**5. Who benefits from gratitude interventions?**

We have seen that gratitude is a critical component of human flourishing and that it appears to enhance well-being by amplifying blessings. The most convincing evidence for the importance of gratitude to happiness comes from experimental work that manipulates gratitude exercises. Some of these studies have looked at who benefits most from exercises such as counting your blessings, and here we find some surprising—and informative—results. For example, men appear to benefit more from grateful recounting than women [8]. We found this surprising result because women tend to be higher than men in dispositional gratitude [2, 3], and tend to value gratitude more than men [48]. Indeed, we found that women tend to enjoy gratitude exercises more than men [8]. Surprisingly, we found that reports of how much people enjoyed the daily gratitude 3-blessings exercise were negatively correlated with how much they gained from the practice in terms of SWB at the 5-week follow-up. In other words, those who enjoyed counting their blessings least gained most in terms of their happiness. Finally, several studies have found that trait gratitude moderates the effects of counting blessings on happiness [8, 49]. Again, to our surprise, those who were least grateful tended to gain most from counting their blessings. How can we make sense of these somewhat counterintuitive results? In our view, the critical finding relates to dispositional gratitude: those who were least grateful, benefited most in terms of their happiness. This helps us understand why men benefitted more from the gratitude intervention than women because men tend to be less grateful than women. Furthermore, it makes sense that those who least enjoyed grateful recounting benefitted the most because we would expect that those low in trait gratitude would have more difficulty with the 3-blessings exercise, and thus would have enjoyed it less. How can we make sense of these findings? Very simply, those who benefit most from gratitude have the most to gain from gratitude.

We believe that there is an important lesson for the science of happiness in these findings. Some in the positive psychology movement have claimed that it is important that the various positive psychology exercises fit the individual who is attempting to use them. There is undoubtedly some truth in this claim, although it is sometimes used to argue that "If the exercise doesn't feel good to you then it probably isn't for you." Based on the findings above, this appears to be wrongheaded advice. What if a medical professional provided the following recommendation to an overweight person: "If exercising doesn't feel good to you, it probably won't be useful to you." Indeed, to achieve many things in life we must engage in something unpleasant to achieve our goal. And so it is with gratitude. Those who are least grateful have most to gain from gratitude exercises, just as those who are most out of shape have most to gain from physical exercise. But for one who is low in dispositional gratitude, engaging in

gratitude exercises is not likely to be very pleasant, at least initially. In other words, becoming more grateful is not likely to be an easy, completely pleasant process. In the words of St. John of the Cross (cited in [50], p. 17): "To come to the pleasure you have not you must go by a way in which you enjoy not." In sum, those who benefit most from gratitude have the most to gain from gratitude.
