Health trouble? Give thanks
Practising gratitude isn’t just good karma. An emerging science shows it can actually change how the body works — and make a concrete difference to your well-being
They weren’t feeling symptoms of fullblown heart failure quite yet — shortness of breath, dizziness, heart palpitations — but they had suffered damage, in some cases a heart attack. And left unchecked the symptoms, and other grimmer problems, would come.
So when University of California’s Laura Redwine and her colleagues asked nearly 200 people in this condition to complete a gratitude questionnaire they weren’t sure quite what to expect. Aside from the obvious — thankfulness? now? — the science on how our bodies are affected by our attitudes is still in its infancy.
But when the researchers drew participants’ blood after the questionnaire they found that those who managed to focus on the positive and scored highest on the gratitude scale had lower levels of C-reactive protein and other markers of inflammation circulating in their bloodstream — surprising signs of prospective recovery.
Some of those same people were later asked to keep a diary of three to five things that made them feel thankful every day. After eight weeks, they also had higher heart rate variability — which signals the heart’s ability to respond to stressors — than the non-journaling “controls.”
Gratitude is already the trendy new practice, proponents claim, for peak emotional well-being (see Weekend Post, Page 2). But studies like Redwine’s are providing harder scientific evidence for the benefits of thankfulness, suggesting that it may actually change the body’s physiological functioning — not just how we feel in a given moment.
To understand how that works, the National Post spoke to Redwine, as well as Dr. Robert Emmons, a pioneer in gratitude research at University of California, Davis.