Gratitude can be good for your well-being
Researcher determines that being grateful has a positive effect on health
They weren’t feeling symptoms of full-blown 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 scientist Laura Redwine and her colleagues asked nearly 200 people in that 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. 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, an assistant professor in the department of psychiatry at University of California, San Diego, as well as Dr. Robert Emmons, a pioneer in the field of gratitude research at University of California, Davis.
WHAT IS GRATITUDE, EXACTLY?
Gratitude is a long game — and more than just, say, whooping over a good parking spot.
Emmons describes gratitude as “a disposition to notice kindness and benevolence and to give back the goodness received"; Redwine agrees with other researchers, who say it’s part of a “wider life orientation” towards the positive, seeing goodness not just in wins or gifts, but in people, gods and the cosmos.
Both agree gratitude isn’t a oneoff thing and that it’s unlikely to have any meaningful or sustainable effects unless experienced frequently. “It’s a cumulative response,” Emmons said in an email interview. “We cannot leave gratitude at the Thanksgiving table and expect to reap the rewards of grateful living.”
A GRATITUDE PRESCRIPTION FOR HEART TROUBLE
Heart failure is one of the most significant public health problems facing Canada and the U.S., with a tripling of rates expected as the population ages.
It’s not clear what the implications are, if any, for gratitude as a possible non-drug, low-tech intervention for heart failure. “But, if we can reduce inflammation, potentially we could improve their health,” Redwine says.
Other research has also shown an association between gratitude and lower blood pressure. The exact mechanisms aren’t clear, but Emmons believes the likely common pathway is through stress.
THE AUTONOMIC NERVOUS SYSTEM
Fear, stress and anxiety aren’t just emotional states — the body is also in on the action. The hormone cortisol spikes when we are under stress. And the autonomic nervous system is affected. Gratitude, Emmons says, “short circuits” those responses: It triggers the parasympathetic (the “calming branch”) of the autonomic nervous system, he says, and is related to a 23-per-cent reduction in cortisol.
THANK YOU … FOR THE PAIN RELIEF
Studies suggest gratitude helps reduce chronic pain — in part because of how it affects patients’ sleep patterns. Emmons research, for example, has found that when people practice gratitude journaling they sleep, on average, 30 minutes longer per night, and wake up feeling more refreshed than people who don’t journal. “Insomniacs have twice the pain compared to people without sleep dysfunction,” Emmons said.
THE GRATITUDE BRAIN BOOST
Gratitude is a complex emotion, Emmons says. “It isn’t easily isolated in a brain scanner.”
But while the neural basis for gratitude is still unclear, it likely involves multiple brain systems. For example, the brain hormones dopamine and serotonin are related to happiness and other pleasurable feelings. Feeling grateful may boost the brain’s “pleasure circuitry,” which could account for why studies have shown gratitude reduces the duration, and future episodes, of depression.
“One of the reasons gratitude makes us happier is that it forces us to abandon the belief that the world is devoid of goodness, love and kindness and is nothing but randomness and cruelty,” says Emmons.
“Repeated patterns of perceived benevolence may lead the depressed person to reorganize his or her self-schema (‘I guess I’m not such a loser after all.’) By feeling grateful, we are acknowledging that someone, somewhere, is being kind to us.”