According to a new study, people who are grateful for what they have tend to live longer. According to the results published in the journal JAMAPsychiatryolder women who scored highest on a questionnaire measuring gratitude had a 9 percent lower risk of premature death from any cause, compared with those with the lowest percentage.
The Benefits of Gratitude
The findings suggest that feelings of gratitude “may increase longevity among older adults,” lead author Ying Chen, a research scientist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, said in a press release.
To conduct the study, researchers analyzed data collected from the long-term Nurse’s Health Study.
In 2016, more than 49,000 women in the study with an average age of 79 completed a six-question gratitude test. They had to agree or disagree with statements such as “I have so much in life to be grateful for” and “If I had to list everything I was grateful for, it would be a very long list.”
Three years later, the researchers followed up to identify deaths among those women. They found that more than 4,600 participants had died, most commonly from heart disease.
The results show that people with the highest levels of gratitude had a lower risk of death from any cause than those with the lowest levels.
Gratitude appeared to protect against every specific cause of death included in the study, and most significantly against death from heart disease, the researchers said. Other causes included cancer, respiratory disease, neurodegenerative disease, infection, and injury.
Based on this, the researchers argue, people may be able to improve their health by focusing on the things they are grateful for.
“Previous research suggests that there are ways to intentionally promote gratitude, such as writing down or discussing what you’re grateful for a few times a week,” Chen said. “Promoting healthy aging is a public health priority, and we hope that further studies will improve our understanding of gratitude as a psychological resource for improving longevity.”
More sleep leads to greater gratitude
A new study to be presented at the SLEEP 2024 annual conference, held in Houston, Texas, June 1-5, has found that healthy sleep positively impacts gratitude, resilience, and thriving in adults.
The results show that subjective sleepiness and mood disturbances improved with going to bed early, which prolonged sleep by an average of 46 minutes per night, and worsened with going to bed late, which reduced nighttime sleep by an average of 37 minutes.
Measures of prosperity, resilience, and gratitude improved significantly over the week with extended sleep and significantly worsened with restricted sleep. Participants who extended sleep also wrote down twice as many things on their gratitude lists as other study participants.
“Survey data suggest that happiness has declined in the United States in recent years, and sleep problems have become very common over the same period,” said lead researcher Michael Scullin, who has a doctorate in psychology and is an associate professor of psychology and neuroscience at Baylor University in Waco, Texas.
“Although it is recognized that sleep deprivation worsens mental health symptoms, no experimental studies have been conducted to test whether more sleep improves positive aspects of life, such as a sense of purpose, hope, and gratitude.”
The study involved 90 adults who were randomly assigned to late bedtimes, early bedtimes, or normal sleep schedules during a single workweek and were monitored via actigraphy. The primary outcomes were changes in state and trait feelings of prosperity, resilience, and gratitude, as well as behavioral expressions of gratitude.
The impacts of poor sleep health are well documented. The American Academy of Sleep Medicine and the Sleep Research Society recommend that adults regularly get seven hours of sleep a night to promote optimal health, productivity, and alertness during the day.
Scullin observed that experimentally increasing sleep improved these positive attributes, which are the basis of well-being and a cornerstone of prosocial behaviors.
Is gratitude good for the heart?
A study reveals that gratitude can buffer the negative physiological consequences of stress and improve overall cardiovascular outcomes. In a sample of 912 participants, it was observed that the greater the predisposition to appreciate what is good in the world, the less likely the person was to suffer from an acute myocardial infarction.
In the United States, an estimated 660,000 patients suffer from myocardial infarction, also known as a heart attack, for the first time each year, and 1 in 7 deaths is due to the disease. With the rate of myocardial infarction on the rise, researchers are calling for cost-effective policies and interventions to meet the United Nations goal of reducing premature deaths due to noncommunicable deaths by one-third by 2030.
In this context, trait gratitude is understood as the predisposition to notice and appreciate what is good in the world and has been identified as a potentially useful and low-cost area of intervention. Recent research has found evidence that gratitude, being a positive psychological construct like optimism, purpose in life, and positive thoughts, may play an important role in cardiovascular health and in modulating the cardiovascular response to acute stress.
As part of a longitudinal study supported by the BIAL Foundation, Brian Leavy, Brenda H. O’Connell, and Deirdre O’Shea assessed the relationship between trait gratitude and acute myocardial infarction in a sample of 912 participants aged 35 to 86 years, with 32.9% reporting a diagnosis of hypertension and 9.6% reporting a diagnosis of diabetes. Participants completed a standardized cardiovascular exercise testing laboratory protocol and were assessed at a later time point, an average of 6.7 years later.
In the article Heart rate reactivity mediates the relationship between trait gratitude and acute myocardial infarction , published in Biological Psychology , researchers from Maynooth University and the University of Limerick (Ireland) reveal a potential link between gratitude and cardiovascular reactivity, which could be a mechanism through which trait gratitude contributes to the reduction of the risk of myocardial infarction.
The study concluded that heart rate reactivity significantly mediated the relationship between trait gratitude and the occurrence of acute myocardial infarction. Higher trait gratitude was associated with a lower likelihood of suffering from acute myocardial infarction 6.7 years later, through changes in heart rate reactivity, even when controlling for age, sex, body mass index (BMI), education, high blood pressure, and diabetes.
According to Brian Leavy, “the results provided further evidence that positive emotions, such as gratitude, are associated with better health outcomes, particularly in promoting cardiovascular health.”
Does practicing gratitude help us be less stressed?
Researchers from Irish universities conducted a study of 68 adults and found that gratitude has a unique stress-reducing effect on both responses to and recovery from acute psychological stress. This effect may contribute to improved cardiovascular health.
Knowing that stress affects humans and impacts their health and well-being, particularly by causing hypertension and increasing cardiovascular morbidity and coronary heart disease, it is important to understand our reactions to stress and find out if there are factors that can play a key role in buffering stress.
In the article “Gratitude, affect balance, and stress buffering: A growth curve examination of cardiovascular responses to a laboratory stress task,” published in January in the Journal of Psychophysiology , Brian Leavy, Brenda H. O’Connell, and Deirdre O’Shea argue that although previous research suggests that gratitude and affect balance play key roles in buffering stress, until now little was known about the impact of these variables on cardiovascular recovery from acute psychological stress.
This was the focus of a study conducted by researchers at the Universities of Maynooth and Limerick in Ireland, who also sought to find out whether affect balance moderates the relationship between gratitude and cardiovascular reactions to acute psychological stress.
The research conducted at the University of Maynooth in Ireland involved 68 university students (24 males and 44 females), aged 18 to 57. This study used a within-subject experimental design with laboratory tasks in which stress was induced in participants and then cardiovascular reactivity and recovery in response to this was measured.
The results showed that a state of gratitude predicted lower systolic blood pressure responses during the stress-test period, meaning that the state of gratitude has a unique stress-buffering effect on both reactions to and recovery from acute psychological stress. Affective balance was also found to amplify the effects of the state of gratitude.
These findings have clinical utility, as there are several low-cost gratitude interventions that can contribute to well-being. For example, previous research has shown that cardiac patients who use gratitude journals have better cardiovascular outcomes than those who do not. Combined with the findings of this study and previous work, gratitude may therefore be a useful intervention point for improving our cardiovascular health.
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