This recent Thanksgiving, I wanted to write you a blog, but I couldn’t because I was busy bringing in a harvest of things to be thankful for. This is a true story. In the order of chronology, first, I got to speak at the Global Gender Summit about a topic I really love, employment-based childcare. Second, on Black Friday I delivered a TED talk about the content of this very blog: Loveonomics. (Videos to be published in spring.) And finally, on Saturday after Thanksgiving, I received the Alumni of the Year award of the Global Alliance in Management Education (the European business school ‘Ivy League’ hosting LSE, HEC, ESADE, Stockholm, Cologne and my alma mater St Gallen.). Senior alumni to boot. (God only knows what is senior about me, other than my memory sometimes.) All this on top of the really important essentials like life, health, family and friends.

Bottom line, feeling thoroughly #thankful.

And that got me to browse the literature on the topic. Why is it good to be thankful, and what if anything, can it do for your relationships? Here are 5 aspects of thankfulness that may resonate with you.

1. Many experiments show that thankfulness can enhance wellbeing. Feeling thankful has been shown to be associated with, and also to cause, a stronger sense of wellbeing. The extent varies with the circumstances, of course, and in a few particular cases, the link does not work. But on the whole – worth trying.
2. Gratitude seems to become better with practice. In some of the studies mentioned above, the wellbeing effects were the stronger, the more grateful the subjects already felt at the beginning of the experiments.
3. When people are prompted to feel thankful, they connect with their sense of justice. A behavioral field study and experiment series primed people for different feelings, such as compassion and gratitude. It then let them choose a charity to donate to and those who were feeling thankful chose to donate to causes linked to justice, such as the ACLU. – This is particularly interesting because for the scholastics, gratitude has always been a sub-virtue of the cardinal virtue of justice. The reason is that gratitude makes us give to others what is due to them.
4. Gratitude makes us more generous and cooperative, if need be at the expense of individual gains. An economic lab experiment showed that individuals induced to be grateful made larger monetary contributions benefiting the community. And this, regardless of whether they knew the beneficiaries.
5. In family relationships, thankfulness is win-win and an element of a virtuous circle. To the extent that a relationship is a micro social order and a space of joint responsibility, gratitude gives credit to both giver and taker and does not diminish own pride. It encourages repeating the exchange that caused the gratitude.

In this sense, wishing you happy holidays and lots of gratitude from and to you!