According to Harvard Medical School:
“Gratitude is strongly and consistently associated with greater happiness. Gratitude helps people feel more positive emotions, relish good experiences, improve their health, deal with adversity, and build strong relationships.”
https://www.health.harvard.edu/healthbeat/giving-thanks-can-make-you-happier
For me, personally, gratitude does seem to give me a better outlook on life. Despite our circumstances, there is much to be thankful for. To start with, our own selves provide things worthy of gratitude. I am thankful that my body heals itself and processes my food without any thought on my part. It tells me when I need to do something to take care of it. I am also thankful that my mind can think and reason. I can distinguish between things that are logical and things that sound like baloney. I can even feel good feelings in response to things I experience around me. I am thankful for the good parts of me.
Family is another potential object of gratitude. Most of us have at least some things to be grateful for about our families. Our parents gave us life and nourished us and made sure we got educated. With our families, many of us have been able to have enjoyable times together at family gatherings and events. Our positive genetic traits that we have, we inherited from our parents and other ancestors.
And there are friends, our community, stores to buy our stuff, places to eat. There are employees who serve, stock, drive, maintain, and manage operations so things work smoothly. There are many who do dangerous jobs that make us a little safer, like firefighters, police, and our military. We have schools and churches to teach our children and to help us learn. There are also many intangible things we can be thankful for, such as hope, peace, love, loyalty, and so on.
It seems to me that there are four basic categories of gratitude: gratitude for the many things that God has given and does give us, gratitude for people and what they bring to us, gratitude for other living things, and gratitude for inanimate things that may or may not be physical. I believe in every setting, we can find things in some of these categories to be grateful for.
Feeling gratitude does good things for ourselves, but we shouldn’t stop there. Expressing our gratitude to those connected with it can spread some of the same good things to others. Maybe it’s gratitude for the person or for something good you gain because of that person. That’s the purpose of saying, “Thank you” when someone does something for you–even if it’s their job to do it.
I would say that gratitude and optimism are closely related. It may be that someone who is routinely grateful is also optimistic. And someone who is optimistic may naturally tend to be more grateful. And both of these can bring light into our lives, making them a little more joyful.
So brighten your daily attitude with the light of gratitude!