Many people recognize that gratitude can lift their mood in the moment. Few, though, know that feeling grateful has lasting effects that promote well-being long after they initially experience thankfulness. Indeed, one study shows that ramping up positivity by writing gratitude letters can change your brain, helping you experience greater mental wellness for extended periods.
The gratitude study and results
Joshua Brown, Ph.D., professor of brain and psychological sciences at Indiana University, and Joel Wong, Ph.D., associate professor of counseling psychology at the same school), carried out a gratitude study, noting that most research regarding gratitude has entailed healthy participants.
They aimed to find out if boosting thankfulness benefits everyone, including those suffering from poor mental well-being, people who, understandably, can benefit most from increasing their mental health.
The study involved 300 participants who struggled with anxiety and depression. The researchers split them into three groups. They all received counseling, but one group also wrote gratitude letters, and another wrote about their negative emotions and experiences.
Study participants who penned letters of gratitude displayed increased mental health compared to the other groups when checked after one-month and three-month intervals.
Interestingly, writing about deep feelings concerning negative experiences didn’t prove cathartic. On the contrary, rather than alleviating pent-up emotion, it worsened the participants’ mental health.
When studying the participants’ writing content, researchers looked at whether negative words mattered. Those who penned letters of gratitude made lots of positive comments, while individuals who wrote about their experiences and feelings mostly used negative words.
The researchers concluded that gratitude letters work because they reduce people’s focus on negativity. The more negative words the writers in the study penned, the more they suffered from poor mental health. The number of positive words written didn’t make much difference; the lack of negative ones did, however.
Three months after the experiment, the researchers examined the participants’ brains with an fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) scanner while they engaged in a gratitude-related task. They were required to consider whether they’d pass on a small donation given to them by a benefactor but only if they felt grateful.
They also completed a questionnaire about their gratitude level in general and were questioned about whether their decision to donate money stemmed from guilt or thankfulness.
The study revealed increased sensitivity in brain areas linked with decision-making and learning in the grateful participants, who were also more generous than those who experienced guilt.
It also turned out that the people who wrote gratitude letters displayed increased prefrontal cortex brain activation while experiencing thankfulness three months after the experiment started.
The conclusions suggest the effects of gratitude last and might teach the brain greater gratitude sensitivity, which in turn may increase future mental health. So, why not pen gratitude letters and ramp up your positivity for months to follow? Make it a regular practice, and the results may last a lifetime.
