![]() ![]() ![]() Thanks to the magic of reading memoirs, I have learned as an adult that all those things I took for granted as a kid were miraculous gifts. Instead, my letter to Mom tried to capture some of the highlights of a childhood that was remarkable by being, by all standards, unremarkable. You could, of course, start your letter to your mom by thanking her for the gift of birth, but I felt like that was so fundamentally huge and obvious as to be almost meaningless. I hoped that by writing her almost as soon as I came up with the idea for this project, I would manage, for a short moment, to put a pin in the disease that was slowly robbing Mom of her words and memories. The other reason I prioritized my mom is that she had been diagnosed with dementia about five years earlier, and her cognition was slipping away month by month. Available from Running Press, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc. And you look just like your mom!” Anyone passing down genes with that much mojo deserved the top spot on my thank-you-letter list.Īdapted from THE THANK-YOU PROJECT: Cultivating Happiness One Letter of Gratitude at a Time by Nancy Davis Kho. When I gave birth to Maddy, Grandma-to-be was in the delivery room, and the first thing the obstetrician said after she caught my newborn daughter was, “Wow, she looks just like you. I have always been close to Mom, grafted to her hip in the waning years of the 1960s as she took my older siblings to Little League practice and Scouts and after-school bowling at Clover Lanes. I figured I owed her that, having lived rent-free in her uterus for nine months. The first letter I wrote when I started my project was to my mom. And, by keeping copies of the letters to reread, Savor the generosity and support that surrounds you.Say something to acknowledge your good fortune in your letters.See the people, places, and things that make your life richer.It leaves me, to use a favorite phrase cribbed from my friend Jill (Letter #10), “suffused with a sense of well-being.”įrom the GGSC to your bookshelf: 30 science-backed tools for well-being.ĭespite its profound impact, the Thank-You Project comes down to three simple steps, done repeatedly: The reminder that letter collection on my nightstand gives me even now of all the different ways I have been supported throughout the years, the tactile heft of a book in my hands that reminds me that a whole team got me to where I am today, is powerful medicine. At the end of writing fifty of them, I bound the letters together into a book. ![]() Just think: You can replicate their studies, only without making the trip to a lab.Īfter I wrote each letter that year, I made a copy to keep before dropping it into the mail. It turns out that gratitude is a heady tonic for both the giver and receiver, which shows up in brain scans. In fact, that’s often how scientists test their theories: They have the experimental group write a letter expressing appreciation to someone, while the control group is, I suppose, denied access to stationery. I have discovered that writing a “ gratitude letter” is one of the most common prescriptions from researchers looking for a way to elevate gratitude levels in their everyday lives.
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