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I teach a large university class on the psychology of close relationships. Each year, after spending an hour telling the students about all of the research showing the beneficial effects of being more grateful, I give them an optional assignment: Write a letter expressing your gratitude to someone you care about. The next class, I conduct an anonymous poll to see how many students completed the assignment. Each year, it’s only a handful—significantly less than a quarter of the class. More striking, perhaps, is that I don’t complete the optional assignment either. I don’t think it is that we don’t believe the results (they’re pretty convincing), or that I am not able to convey them well enough (I’m pretty convincing). Something else is going on: We know it would probably be a nice thing to write a gratitude letter to someone we care about, but we just can’t get ourselves to do it. Some research shows that people don’t share letters because they underestimate how good the recipient will feel and overestimate how awkward it will make them feel, but I teach my students about these findings and the assignment isn’t to share their gratitude letter (though I suggest they could); it’s just to write it for themselves.

This problem has come up in other ways throughout my career. I will sometimes share the research on gratitude with community groups and talk about different gratitude interventions that research suggests are effective. But even while I am talking about them—and believing in them—I rarely actually enact them in my daily life. Thanks to knowing the research, I am good about verbally expressing gratitude when I feel the emotion. If I read a great book or come across some really interesting research, I will find the author and email them to say I appreciated their work. If I interact with someone at work or in my daily life who is cheerful, funny, and helpful, I will thank them for making my day better. But that's more about expressing gratitude when I feel it, not boosting feelings of gratitude when I might otherwise being feeling irritated, tired, or just not really feeling anything at all. (One truth when you study emotions is that people are often not feeling any emotion when you ask them how they feel.) I also am able to motivate myself to express gratitude because I imagine how doing so will make the other person feel; feeling better myself (and I always do) is just a byproduct.

But something changed. I recently read a book in which author Janice Kaplan tried to spend a year living gratefully (The Gratitude Diaries). I guess it was the right book at the right time, because it inspired me to actually put into practice some of what I know. I got a pretty little notebook to write down one thing I am grateful for each night—only letting myself write one thing keeps it feasible and fun—and my family even joined in with me and wrote in their own gratitude journals most nights. I also started trying to focus on what I have, instead of what I have not. And to focus on what I have done, instead of what I haven’t.

This is a bit part of what gratitude is about: reframing how we think. The first studies of gratitude compared the effects of a gratitude condition (writing down things you were grateful for) with a daily hassles condition (writing down daily hassles); there was also a neutral control condition. At first, I thought this was a strange condition: Why would you have people think about negative events as a comparison? But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that that is often our default setting—to focus on the negative. When you talk with someone at the end of the day, how much time do you spend telling them about all the good moments that happened to you? The beautiful weather, the good lunch you had, the nice conversation with a friend? And how much time do you spend sharing the moments that annoyed you? The bad weather, the driver who cut in front of you, the lack of cashiers at the grocery store? We adapt to the good in our lives, making it easy to stop paying attention to everything we have. I have known this and yet, in the past month, I have actually tried to live it. I have started to take a few moments to appreciate all of the good in my life that sits there unnoticed. And I have noticed a difference. After watching the show Alone, in which individuals are left to fend for themselves in the wild, I started feeling more grateful for food and how easy it is to get that food. Some days I wake up and just feel grateful for another day. There are so many good aspects of my life that usually go unnoticed. Sometimes these are small (having gas in my car) and sometimes they are big (being healthy).

With so much pulling us to focus on what is wrong, I am curious how long I can keep up focusing on what is right.

So now I give you an optional assignment: Write a letter of gratitude to someone you care about; extra credit if you actually share it with that person. And as an extra assignment because it is so easy, take a couple of minutes today to think about something good in your life that you usually take for granted. Some lives have more strife than others, so finding the good can take more work, but it should be there if you look for it.