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Comment by crystalcamarao | Hacker News Reader

Hi,

Do you want to become better at being grateful?

I built a simple site where you can list 3 things you’re grateful for that day.

Research shows that being grateful makes you happier and healthier. I want to help people be more grateful, especially people who are depressed.

I’d appreciate your comments.

Thanks!

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There's a lot of great research on the topic of happiness - it's the field of Positive Psychology

A great "how to" book is: The How of Happiness: A New Approach to Getting the Life You Want by Sonja Lyubomirsky (a Ph.D. researcher in the field of study) http://thehowofhappiness.com -- this book shares the specific advice you share in your comment.

A lot of great books I can recommend as well, e.g. Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert and The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom by Jonathan Haidt.

Sounds interesting. Thanks for sharing! I’m adding that book on Goodreads now.

Nice idea! I remember in my first month or two of therapy, my therapist basically kept training me to list 3 things to be grateful for, and I was mostly annoyed about how much of the therapy was about that.

But, it turned out to be very effective, and being 'forced' to do my homework paid off. She later explained that she usually starts out with this 'exercise' because most of her clients are not just dealing with their particular issues, but also with those issues festering and affecting their sense of self-worth and day-to-day thinking process. And helping her clients improve in that area generally made it much easier and effective when dealing with the particulars.

I also like that it's 3 rather than "list 10". There's some research on this: when people try 3, it's rather easy to succeed. If they try 10, they might find it hard, and if they run out of "good" things to list before finishing, they may erroneously conclude they have it pretty bad.

Psychology is rather funny - good to study it empirically! I'm so thankful there are so many Ph.D. researchers who take it seriously and contribute to the general knowledge by writing books for the general public.

Great insight! I guess it’s part of why it’s doable as a habit. As James Clear pointed out in Atomic Habits, “make it easy”. Thanks for sharing!

This is awesome. I've wanted something like this for years. Thanks so much for building it.

Awww. Thanks for making my day!

Very minor suggestion, but using bullets and numbering is a bit visually redundant. I would probably choose one or the other vs both.

Beyond that, really fun idea. It makes me happy to see an app idea with a more humanistic goal.

Sorry about that, something’s wrong with the code. Thanks for sharing!

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