How Did Arthur C Brooks Choose To Be Grateful

In “Choose to be Grateful. It will make you happier”, Arthur C. Brooks, argues that in order for people to make themselves grateful, they must appreciate even “insignificant trifles” despite whether or not they genuinely feel grateful at the time. Believing that people “raise [their] happiness” when they choose to actively give thanks, Brooks persuades humans to express gratitude even if it’s insincere. The author does this by citing a 2003 study that proves that appreciating makes people happier, connecting “acting happy” to neurologic changes in a person’s brain, detailing research (which supports that a person’s gratitude brings out the best in others around him or her) from USC, and even sharing his experience from putting his theory into practice. To demonstrate that appreciation leads to happiness, Brooks begins by recalling a test, conducted in 2003, that consisted of two groups, one of which’s participants listed everything that they appreciated each week while the other recorded their weekly hassles. After ten weeks of this, the researchers found that the grateful group’s “overall satisfaction in life” outweighed that of the negative group’s, thus proving that expressing gratitude results in happiness.
The author then backs his claim with science when he explains that smiling and gratitude, “regardless of feelings”, “coaxes” people’s brains into “processing positive emotions.” First, he describes a “famous experiment” from 1993 that proved that when a person “forcibly smiles”, the muscles around the eyes, orbicularis oculi, tense which in turn “stimulat[es] brain activity associated with positive emotions.” Referring to research published in the journal, Cerebral Cortex, Brooks also names gratitude a stimulate of hypothalamus, “a part of the brain that regulates stress”, and the ventral tegmental area, the “reward circuitry” that produces