The healing power of gratitude

Practicing gratitude is one of the keys to a positive outlook on life. Positivity may come naturally to some people, or during certain periods of your life, but for the rest it requires practice, habit building, strengthening it like a muscle – because our mind naturally gravitates towards worry and the detection of danger and misfortune. A positive attitude doesn’t sugar coat or deny the many challenges around us – it just reminds us that there’s also so much that’s going well and that there's plenty that's good in our lives.

There’s a large body of evidence showing that positivity enhances mental and physical well being. Thankfulness predicts lower rates of depression, better emotional states, and healthier relationships. 

A review in the Journal of Positive Psychology focuses on interventional studies rather than observational ones – a better way to test the effectiveness of a treatment modality. These studies test gratitude practice in a test group, and compare the outcomes with a control group that did not use a gratitude intervention. Interventions included gratitude journaling (writing regularly about what you’re grateful for), writing a gratitude letter (devised by Martin Seligman – the father of Positive Psychology – constitutes writing and delivering a letter of gratitude to someone previously not properly thanked) and the Three Good Things exercise, in which you writing down three good things that happened within a stated time period.

The review includes 25 experimental articles that tested gratitude interventions and psychological wellbeing symptoms, such as depression, anxiety, stress, negative emotions and aggression and finds some evidence that gratitude may contribute to improvement in psychological well being.

There were 32 interventional studies centered on emotional wellbeing: happiness, life satisfaction, quality of life, flourishing, etc. and the vast majority of studies show that gratitude practices increased emotional wellbeing.

Regarding social wellbeing, consisting of social skills, contacts and relationships, and purposeful employment, the review includes 19 experimental studies: Practicing gratitude helps maintain healthy relationships and the formation of new ones.

The mind and the body are one and the same, so mental wellbeing likely affects many aspects of what we call physical health. There are, however, only a few studies focused on gratitude and physical health, but there’s some indication that gratitude lessens stress, lessens self reported symptoms, may lower blood pressure, cholesterol and inflammatory markers, and improves sleep. 

Gratitude – for the small things in life

Paying attention to the smaller things to be grateful for is central to the practice of gratitude. The bigger gifts of life are eminent and require less practice. It’s the small stuff though, that lightens your heart repeatedly once you notice it.

Food is a useful, yet fraught, way to recognize our good fortune. Many of us are troubled by food, and have an ongoing stressful fight with it, labeling some of it, or some of its macro nutrients as bad and even evil. But food should really be our constant reminder of how lucky we are for the bounties of nature, for the nourishment that comes from the sun and the earth and from the labor of all who participate in the vast network that makes our every coffee cup, slice of bread, and every morsel of food.

As is nature. There’s a sunrise and a sunset every day for you to admire, a flower, a bird, a colorful leaf, and an old tall tree. Gratitude to nature not only improves wellbeing, it may also help us to better protect our environment.

Wishing you a happy Thanksgiving holiday, and grateful for your readership.

Dr. Ayala