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Appreciating the little things in life can have a lasting impact on your health.
Experiencing gratitude is beneficial for physical health and emotional well-being, previous research has shown. Now, a new study has found that people who experience more gratitude also have a lower risk of death. The report is the first to examine the effects of gratitude on longevity, experts say.
The researchers used data from the Nurses’ Health Study, which included nearly 50,000 women between the ages of 69 and 96 who completed a six-item gratitude questionnaire in 2016. By asking participants to indicate how much they agreed with statements such as “I have so much in life to be thankful for” and “I am thankful for a wide variety of people,” the research team was able to determine the percentage of women who had the highest and lowest feelings of gratitude.
When the researchers looked at the data again three years later, they found that the women with the highest levels of gratitude were 9 percent less likely to die from any cause, including cardiovascular disease, cancer and neurodegenerative diseases, according to the study, published July 3 in the journal JAMA Psychiatry.
“Gratitude is powerful: powerful for happiness, powerful for addressing at least the minor depressive symptoms, powerful for improving health, powerful for protecting against premature death — and it’s something that everyone can do,” said lead study author Dr. Tyler VanderWeele, who is the John L. Loeb and Frances Lehman Loeb Professor of Epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston.
During the three-year follow-up in the study, there were 4,608 deaths among participants — 2,153 of them were women who reported experiencing the least gratitude, while 1,273 deaths were women who were in the middle stratum. There were 1,182 deaths among women who reported experiencing the highest gratitude.
The study also found that people who reported feeling more gratitude were more likely to be slightly younger, have a partner, participate in social or religious groups, or have better health overall.
“I think that things that are going well in life, whether that’s one’s health or one’s social relationships, make one more grateful,” said VanderWeele, who is also director of the Human Flourishing Program, which focuses on the study and promotion of human flourishing, and co-director of the Initiative on Health, Spirituality, and Religion at Harvard.
For the longevity analysis, researchers controlled the data set by comparing similar women who differed only in their gratitude scores, VanderWeele said. The researchers controlled for factors such as psychological well-being, health conditions and other demographics, including social and religious participation.
“It’s still very meaningful — even after controlling for social connectedness and other aspects of psychological well-being and a whole bunch of basic health markers and money and income and so forth — you still find those who are grateful versus those who are not have about a 10 percent reduced risk of mortality,” VanderWeele said. “Those other things are important, but they don’t explain the whole effect of gratitude.”
The authors noted in the study that participants were primarily white, older women from the United States. Future studies with a more representative sample are needed to learn more about the effects of gratitude and longevity in other demographic groups.
“It’s not entirely surprising to me, given what we know about the health benefits of positive emotions in general, that a person’s tendency toward gratitude can actually extend their life,” said Dr. Philip Watkins, a professor of psychology at Eastern Washington University and author of the book “Gratitude and the Good Life: Toward a Psychology of Appreciation.”
Research shows that gratitude promotes happiness and flourishing in people, said Watkins, who was not involved in the new study.
Greater gratitude has been linked to improved physical health, such as boosting the immune system, lowering blood pressure, and benefiting the heart. People who are more grateful also tend to sleep better, have higher self-esteem, and lower levels of anxiety, stress, and depression.
While the new study looked at people who are naturally more grateful, there are ways to practice more gratitude on a daily basis, said Dr. Emiliana Simon-Thomas, scientific director of the Greater Good Science Center — a research institute that studies the psychology, sociology and neuroscience of well-being — at the University of California, Berkeley.
“It’s so important that each individual starts from their own comfort zone,” said Simon-Thomas, who was not involved in the new study. “It’s unfair to demand gratitude from someone who feels particularly impoverished. But it’s not unfair to point out some of the simple and easy immediate factors that are actually a source of goodness.
“It can be (as simple as) the feeling of the warm sun through a window on your shoulder – it’s just a matter of really realizing that there are things around you, even in the moments when it’s hard,” she added.
There are three strategies Simon-Thomas recommends for people who want to implement more feelings of gratitude. First, keep a gratitude journal where you can write down a few things you’re grateful for, “whether it’s a washing machine in your house, or electric light, or the opportunity to go camping with friends — the list goes on.”
Another way to show gratitude is to write letters to others who have had a positive impact on your life. The feeling of gratitude is even stronger when you deliver the letters to the other person, says Simon-Thomas.
A third way to feel more gratitude is to be more specific when expressing thanks. If someone brings you a cup of coffee to start your day, don’t just say, “Thank you,” but try to expand it to something like, “I really appreciate you bringing me a cup of coffee today, I know you have lots of other things to do… and I got a lot done because you brought me coffee,” Simon-Thomas says.
There’s no clear consensus on how often you should practice gratitude, Simon-Thomas said. She recommends experimenting with different methods to see what feels right for you.
Practicing gratitude is not only important for your health and well-being, but it’s also important to try to be more grateful because it’s a good virtue and can have a positive effect on your relationships, Watkins says.
Gratitude has also been linked to being more optimistic in general, and people who express higher levels of gratitude tend to look for more of the good in life, Watkins added.
“Research shows that far more good things happen to us than bad things, but we’re so quick to focus on the bad things,” Watkins said. “I think that’s one of the reasons why gratitude … and being grateful is so important, because it helps us have a more balanced outlook on life.”