Grateful or Thankful?

What Is Gratitude?  verywellmind.com

Gratitude is a positive emotion that involves being thankful and appreciative and is associated with several mental and physical health benefits. When you experience gratitude, you feel grateful for something or someone in your life and respond with feelings of kindness, warmth and other forms of generosity.

Grateful or thankful? dictionary.cambridge.org

We use grateful to talk about how we feel when someone is kind to us or does us a favour:

[a message on a thank-you card] Thank you so much for helping us move house. We are so grateful.

[at the end of a formal letter] I would be very grateful if you could send me more information about your company for my school project.

Not: I would be thankful …We usually use thankful when we are relieved that something unpleasant or dangerous didn’t happen.

Grateful  happiehuman.com

Being grateful is defined in Merriam Webster as being “appreciative of benefits received.” Meanwhile, in the same source, being thankful is defined as being “conscious of benefits received” and also “well pleased.”

Gratefulness can be the result of many small, positive actions that come together to shape a mindset of appreciation. 

Thankfulness is a conscious act you engage in after you receive some sort of benefit. 

By these definitions, the expression of gratitude is the continuous flow of being thankful.

Gratitude Part 4:  canr.msu.edu

Thankful tends to be an automatic response like when someone holds open a door—most people automatically say thank you. Or if you drop something at the grocery store and someone picks it up for you, automatically you say thank you. Gratefulness tends to be an emotional response to reflection of an occurrence or series of occurrences that have made a difference in your life. An example might be a mentor at work who has provided support and guidance to you as you become familiar with your new position and the organization.

Grateful  thesaurus.com

Sometimes, the word grateful is viewed as a stronger, more emotional, or more emphatic version of thankful. Some people may think that grateful places more emphasis on appreciation toward others, while thankful places the emphasis more on the relief felt by the person who was helped.  Two examples of each:  

Reflecting:  I’ll always be grateful for the teachers who taught me good study habits.

Responding:  The farmers were thankful for the good harvest given to them by the gods.

Reflecting: The people were eternally grateful to the brave heroes who saved them from a dragon

Responding: Sylvia was thankful that the roof didn’t fall down on her during the tornado.

PK:

Thankful is a response of appreciation for a blessing or a protection: “Thank you much!”

Gratitude is a mindset of appreciation toward someone for the good they rendered to us.

Thanks should flow from us to God and men many times a day for their service to and for us.

Gratitude is an attitude toward a person or entity for the many good things over the years.

I’m thankful to God for the safe trip I made to the store today.  I am grateful for my country.

A Christian should be marked by a life of gratitude and daily and often thanks-givings.