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Gratitude can reduce stress, depression, and burnout, especially in healthcare workers.

Being grateful has been linked to lower blood pressure and better heart health outcomes.

Expressing gratitude could improve sleep, reduce headaches, and boost self-care in nurses.

You have probably heard the phrase, "Count your blessings.” It is a saying among religious people to remind them to be thankful for what is positive and good in their life. Often this reminder helps people when they may be tending to focus on a recent negative event, or feeling depressed, and focusing on all the negative aspects of their life lately. Aside from a temporary redirection of focus away from the negative, does this thankfulness, or gratitude, produce any other psychological, emotional, or even biological changes in us? This question has been at the heart of much research in psychology and medicine for decades, and even more in the last 20 years with increased stress, political division, pandemics, and loneliness fueled by social media. What research has revealed about being grateful may surprise you.

From the early philosophers, such as Descartes, who debated the “mind-body” problem (how can thoughts influence a physical thing like the body), psychologists have been speculating about the influence of the way we think on our body. While a detailed discussion of the mind-body issue is beyond the purpose of this brief post, here are a few examples as an entrance into our discussion. In the early and mid-1900s, John Watson and B.F. Skinner (respectively) didn’t want to assume anything about thoughts or cognition since they couldn’t scientifically verify that cognition exists, so they only focused on observable behavior when they created the “behaviorism” school of thought. I’m skipping over a number of other studies, but just wanted to mention a couple more. A classic study by Langer and Rodin (1976) examined perceived control over their environment among nursing home patients (e.g., whether they can be in charge of caring for a plant in their room, or what shows to watch on TV, or other aspects of their daily life). The results showed that in those who were given more control over their environment, 93% showed overall improvement, became more active, and felt happier. Of those who were in the no control group, 71% became more debilitated in as soon as three weeks. In a meta-analysis of 15 studies encompassing 229,000 patients, Rozanski et al. (2019) examined the influence of optimism and pessimism on the likelihood of cardiovascular events and all-cause mortality. The data showed a strong effect of optimism: those who were optimistic were significantly less likely to experience cardiovascular events, and they had a significantly lower mortality rate than pessimists.

These few examples are just the tip of the iceberg. There are many studies demonstrating the powerful effects of the way we think over our physical well-being. So much so that in 1978, APA created Division 38 (Health Psychology)........

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