3 Quick Relationship-Building Activities to Try This Week

Source: Pxhere

Whenever I teach a class on gratitude, I give students an optional homework assignment: Write a gratitude letter to someone in your life. In the next class, I use anonymous polling to find out how many actually wrote a letter. Less than half do. This semester, I didn’t do it either.

Why do we so often skip the things that are good for us? We know we should exercise, but we watch TV instead. We know we should eat more vegetables while we reach for the bag of cookies. We know we should be nicer to our romantic partner, our children, our parents, but we fail to compliment them or express our gratitude.

It is easy to see why we watch TV or eat cookies instead of adopting healthier habits: It can be hard to suppress immediate gratification for some longer-term goal. But why don’t we express our gratitude or compliment the people in our lives more? These are not unpleasant tasks like eating vegetables instead of cookies. One reason may be that we think it will be awkward. We also tend to underestimate how good it will make the other person feel (not to mention how good it will make us feel). Another reason we may not express more gratitude is that we are subject to some unfortunate human tendencies that make it easier to take the people in our lives for granted. We tend to adapt to new things in our lives, both bad and good. For bad, this is beneficial. But for good, it means we stop seeing and appreciating the value of good events and good relationships. When you first meet someone new, each moment with them is heady and exciting. Ten years later, hanging out with them is the norm and it might barely register as an event when you are talking together in the kitchen. For this reason, researchers find that we can get a relationship boost by mentally subtracting our romantic partner from our lives. And when people experience serious illness or survive a near-fatal accident, they often report a renewed sense of gratitude for being alive. What they once took for granted they see through new eyes again.

I have written about this topic before, offering diffewhile those who have been together longer fight more about chores awhile those who have been together longer fight more about chores and habits.nd habits.rent tips for overcoming hedonic adaptation and encouraging gratitude and other positive relationship behaviors. I regularly teach classes on the psychology of close relationships and emotional well-being. And yet, I fall prey to the same tendencies as everyone else. Even when I think I am being appreciative, I find that my family feels taken for granted by me. I may be saying thank you, but when I am busy and stressed, I am not always making my “thank you’s” high quality. The problem is that we can’t just tell ourselves to feel grateful or nice when we don’t actually feel that way. And it’s harder to notice what is missing (good feelings) than what is there (irritation). To truly feel grateful, we need something that genuinely leads us to have those positive feelings. The good news is that there are ways to do that. Here are three quick activities I urge you to try before the week is over. Some are suggestions I've made before, but I bet many of you haven't taken me up on them yet. These activities can help you tap into your own good feelings and you may find that they inspire good feelings in others as well:

1. Write a gratitude letter. Rather than being surprised more than half of my students do not write a gratitude letter, perhaps we should be impressed that any of them do. And the ones who do report that writing the letter made them feel grateful and happy. Gratitude letters are a common way that researchers induce gratitude in the lab. Writing a letter, rather than just thinking about it, forces you to put down all of your thoughts in a coherent way and might help you recall more reasons to be grateful.
2. Give a compliment. It is so easy to focus on what is wrong in our lives and our relationships rather than what is right. And it’s easy to assume the people in our lives know we like, love, and care about them. But when is the last time you gave a meaningful compliment to someone you care about just because?
3. Do something unexpected. We tend to feel less grateful when we expect something from someone. If your partner surprises you with coffee in bed one morning, you might feel very grateful. But by the third month of morning coffee, rather than feeling grateful when you do get coffee, you are probably more annoyed when you wake up one day and find your partner in the kitchen drinking their own coffee, with no cup for you in sight. Switching things up and doing something unexpected might prompt some heartfelt gratitude. Does your partner or roommate always take out the trash? Try putting the cans on the street before they can get to it and see what happens.

Give yourself a deadline to try all three (I’m setting a reminder in my phone right now) and then see how they make you feel. Why wouldn’t we take a moment to do something nice for the people we care about?