What If It All Disappeared?

Yesterday was Thanksgiving here in the States, a day when many of us sit down, reflect on what we’re grateful for, and then...forget about it until next year.

But here’s a thought: what if we gave gratitude more than just a shoulder shrug of indifference for the other 364 days of the year?

Because if there's any one tool or tactic or technique out there that can completely change your life for the better—I'm talking from your relationships to your finances to your mental health and more—it's actually practicing gratitude.

Key point there...it's a practice, not a destination.

It's all too easy to get complacent and take things for granted. It's just psychology. Specifically, it’s hedonic adaptation.

Hedonic adaptation is the fact that as excited as you may be to get the latest iPhone, it doesn’t take long before the newness wears off and that new phone is just your phone.

Your brain establishes a new baseline and you move on to desiring something else.

We normalize what we have, even if it was something we spent years longing or working for.

I mean, think about it, everything you have today is something you once really wanted. At some point in your past, aspects of your life today were the dream.

Maybe it was that new car sitting in your driveway, the dream job that fulfills you and pays well, that house with a white picket fence and 2.5 children playing with the dog in the yard.

Do me a favor.

Take a second to look around you right now and see if you can spot any prior dreams fulfilled (the house, the car, the family, etc.).

For real. Do it.

...

...

Did you do it?

Ok, now imagine it all disappears.

Poof. Gone.

How do you feel now?

The car that takes you to work each day? Gone.

The house where you curl up with your favorite blanket and binge Netflix? Vanished.

The kitchen where you cook meals for the people you love? Empty.

The laughter of your kids or the wag of your dog’s tail when you walk through the door? Silence.

Feel that?

It’s funny, isn’t it? When these things are part of your day-to-day, they fade into the background. But the minute you imagine losing them, you start to see just how much they really mean.

It's a strange thing about us humans—while we're pretty dismissive about the things we take for granted, we're also loathe to part with any of it.

Hedonic adaptation helps explain why so many folks struggle with starting a gratitude practice. Gratitude sounds easy, but it’s actually kind of hard to identify what we have when we don't remember what it was like without it.

We don't think about being grateful for the progress or the achievements because that was then and this is now.

We’ve established a new baseline where that thing we wanted so badly is just a given and we’ve moved on to desiring the next thing.

But while hedonic adaptation may make it tougher to see what you’ve got to be grateful for, there is a trick that cuts through it: loss aversion.

Loss aversion is our tendency to feel the pain of losing something much more intensely than the joy of gaining it.

And you just experienced how it can help you overcome the effects of hedonic adaptation—to not just recognize what you have, but to remember what life was like before you had it.

Because when you imagine losing something, well that's when you start to really understand how much it actually means to you, and that’s when you turn that half-hearted appreciation into a super powerful sense of gratitude.

Being consciously aware of the things you're grateful for doesn't just flood you with happiness hormones (which it does via the release of dopamine and serotonin), but it also permanently rewires your brain to think more positively overall.

And positive thinking leads to abundant thinking, which is why establishing a gratitude practice is one of my favorite ways to help folks improve their finances.

Because the truth is, abundance isn’t about having everything. It’s about seeing the value in what you already have—and realizing just how much you have to be grateful for.