Creating a grateful outlook on life, according to research, is the ability to experience and reflect gratitude, or having a strong grateful outlook on life (glass half full people) includes four different components.  They are intensity, frequency, span, and density.

For example, I will give you some strong verses weak disposition examples below.

Strong Gratitude Disposition

Intensity: Individuals who experience a positive event — who have a strong gratitude disposition — will feel more intense feelings of gratitude versus those who do not practice gratitude as much.

 Weak Gratitude Disposition

Intensity: People who do not practice gratitude as much will have less intense feelings of gratitude.

Strong Gratitude Disposition

Frequency: Experience many moments of gratitude during the day and feel thankful for even the smallest circumstances.

Weak Gratitude Disposition

Frequency:  Smaller moments may not register as moments to be thankful, citing few moments of gratitude.

Strong Gratitude Disposition

Span: Feel thankful for many aspects of life (e.g., family, job, health, education, etc.).

Weak Gratitude Disposition

Span: Struggle to come up with many different areas of their lives for which they are thankful.

Strong Gratitude Disposition

Density: Refers to the number of people that an individual feels gratitude toward, and is able to list many different individuals to whom they are thankful: friends, neighbors, parents, teachers, mentors, God, etc. 

Weak Gratitude Disposition

Density: Much shorter lists of people they are thankful for, unable to name many people to direct thanks.

When you feel a sense of thankfulness you also feel a sense of abundance.  This feeling has many positive benefits and helps you flourish as a human being.  You feel at peace, have contentment, and have joy.  When we feel a positive emotion like gratitude it broadens our horizons and gives us HOPE for the future.  We engage in greater creativity, connections, ideas, and actions.

These emotions help build our personal resources and resilience. We build physical, emotional, psychological, and social resources.  This helps you thrive and improves resilience.  So, when life happens, you have the resources needed to bounce back.  You can remain resilient in times of stress or during challenges.

Feelings like gratitude build on each other.  Leading to an upward spiral of positive emotions and thriving.  The more gratitude you feel in life, the more you feel gratitude and positive emotions to us and others.  Gratitude builds gratitude.

Gratitude can also help our well-being by cancelling out negative and stressful emotions associated with burn-out and unhappiness.  Positive emotions are incompatible with negative emotions.  When we redirect with gratitude to the ‘good”, we activate the reward centers in the brain.  Dr. Caroline Leaf, my favorite neuroscientist, has researched how we can grow, strengthen, and stretch our brains and switch it on. 

Dopamine, serotonin, and oxytocin are released.  We continue to see the world with different lenses of thankfulness.