Gratitude can make us happy and help our financial life

Gratitude makes us more aware of the sources of joy, wonder and hope in our lives. Being grateful also can improve health, strengthen relationships and help us manage our money.

Developing gratitude requires us to focus on what we have rather than on what we lack, says Meghaan Lurtz, a senior research associate with financial planning site

Kitces.com and past president of the Financial Therapy Association. Such thankfulness has been shown to reduce feelings of impatience, perhaps making it easier to save and delay gratification as well as decreasing the temptation to spend. “(Gratitude) can help to quell that ‘I need more, I need different, I need this, I need that’ feeling,” Lurtz says.

Gratitude makes us happier

Gratitude is a social, relationship-strengthening emotion with two parts, according to Robert Emmons, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Davis, and author of “Thanks! How the New Science of Gratitude Can Make You Happier.”

The first part is acknowledgement of the gifts and benefits we’ve received. The second is recognition that we have been blessed by help from others, good luck or perhaps the intervention of a higher power. Gratitude “requires us to see how we’ve been supported and affirmed by other people,” Emmons writes.

“There is a really important social quality to gratitude,” Lurtz says. “It can bring us together, it can connect us, it can help us to feel safe.”

It also short-circuits many negative emotions, such as resentment, envy or regret, Emmons found — it’s tough to feel envy and gratitude at the same time, for example. Lurtz believes that gratitude can increase contentment and reduces the desire to “keep up with the Joneses” by overspending or working excessively.

“We’re always trying to get to that next level,” Lurtz says. “We should be asking, ‘When is enough, enough?’ “