Kia Ora,
Empirical findings [A Wiki snippet or if you like the lazy person's ontap teacher ] ...
Gratitude has been said to have one of the strongest links with mental health of any character trait. Numerous studies suggest that grateful people are more likely to have higher levels of happiness and lower levels of stress and depression.[29][30] In one study concerning gratitude, participants were randomly assigned to one of six therapeutic intervention conditions designed to improve the participant's overall quality of life (Seligman et. all., 2005).[31]
Out of these conditions, it was found that the biggest short-term effects came from a "gratitude visit" where participants wrote and delivered a letter of gratitude to someone in their life. This condition showed a rise in happiness scores by 10 percent and a significant fall in depression scores, results which lasted up to one month after the visit.
Out of the six conditions, the longest lasting effects were caused by the act of writing "gratitude journals" where participants were asked to write down three things they were grateful for every day. These participants' happiness scores also increased and continued to increase each time they were tested periodically after the experiment.
In fact, the greatest benefits were usually found to occur around six months after treatment began. This exercise was so successful that although participants were only asked to continue the journal for a week, many participants continued to keep the journal long after the study was over. Similar results have been found from studies conducted by Emmons and McCullough (2003)[14] and Lyubomirsky et. all. (2005).[30]
Whilst many emotions and personality traits are important to well-being, there is evidence that gratitude may be uniquely important. First, a longitudinal study showed that people who were more grateful coped better with a life transition[
just thought I would add 
now that's interesting..could there be a connection with the "transition" we go through ?]. Specifically, people who were more grateful before the transition were less stressed, less depressed, and more satisfied with their relationships three months later.[32] Second, two recent studies have suggested that gratitude may have a unique relationship with well-being, and can explain aspects of well-being that other personality traits cannot. Both studies showed that gratitude was able to explain more well-being than the Big Five and 30 of the most commonly studied personality traits
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I don't know about others but I'm truly "grateful" for Wiki
Metta Zenda
