Exam 15: Guidelines for Stress Management and Well-Being Enhancement

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Expressing gratitude is a prosocial behavior that promotes good feelings, enhances social relationships, and increases your well-being.It enables you to more fully savor the benefits of positive actions taken by others on your behalf.In addition, people tend to like grateful people and are more likely to give them social rewards.So people that express appreciation and gratitude give social rewards and are more likely to receive them in kind.
To illustrate the positive benefits of expressing gratitude we can look at a study (Seligman, Steen, Park, & Peterson, 2005) that found that non-clinical participants who wrote a letter of gratitude and delivered it in person to someone who had not been properly thanked felt happier and less depressed than placebo controls.The gains persisted for up to one month.

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A caveat regarding altruism is that if the effort and time spent helping is too overtaxing it will cancel out the beneficial effects for the giver (Post, 2005).Further, service motivated by duty or obligation may not result in improved well-being for the helper (Walsh, 2011). Some forms of long-term caregiving . This is not to discourage any form of altruism since altruism in the form of long-term caregiving, for example, is the ultimate form of virtuous giving, but rather to mention some of the potential risks and benefits involved when undertaking any form of altruistic behavior.

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As you know, subtracting negative affect at best brings us to a neutral state.We have to add positive affect and build on those good feelings if we want to achieve happiness and well-being.As Seligman (2011, p.57) states, "if we want to flourish and if we want to have well-being, we must indeed minimize our misery; but in addition, we must have positive emotion, meaning, accomplishment, and positive relationships." He further notes that before the advent of positive psychology, as a psychotherapist he had success helping his patients get rid of many of their feelings of sadness, anxiety, and anger, but he did not necessarily get a happy patient.As he laments, "I got an empty patient.That is because the skills of enjoying positive emotions, being engaged with people you care about, having meaning in life, achieving your work goals, and maintaining good relationships are entirely different from the skills of not being depressed, not being anxious, and not being angry" (Seligman, 2011, p.168).