Spreading #sunshine: Counting blessings online and issuing social media gratitude can change real moods

Studies have shown that practicing moments of gratitude can improve your health, boost your energy, increase your sense of well-being, and speed progress toward goals.

But can the same be said for moments of #gratitude?

LeeAnn Mallorie thinks so. The 34-year-old Northern Liberties resident, a conscious-dance instructor and personal-growth consultant, often takes to Facebook to emote semi-publicly, hashtagging everything from business breakthroughs ("company culture change in Taiwan. #grateful") to personal decisions like relocating to Philadelphia last January ("It's a crazy time to be moving ... but the truth is, winter is one of my favorite things about the East Coast. #happy").

Twitter users counted themselves #grateful, #happy, or #blessed more than 1.5 million times in the last month alone. And in certain online circles, friends have been challenging one another to log "100 Happy Days" on Instagram, or mark "a month of gratitude" on Facebook.

But while some see social media as a genuine self-improvement tool, skeptics detect a whiff of phoniness and even absurdity. And as exclamations of hashtagged gratitude and bliss have become the de facto punctuation for the miraculous and the mundane alike, they've also spurred a sarcastic backlash, including mainstream- and social-media critiques.

Sometimes, it's just difficult to distinguish between a genuine, if overblown, expression of emotion, a humblebrag, and a sarcastic aside. (See one St. Joseph's University student's recent tweet: "Found gold peak tea in the fridge #blessed.")

Mallorie, who runs a "Happiness Philly" meet-up group, doesn't see anything silly about counting her blessings online. But, she said, it's what happens offline that really matters.

"I make [my gratitude practice] public, but also I'm deeply embedding it in the way I live my life," she said. "I'm not just writing 'I'm grateful' once a day on Facebook, but also living gratitude in my life."

A study published in March in the journal PLOS One found that moods on social media can be contagious - happiness most of all. Researchers found that every upbeat Facebook post sparked an average of 1.75 more positive posts among the user's friends, while each negative posting yielded an average of 1.29 more downbeat status updates.

Practicing a formal gratitude regimen online can likewise inspire others to do the same.

That happened after Rachel Ezekiel-Fishbein, 49, a public relations and communications consultant from Elkins Park, started a "month of gratitude" on Facebook this spring.

"I had been a little bit cranky not that long ago, and just decided that it was time for me to have an attitude adjustment," she said. After she started her month of gratitude, several friends joined in.

Ezekiel-Fishbein began the regimen on Facebook simply because that's where she does almost everything else - including business interactions, communications with friends, and even self-discipline. (On days she doesn't want to go for a run, she'll challenge herself to do it anyway, then post the achievement online as a reward.)

Her online gratitude log, she emphasized, was not about showing off. On the contrary, she thinks the reason it caught on is that it was based in honesty; it wasn't about "sanitizing" her life.

"When we express gratitude, we show humility. You recognize that, no matter what is going on in your life in that moment, you still have things for which to be appreciative," she said. "That's different from putting a happy face on things."

Pamela Rutledge, a media psychologist who teaches at Fielding Graduate University and the University of California-Irvine, said the spread of feel-good posts has a physiological basis.

"Scary things get our attention, but happy things actually make us feel different in a way that has more duration," she said. "These social-media challenges, where people challenge others to be more grateful, more mindful, are actually changing the body chemistry of everyone who interacts with that, in a very positive way."

But she cautioned that all the gratitude apps in the world - and there are 125 of them in the iPhone App Store alone - can't change how you feel unless you're actually internalizing the practice.

Focusing on the online challenge might make you feel like you've achieved something, Rutledge said. But it won't change how you feel.

"It's the component of positive emotion and mindfulness that encourages the practice's sustainability, and has a long-term positive impact."

Abby Baker, 33, a teacher from Point Breeze, encountered the flip side of the phenomenon when she tackled an online challenge called "100 Happy Days" on Instagram.

"I find myself often focusing on the negative aspects of my life and my job," she said. "I thought by doing that, it would change how I frame and see things."

She inspired her friends to start posting, too - at least for a few weeks.

Eventually, though, "it seemed like a chore. I kind of trailed off. I noticed, with other people, the same thing happened," she said. "It made me more conscious of being happy for a couple days, but nothing really changed."

She noticed that some friends, chronic online complainers before they undertook the challenge, remained so. Eventually, the hashtag became a punch line.

"If it was a picture of me with a bowl cut when I was 5, someone would hashtag it '#100happydays,' " she said.

Rutledge suggested that "happiness" may be a tall order for an online challenge. But, she said, users can attain something just as valuable: resilience.

"The idea that you're supposed to be happy in a tra-la-la kind of way is a misunderstanding," she said. "These happiness apps and exercises aren't meant to make you blissfully happy every moment of the day, but to build a stronger repertoire of emotional skills so you're better able to deal with the stuff that life hands you."

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