Trauma

 Gratitude: Your Powerful Tool For Change and Health

Gratitude may be one of the most overlooked tools that we all have access to every day. According to research even practicing gratitude for a short amount of time can lead to higher levels of well-being. Cultivating gratitude has enormous benefits in the following areas of our lives:

Gratitude Increases Mental Health

• Gratitude reduces stress: Gratitude and other positive emotions are among the strongest relaxants known to man. Gratitude may be just as or even more effective than relaxation methods such as deep breathing.
• Gratitude helps overcome trauma. A 2006 study published in Behavior Research and Therapy found that Vietnam War Veterans with higher levels of gratitude experienced lower rates of PTSD. Gratitude has also been shown to lead to positive outcomes following traumatic events such as campus shootings (Vieselmeyer, 2017: The Role of Resilience and Gratitude in Posttraumatic Stress and Growth Following a Campus Shooting) or destructive earthquakes (Lies, 2014: Gratitude and personal functioning among earthquake survivors in Indonesia), as well as following negative life experiences such as substance misuse (Chen, 2017: Does gratitude promote recovery from substance misuse?)
• Gratitude improves psychological health. Gratitude reduces a multitude of toxic emotions, ranging from envy and resentment to frustration and regret. Robert A. Emmons, Ph.D., a leading gratitude researcher, has conducted multiple studies on the link between gratitude and well-being. His research confirms that gratitude effectively increases happiness and reduces depression. Recent studies also showed that gratitude decreased levels of depression (Sirois, 2017: Gratitude Uniquely Predicts Lower Depression in Chronic Illness Populations) while others point to the higher levels of well-being in people who practice gratitude (Nezlek, 2017: A daily diary study of relationships between feelings of gratitude and well-being)
• Gratitude builds resilience: Some people experience profound life losses yet find themselves capable of moving forward and finding happiness again. They find the people and passions in their lives that make them happy and focus on them. A 2003 study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that gratitude was a major contributor to resilience following the terrorist attacks on September 11.  Recognizing all you have to be thankful for, even during the worst times of your life, fosters resilience.

Gratitude Promotes Physical Health

• Research shows that those who engage in gratitude practices feel less pain, go to the doctor less often, have lower blood pressure, and are less likely to develop a mental disorder. (2012 study published in Personality and Individual Differences). Grateful people tend to exercise more, take better care of their health, go for check-ups frequently. Grateful people tend to cope and manage terminal conditions better and recover from certain medical procedures faster.
• Grateful people sleep better. In a 2011 study in Applied Psychology: Health and Well-Being found that writing in a gratitude journal improves sleep and helps with insomnia. This is a matter of controlling our minds and instead of filling it with worries or anxiety; we fill it with thoughts of gratitude which induces a relaxation response. Simply put, gratitude is a safe and free sleep aid (Jackowska, 2016: The impact of a brief gratitude intervention on subjective well-being, biology and sleep)
• Gratitude makes you more likely to exercise, which benefits your health. In one 11-week study of 96 Americans, those who were instructed to keep a weekly gratitude journal exercised 40 minutes more per week than the control group.
• The optimist actually lives a few years longer than the pessimist. In fact, research shows that gratitude and vitality are strongly correlated (A study of 238 people found a correlation of .46 between vitality and gratitude.^e2Study of 1662 people found a correlation of .38 between vitality and gratitude. Same study found correlations above .3 even after controlling for the levels of: extroversion, agreeableness, neuroticism, and perceived social desirability

Gratitude Can Change Your Personality

• More Optimistic: Writing in a gratitude journal for 5 minutes a day can make us more optimistic. Optimism in turn makes us happier, improves our health, and has been shown to increase lifespan by as much as a few years.
• Less Materialistic: “Be thankful for what you have; you’ll end up having more. If you concentrate on what you don’t have, you will never, ever have enough.” Oprah Winfrey
  Gratitude and materialism are inversely related. In one study, (McCullough 2002) those who had a high level of gratitude as a personality trait were much more likely to have below-average levels of materialism.  Polak 2005 showed the same results. Lerner and Ketlner (2000, 2001) show that gratitude focuses our attention on others (which makes us less self-centered)
• More Spiritual: That is more spiritual people are the more likely they are to be grateful seeing that all major religions espouse gratitude as a virtue. In turn gratefulness improves our spirituality and makes us feel closer to God or other religious entities
• Less Self-Centered: The very nature of gratitude is to focus on others so when we practice gratitude we also develop spontaneous urges to help others, and cause us to be less self-centered.

Gratitude Edifies Emotional Health

• Gratitude enhances empathy and reduces aggression: According to a 2012 study by the University of Kentucky participants who ranked higher on gratitude, were less likely to retaliate against others, even when given negative feedback. They experienced more sensitivity and empathy toward other people and a decreased desire to seek revenge.
• Gratitude improves self-esteem: A 2014 study published in the Journal of Applied Sports Psychology found that gratitude increased athlete’s self-esteem, which is an essential component to optimal performance. Other studies have shown that gratitude reduces social comparisons. Rather than becoming resentful toward people who have more money or better jobs grateful people are able to appreciate other people’s accomplishments.
• Gratitude makes us feel good: According to gratitude researcher Robert Emmons, gratitude is just happiness that we recognize after-the-fact to have been caused by the kindness of others. Gratitude feels good, make you stronger, healthier, and more successful. By giving it to others, you increase your own supply. As J.M. Barrie said, “Those who spread sunshine to the hearts of others cannot keep it from themselves.”
• Gratitude reduces feelings of envy: Envy and gratitude are largely incompatible. Gratitude is the act of perceiving benevolence, while envy and jealousy is the act of perceiving inadequacy. Benevolence and inadequacy cannot be completely perceived at the same time.
• Gratitude makes our memories happier: Experiencing gratitude in the present makes us more likely to remember positive memories, and actually transforms some of our neutral or even negative memories into positive ones. In one study, putting people into a grateful mood helped them find closure of upsetting open memories. During these experiences, participants were more likely to recall positive aspects of the memory than usual, and some of the negative and neutral aspects were transformed into positives.

Gratitude Spices Up Your Social Life

• Gratitude opens the door to more relationships. A 2104 study published in Emotion found that showing appreciation to a new acquaintance increases the chances of them seeking an ongoing relationship, so it can help you win new friends. Gratitude generates social capital – in two studies with 243 total participants, those who were 10% more grateful than average had 17.5% more social capital. Simply put, gratitude makes us nicer, more trusting, more social, and more appreciative. A more recent study showed that gratitude makes strangers trust us more (Drążkowski, 2017: Gratitude pays: A weekly gratitude intervention influences monetary decisions, physiological responses, and emotional experiences during a trust-related social interaction)
• Gratitude improves marriages: Building regular practices of gratitude into a marriage is an easy but effective way to strengthen it. Scientists created an appreciation to nagging ratio (called the Losada ratio) which divides the total number of positive expressions (support, encouragement, and appreciation) made during a typical interaction by the number of negative expressions (disapproval, sarcasm, and cynicism). Marriages that did well were those with a positivity ratio above 5.1, but when the ratio was below .9 the marriages were in trouble.

Gratitude Can Make or Break Your Career

Gratitude can help you achieve your career goals because it makes you a more effective manager, helps you network, increases your decision-making capabilities, increases your productivity, and helps you get mentors and protégés.