How Gratitude Changes You and Your Brain
By: Joel Wong and Joshua Brown
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 college students or other
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.
