an antidote to dissatisfaction: Gratitude.

While gratitude might sound like just another self-improvement trend preached by people using hashtags, what we currently know about it is based on a solid body of scientific work and studies. We’ll include links to these studies in the description.

Gratitude can mean different things to different people in different situations. It’s not just one thing; it can be:

• A character trait.
• A feeling.
• A virtue.
• A behavior.

You can feel grateful towards:

• Someone who did something for you.
• Random events, like the weather.
• Even for nature or fate.

And guess what? It’s actually wired into our biology.

1: How Gratitude Connects Us to Each Other#

The thing that probably came before gratitude is reciprocity. It likely evolved as a biological signal that encourages animals to exchange things for their mutual benefit. You can find this in the animal kingdom among certain fish, birds, or mammals, but it’s especially noticeable in primates.

When your brain recognizes that someone’s done something nice for you, it reacts with gratitude. This feeling motivates you to repay them. This gratitude helps make you care about others, and it makes others care about you.

This became important because, as human brains got better at reading emotions, selfish individuals were identified and avoided (shunned). It became an evolutionary advantage to play well with others and build lasting relationships.

For example, imagine you were hungry and someone else showed you where to find tasty berries. You’d feel gratitude towards them and a bond to return the favor later on – a drive to be pro-social. When you did repay them, they would feel gratitude towards you. This process brought your ancestors closer together and helped forge bonds and friendships.

So, in the beginning, early forms of gratitude were biological mechanisms that changed your behavior towards cooperation, which ultimately helped humans dominate Earth. But, over time, gratitude grew into something more than just an impulse to play fair.

2: The Consequences of Gratitude#

Scientists found that gratitude does some cool things in your brain. It stimulates the pathways involved in:

• Feelings of reward.
• Forming social bonds.
• Interpreting other people’s intentions.

It also makes it easier to save and retrieve positive memories.

What’s more, gratitude directly works against negative feelings and traits like:

• Envy and social comparison.
• Narcissism.
• Cynicism.
• Materialism.

As a result, people who are grateful (no matter what they’re grateful for) tend to be:

• Happier and more satisfied.
• They have better relationships.
• They have an easier time making friends.
• They sleep better.
• They tend to suffer less from depression, addiction, and burnout.
• They are better at dealing with traumatic events.

In a way, gratitude makes it less likely that you’ll fall into one of the psychological traps modern life has set for you.

For example, gratitude measurably counteracts the tendency to forget and downplay positive events. If you work long and hard for something, actually getting it can sometimes feel empty or even “daft.” You might find yourself emotionally right back where you started, immediately looking for the next biggest thing to chase that satisfaction, instead of just being satisfied with yourself and what you achieved.

Or, imagine you feel lonely and really want more friends. You might actually have someone, or even a few people, who genuinely want to hang out. But you might feel that this isn’t enough, that you’re a loser, and feel bad about yourself. So, you might end up turning down their invitations to hang out, which just makes you even more lonely. If you felt grateful for the relationships you do have instead, you might be more likely to accept invitations or even take the initiative yourself. The more often you risk opening up, the higher the chance of solidifying existing relationships and meeting new people.

In the best case, gratitude can set off a positive feedback loop:

• Positive feelings lead to more pro-social behavior.
• This leads to more positive social experiences.
• Which causes more positive feelings.

This sort of thing is a common experience after going through something really tough, like undergoing chemotherapy. Life can feel absolutely amazing after a crisis is over. The smallest things can become bottomless sources of joy, from just being able to taste food again, to simply sitting in the sun, or chatting with a friend. Objectively, your life might be the same or maybe even a bit worse than before, but your brain is comparing your present experiences with the times when life was really bad, and it reacts with gratitude.

So, in a nutshell, gratitude refocuses your attention towards the good things you have. And the results of this shift are better feelings and more positive experiences.

While it’s great to know all this, is there actually a way for you to feel more of it?

3: How To Make Your Brain More Grateful#

The ability to experience more or less gratitude isn’t the same for everyone. You have something called trait gratitude, which is how much you’re naturally able to feel it. This depends on your genetics, personality, and culture.

This discovery made scientists wonder if they could create exercises that could actually change your trait gratitude and lead to more happiness.

Let’s start with some Important Caveats:

• It’s not yet completely clear to what degree gratitude can be trained or how long the effects last.
• There are no magic pills for happiness.
• Life is complicated. Some days you feel totally in control of yourself, and on others, you feel like you’re not. And this is okay.
• Sometimes, trying too hard to pursue happiness can actually make you more unhappy if you put too much pressure on yourself.
• Gratitude should definitely not be seen as a solution to depression.
• It is not a substitute for professional help.
• It can only be a piece of the puzzle; it’s not the solution to the whole puzzle itself.

The easiest gratitude exercise, and the one with the most solid research backing it, is gratitude journaling.

• It means sitting down for just a few minutes.
• Do it one to three times a week.
• Write down five to ten things you’re grateful for.

It might feel a bit weird at first, so just start simply. Can you feel grateful for a little thing? Like how great coffee is, or that someone was kind to you. Can you appreciate something someone else did for you? Can you reflect on which things or people you would miss if they were gone and be grateful that they are in your life?

We’re all different, so you’ll figure out what works best for you. And that’s really it. It feels almost insulting, like things shouldn’t be that simple! But in numerous studies, participants reported more happiness and a higher general life satisfaction after doing this practice for just a few weeks. And, even more amazing, studies found changes in brain activity some months after they even stopped the practice.

Practicing gratitude may actually be a real way to reprogram yourself. This research shows that your emotions are not fixed. In the end, how you experience life is really a reflection of what you believe about it. If you can challenge or “attack” your core beliefs about yourself and your life, you can change your thoughts and feelings, which automatically changes your behavior.

It’s pretty mind-blowing that something as simple as self-reflection can actually hack the pathways in our brain to fight that feeling of dissatisfaction. And, if knowing that isn’t a reason to be more optimistic, what is? Being a human is hard sometimes, but it really doesn’t need to be as hard. And, if you actively look, you might find that your life is much better than you thought.

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About This Video / Additional Information#

If you’re curious and want to give gratitude a try, we made a thing. Please note upfront that you don’t need to buy anything from anyone to practice gratitude. All you really need is paper, a pen, and about five minutes.

Having said that, we’ve made a Kurzgesagt gratitude journal. It’s based on the studies we read, conversations with experts, and our own personal experiences with gratitude over the last year. It’s structured in a way that might make it a bit easier to get into the habit of gratitude journaling. There are short explanations and reflections mixed in to keep it interesting. We also tried to make it as pretty as we could.

This video is part of an unofficial series of more personal, introspective videos we’ve been doing, like the ones on optimistic nihilism and loneliness. We don’t want to become a standard self-help channel, so we plan to keep this sort of video limited to roughly one per year. We really hope they’re helpful to some of you.

Thank you for watching.

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