Boston College student Josh Coyne’s videotaped experiment on gratitude is one surefire way to understand the importance of saying ‘thank you.’
As part of a class project, Coyne set out to study gratitude and its relation to happiness, self-love and stress levels among college students. For his experiment, Coyne surveyed 30 of his fellow students on their levels of stress, self-love and happiness. The survey then prompted the participants to write an essay about someone they were grateful for and why. When they were finished writing the essay, they were asked to call that person and read aloud to them what they wrote.
The experiment, which was taped, showed just how powerful expressing a note of gratitude to someone can be in bringing self-happiness. The students then retook the survey and reported decreased stressed, and increased self-love and happiness.
“It’s safe to say that those two words called ‘thank you’ can go a long way to enrich our lives in ways we were never expect,” Coyne said in his video.