# data[].attributes.headline
How Gratitude Changes You and Your Brain | Greater Good Magazine

# data[].attributes.subject
How Gratitude Changes You and Your Brain | Greater Good Magazine

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
With the rise of managed health care, which emphasizes cost-efficiency and brevity, mental health professionals have had to confront this burning question: How can they help clients derive the greatest possible benefit from treatment in the shortest amount of time?

Recent evidence suggests that a promising approach is to complement psychological counseling with additional activities that are not too taxing for clients but yield high results. In our own research, we have zeroed in on one such activity: the practice of gratitude. Indeed, many studies over the past decade have found that people who consciously count their blessings tend to be happier and less depressed.

The problem is that most research studies on gratitude have been conducted with well-functioning people. Is gratitude beneficial for people who struggle with mental health concerns? And, if so, how?

We set out to address these questions in a recent research study involving nearly 300 adults, mostly college students who were seeking mental health counseling at a university. We recruited these participants just before they began their first session of counseling, and, on average, they reported clinically low levels of mental health at the time. The majority of people seeking counseling services at this university in general struggled with issues related to depression and anxiety.

We randomly assigned our study participants into three groups. Although all three groups received counseling services, the first group was also instructed to write one letter of gratitude to another person each week for three weeks, whereas the second group was asked to write about their deepest thoughts and feelings about negative experiences. The third group did not do any writing activity.

What did we find? Compared with the participants who wrote about negative experiences or only received counseling, those who wrote gratitude letters reported significantly better mental health four weeks and 12 weeks after their writing exercise ended. This suggests that gratitude writing can be beneficial not just for healthy, well-adjusted individuals, but also for those who struggle with mental health concerns. In fact, it seems, practicing gratitude on top of receiving psychological counseling carries greater benefits than counseling alone, even when that gratitude practice is brief.

And that's not all. When we dug deeper into our results, we found indications of how gratitude might actually work on our minds and bodies. While not definitive, here are four insights from our research suggesting what might be behind gratitude's psychological benefits.

1. Gratitude unshackles us from toxic emotions

First, by analyzing the words used by participants in each of the two writing groups, we were able to understand the mechanisms behind the mental health benefits of gratitude letter writing. We compared the percentage of positive emotion words, negative emotion words, and "we" words (first-person plural words) that participants used in their writing. Not surprisingly, those in the gratitude writing group used a higher percentage of positive emotion words and "we" words, and a lower proportion of negative emotion words, than those in the other writing group.

However, people who used more positive emotion words and more "we" words in their gratitude letters didn't necessarily have better mental health later. It was only when people used fewer negative emotion words in their letters that they were significantly more likely to report better mental health. In fact, it was the lack of negative emotion words-not the abundance of positive words-that explained the mental health gap between the gratitude writing group and the other writing group.

Perhaps this suggests that gratitude letter writing produces better mental health by shifting one's attention away from toxic emotions, such as resentment and envy. When you write about how grateful you are to others and how much other people have blessed your life, it might become considerably harder for you to ruminate on your negative experiences.

2. Gratitude helps even if you don't share it

We told participants who were assigned to write gratitude letters that they weren't required to send their letters to their intended recipient. In fact, only 23 percent of participants who wrote gratitude letters sent them. But those who didn't send their letters enjoyed the benefits of experiencing gratitude nonetheless. (Because the number of people who sent their letters was so small, it was hard for us to determine whether this group's mental health was better than those who didn't send their letter.)

This suggests that the mental health benefits of writing gratitude letters are not entirely dependent on actually communicating that gratitude to another person.

So if you're thinking of writing a letter of gratitude to someone, but you're unsure whether you want that person to read the letter, we encourage you to write it anyway. You can decide later whether to send it (and we think it's often a good idea to do so). But the mere act of writing the letter can help you appreciate the people in your life and shift your focus away from negative feelings and thoughts.

3. Gratitude's benefits take time

It's important to note that the mental health benefits of gratitude writing in our study did not emerge immediately, but gradually accrued over time. Although the different groups in our study did not differ in mental health levels one week after the end of the writing activities, individuals in the gratitude group reported better mental health than the others four weeks after the writing activities, and this difference in mental health became even larger 12 weeks after the writing activities.

These results are encouraging because many other studies suggest that the mental health benefits of positive activities often decrease rather than increase over time afterward. We don't really know why this positive snowball effect occurred in our study. Perhaps the gratitude letter writers discussed what they wrote in their letters with their counselors or with others. These conversations may have reinforced the psychological benefits derived from the gratitude writing itself.

For now, the bottom line is this: If you participate in a gratitude writing activity, don't be too surprised if you don't feel dramatically better immediately after the writing. Be patient and remember that the benefits of gratitude might take time to kick in.

4. Gratitude has lasting effects on the brain

About three months after the psychotherapy sessions began, we took some of the people who wrote gratitude letters and compared them with those who didn't do any writing. We wanted to know if their brains were processing information differently.

We used an fMRI scanner to measure brain activity while people from each group did a "pay it forward" task. In that task, the individuals were regularly given a small amount of money by a nice person, called the "benefactor." This benefactor only asked that they pass the money on to someone if they felt grateful. Our participants then decided how much of the money, if any, to pass on to a worthy cause (and we did in fact donate that money to a local charity).

We wanted to distinguish donations motivated by gratitude from donations driven by other motivations, like feelings of guilt or obligation. So we asked the participants to rate how grateful they felt toward the benefactor, and how much they wanted to help each charitable cause, as well as how guilty they would feel if they didn't help. We also gave them questionnaires to measure how grateful they are in their lives in general.

We found that across the participants, when people felt more grateful, their brain activity was distinct from brain activity related to guilt and the desire to help a cause. More specifically, we found that when people who are generally more grateful gave more money to a cause, they showed greater neural sensitivity in the medial prefrontal cortex, a brain area associated with learning and decision making. This suggests that people who are more grateful are also more attentive to how they express gratitude.

Most interestingly, when we compared those who wrote the gratitude letters with those who didn't, the gratitude letter writers showed greater activation in the medial prefrontal cortex when they experienced gratitude in the fMRI scanner. This is striking as this effect was found three months after the letter writing began. This indicates that simply expressing gratitude may have lasting effects on the brain. While not conclusive, this finding suggests that practicing gratitude may help train the brain to be more sensitive to the experience of gratitude down the line, and this could contribute to improved mental health over time.

Though these are just the first steps in what should be a longer research journey, our research so far not only suggests that writing gratitude letters may be helpful for people seeking counseling services but also explains what's behind gratitude's psychological benefits. At a time when many mental health professionals are feeling crunched, we hope that this research can point them-and their clients-toward an effective and beneficial tool.

Regardless of whether you're facing serious psychological challenges, if you have never written a gratitude letter before, we encourage you to try it. Much of our time and energy is spent pursuing things we currently don't have. Gratitude reverses our priorities to help us appreciate the people and things we do.

Greater Good wants to know: Do you think this article will influence your opinions or behavior?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
How Gratitude Changes You and Your Brain

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
New research is starting to explore how gratitude works to improve our mental health.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
SLED Databases :: Alaska Library Network Login

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Welcome to the Alaska Library Network (ALN) proxy server. The database you are accessing is only available to residents of Alaska or to State of Alaska Employees. You have reached this page because you are attempting to access the database from from outside of an authorized computer network.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Please take a moment to be grateful for this article you are about to read. I'll wait... Seriously though, it can have a profound impact on your life (the whole being grateful thing that is ... the effect of the article is less certain).

With the holidays coming up I wanted to focus on the one Turkey Day tradition that has the power to reshape your neural pathways. Sounds like an impressive feat, but it's true. No it's not the turkey increasing your serotonin ( myth busted!), nor the apple pie giving you a burst of dopamine. As my intro suggests, it's right there in the name. Thanks giving. Giving of thanks, also known as gratitude. Gratitude, particularly if practiced regularly, can keep you healthier and happier. In this article I'll share the results of four studies that show how gratitude can, among other things, help you exercise more, sleep better and be happier.

One study by a couple of American researchers assigned young adults to keep a daily journal of things they were grateful for (Emmons and McCullough, 2003). They assigned other groups to journal about things that annoyed them, or reasons why they were better off than others. The young adults assigned to keep gratitude journals showed greater increases in determination, attention, enthusiasm and energy compared to the other groups. While that shows a clear benefit of gratitude, it also makes a clear distinction. Realizing that other people are worse off than you is not gratitude. Gratitude requires an appreciation of the positive aspects of your situation. It is not a comparison. Sometimes noticing what other people don't have may help you see what you can be grateful for, but you have to take that next step. You actually have to show appreciation for what you have, for it to have an effect.

The effect of gratitude is not just limited to young adults who haven't yet been beaten down by the sad realities of life. In addition, even less frequent moments of gratitude can have an effect. The same researchers conducted a separate study on adults, which showed that even a weekly gratitude journal was beneficial. Subjects assigned to journal weekly on gratitude showed greater improvements in optimism. That makes sense. But that's not all; it also influenced their behaviors. Keeping a gratitude journal also caused greater improvements in exercise patterns. Lastly, it also caused a reduction in physical ailments, so these subjects had fewer aches and pains (tired of your carpal tunnel syndrome? Be grateful you don't have a headache).

A third study from earlier this year did not require a gratitude journal, but simply looked at the amount of gratitude people tended to show in their daily lives (Ng et al, 2012). In this study, a group of Chinese researchers looked at the combined effects of gratitude and sleep quality on symptoms of anxiety and depression. They found that higher levels of gratitude were associated with better sleep, and with lower anxiety and depression. This begged the question, is the level of gratitude improving these symptoms or is it the fact that the patients are getting better sleep? These researchers ran some analyses controlling for the amount of sleep and revealed some interesting links.

They found that after controlling for the amount of sleep people got, gratitude still had an effect on lower depression scores. This means that regardless of their levels of insomnia, people who showed more gratitude were less depressed. With anxiety they found a different result. After controlling for sleep, gratitude showed no effect on anxiety. So while higher gratitude led to less anxiety originally, this is simply because it helped people sleep better, and sleeping better improved their anxiety. So gratitude had a direct effect on depression symptoms (the more gratitude, the less depression) and an indirect effect on anxiety (increased gratitude led to improved sleep, which led to lower anxiety). Either way, with gratitude you're better off, and you get a good night's sleep.

The wide variety of effects that gratitude can have may seem surprising, but a direct look at the brain activity during gratitude yields some insight. The final study I'm going to share come from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). NIH researchers examined blood flow in various brain regions while subjects summoned up feelings of gratitude (Zahn et al, 2009). They found that subjects who showed more gratitude overall had higher levels of activity in the hypothalamus. This is important because the hypothalamus controls a huge array of essential bodily functions, including eating, drinking and sleeping. It also has a huge influence on your metabolism and stress levels. From this evidence on brain activity it starts to become clear how improvements in gratitude could have such wide-ranging effects from increased exercise, and improved sleep to decreased depression and fewer aches and pains.

Furthermore, feelings of gratitude directly activated brain regions associated with the neurotransmitter dopamine. Dopamine feels good to get, which is why it's generally considered the "reward" neurotransmitter. But dopamine is also almost important in initiating action. That means increases in dopamine make you more likely to do the thing you just did. It's the brain saying, "Oh, do that again."

Gratitude can have such a powerful impact on your life because it engages your brain in a virtuous cycle. Your brain only has so much power to focus its attention. It cannot easily focus on both positive and negative stimuli. It is like a small child: easily distracted. Oh your tummy hurts? Here's a lollipop. So you lost your job? Isn't it wonderful we're having KFC for dinner? On top of that your brain loves to fall for the confirmation bias, that is it looks for things that prove what it already believes to be true. And the dopamine reinforces that as well. So once you start seeing things to be grateful for, your brain starts looking for more things to be grateful for. That's how the virtuous cycle gets created.

It's not always easy to remember to be grateful, particularly since the human brain is so adaptable. We easily get used to whatever comforts are around us. When was the last time you turned the key in your car's ignition and praised the miracles of the internal combustion engine? In disasters, like Hurricane Sandy for example, we can come to see that we shouldn't take things like running water and electricity for granted. But how long does that feeling last for? Within a few days you're back to cursing when the elevator takes 30 seconds to get to your floor.

Gratitude takes practice like any other skill. Thanksgiving Day is a good time to start, but if you want to reap all the benefits, keep practicing after that. Try thinking of one thing every day that you're grateful for. I'm practicing it too. While my wrists hurt and my eyes are strained from sitting at my computer too long, I am grateful for all the researchers who made this article possible. I am grateful for my Macbook Air for not weighing me down. And I am grateful to you for reading all the way to the end.

If you liked this article then check out my new book - The Upward Spiral: Using Neuroscience to Reverse the Course of Depression, One Small Change at a Time .

Become a fan of PreFrontal Nudity on Facebook

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Please take a moment to be grateful for this article you are about to read. I'll wait... Seriously though, it can have a profound impact on your life (the whole being grateful thing that is ... the effect of the article is less certain).

# data[].attributes.headline
THE HAPPIEST PEOPLE on Earth?: EBSCOhost

# data[].attributes.subject
THE HAPPIEST PEOPLE on Earth?: EBSCOhost

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
SLED Databases :: Alaska Library Network Login

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Welcome to the Alaska Library Network (ALN) proxy server. The database you are accessing is only available to residents of Alaska or to State of Alaska Employees. You have reached this page because you are attempting to access the database from from outside of an authorized computer network.