Can gratitude improve your mental, physical health? – Part 1

As we approach another Thanksgiving, let us take a moment to appreciate the importance and benefits of being thankful. Gratitude can be one of the most powerful tools in your emotional toolkit, which is why it’s been a popular topic across many cultures throughout history.

Gratitude is a powerful emotion that can bring many benefits to our lives. Expressing gratitude and cultivating it in ourselves has been linked to increased happiness, improved physical health, greater mental well-being, higher self-esteem, and life satisfaction.

Keeping a gratitude journal or practising gratitude regularly can help us reap the emotional and psychological benefits of this positive emotion, improving psychological health. It’s also been shown to increase overall mental health by helping us focus on the positive things in life rather than dwelling on negative emotions.

In this article, I’m going to discuss some of the scientifically proven benefits of gratitude and show you how using it can have positive impacts on your life – from better physical and mental health, increased energy levels, and reduced stress to improved relationships with family, friends or co-workers and even financial success.

By the end of your reading, I believe you will realize why practising gratitude should be part of your daily routine and be motivated to begin if you haven’t already.

According to Amin (2014), The benefits are split into five groups:

• Emotional benefits
• Social benefits
• Personality benefits
• Career benefits
• Health benefits

Gratitude and Emotional Benefits

Practising gratitude is known to impact our emotions and emotional health. Evidence has shown that a regular “attitude of gratitude” can:

1. Make us happier

Simply writing for five minutes a day about what we are grateful for can enhance our long-term happiness by over 10% (Emmons & McCullough, 2003; Seligman, Steen, Park, & Peterson, 2005). When we begin noticing what we already have can make us feel more positive about our lives. There is a simple quote that says, “Those who pay attention to what is good in their life instead of what is bad are more likely to feel positively about their life.”

2. Increase psychological well-being

Researcher Chih-Che Lin (2017) found that even in personality development, a high level of gratitude has a strong positive impact on psychological well being, self-esteem, and depression. Basically, this means that we can reap the best benefits of gratitude by embodying gratitude and truly living a life of gratitude, a state that we can get to through regular practice and commitment.

3. Enhance our positive emotions

Feeling grateful every day keeps the negative emotions such as envy and bitterness away. Research has shown that gratitude reduces envy, facilitates positive emotions, and makes us more resilient (Amin, 2014). After all, if we are grateful for what we have, what room is there for envy to sneak into our hearts?

4. Increase our self-esteem

Participants who completed a four-week gratitude contemplation program reported greater life satisfaction and self-esteem (Rash, Matsuba, & Prkachin, 2011). Gratitude can help you feel better about your circumstances, which can lead to feeling better about yourself.

5. Keep suicidal thoughts and attempts at bay

A study on the effects of gratitude on depression, coping, and suicide showed that gratitude is a protective factor when it comes to suicidal ideation in stressed and depressed individuals (Krysinska, Lester, Lyke, & Corveleyn, 2015). Enhancing our own practice of gratitude can help protect us when we are weakest.

Gratitude and Social Benefits

Gratitude makes us more emotionally balanced, happier, and more positive. Regarding social benefits, regularly practising gratitude can:

6. Make people like us and want to be around us

Those who are more grateful have access to a wider social network, more friends, and better relationships on average (Amin, 2014). This is likely because of the effect that being grateful has on how trustworthy, social, and appreciative we seem to others.

7. Improve our romantic relationships

A recent study found evidence that expressing gratitude to our significant others results in improved quality in the relationship (Algoe, Fredrickson, & Gable, 2013). Showing our gratitude to loved ones is a great way to make them feel good, make us feel good, and make the relationship better in general!

8. Improve our friendships

Like the effects of gratitude on romantic relationships, expressing gratitude to our friends can improve our friendships. Those who communicate their gratitude to their friends are more likely to work through problems and concerns with their friends and have a more positive perception of their friends (Lambert & Fincham, 2011).

9. Increases social support

Those who are more grateful have access to more social support. Research confirms this finding that higher gratitude also leads to lower levels of stress and depression, suggesting that gratitude not only helps you get the social support you need to get through difficult times, but it lessens the need for social support in the first place (Wood, Maltby, Gillett, Linley, & Joseph, 2008).

10. Strengthen family relationships in times of stress

Gratitude has been found to protect children of sick parents from anxiety and depression, acting as a buffer against the internalization of symptoms (Stoeckel, Weissbrod, & Ahrens, 2015). Teenage and young adult children who can find the positives in their lives can more easily deal with difficult situations like serious illness in the family.

To be continued next week