Why Is It That Gratitude Is Good For Your Health?

Gratitude is good for you – it’s incredibly healthy for those who practice it. Being grateful not only helps us to cultivate emotional well-being and control stress, but it also has a positive impact on our physical health.

It is not so surprising that gratitude is good for our emotional health. What is a little more surprising is the fact that being grateful is good for our physical health, especially in the culture of mens sana in corpore sano .

A healthy mind in a healthy body. Actually, it is a two-way street, since it also works the opposite: a healthy body in a healthy mind.

The good news is that no matter how we say thank you,  all gratitude is good for our health in one way or another. Why? It has a wonderful neurological effect on us.

A recent study published in April 2017, found that people who experience and express gratitude reported fewer symptoms of physical illness and better sleep quality.

While the immediate effects of gratitude are clear, the authors argue that gratitude is also good for long-term relationship success and personal well-being.

Gratitude is good for you

A study conducted in 2009 by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) found that the hypothalamus is activated when we feel gratitude or do things with altruistic intention.

While it may be hard to believe, this research supports the claim that we literally cannot function well without gratitude. Because the hypothalamus is the part of our brain that regulates important bodily functions, including appetite, sleep, temperature, metabolism and growth.

The good news is that gratitude is addictive, in a positive way. Acts of kindness and gratitude release large amounts of dopamine, a natural reward that acts as a stimulant to keep us motivated to be grateful.

Gratitude is good for our health and makes our pain less painful

It is hard to believe that something as simple as being grateful can relieve physical pain. However, this is entirely true, and many studies support it.

For example, according to a 2012 study published in Personality and Individual Differences , grateful people experience less pain and report feeling healthier than other people.

Gratitude encourages the release of dopamine, and this can also help improve physical pain. This is because dopamine is a neurotransmitter that plays an important role in the treatment of pain. The analgesic effect is great.

In addition, research has generally found that grateful people are also more interested in taking care of their health and exercising more. In fact, people who practice gratitude exercise more often and are more likely to have medical checkups performed. This probably contributes to their longevity.

When it comes to physical health, gratitude can lower blood pressure and improve the immune system. In addition, gratitude is associated with higher levels of good cholesterol (HDL) and lower levels of bad cholesterol (LDL).

There is also a link between gratitude and decreased creatinine levels, an indicator of the kidney’s ability to filter waste from the blood. Being grateful also reduces the levels of C-reactive protein, a marker of heart inflammation and heart disease.

Gratitude is good for good sleep

One of the reasons that gratitude improves both emotional and physical well-being is that it greatly improves our sleep quality. Numerous scientific studies on gratitude have come to the same conclusion. It improves our sleep quality, reduces the time it takes to fall asleep and prolongs the duration of our sleep.

As we mentioned earlier, sleep is one of the many important aspects that the hypothalamus controls. This is activated by gratitude. Sleep is associated with many bodily functions, such as those related to anxiety, depression, pain and stress, not to mention the immune system.

The key is what is in our minds when we try to fall asleep. If we are worried or anxious, the body’s stress level increases, which reduces your sleep quality, keeps you awake or makes you wake up.

But if you think about everything you are grateful for, your thoughts will make you relax. This will make you fall asleep easier.

Being grateful is a stress reliever

Sleeping better means being more relaxed, which is not only good for our mental health but also our heart and nervous system, as it helps us cope better with stress.

A 2007 study on the benefits of gratitude in people with hypertension showed a significant reduction in systolic blood pressure. What the participants in the test did was count things they were grateful for once a week.

This study also found that having a “gratitude diary” can reduce blood pressure by 10%. Other studies have shown that gratitude helps reduce cortisol, the stress hormone. It has also been linked to higher levels of heart rate variability, a good marker of our health status that can help diagnose states of stress.

It has also been found that gratitude makes us more resilient to trauma and stressful events. In other words, grateful people can recover better after trauma.

Gratitude is good for anxiety and depression

Numerous studies on the benefits of practicing gratitude have shown that having a gratitude diary or writing and sending letters of gratitude can increase our long-term happiness by more than 10%.

A study from 2005 also showed that writing a gratitude diary reduced depression by more than 30% during the study.

Another recent study found that all people in the test who had anxiety and depression who wrote thank-you notes had significant behavioral changes.

Furthermore, MRI showed that not only was there an increase in neural modulation due to changes in the medial prefrontal cortex , but that the individuals were more able to deal with negative emotions (eg guilt) and were more willing to be helpful, empathetic and kind. .

Another study, conducted in 2012 by Chinese researchers, showed that gratitude has a profound effect on sleep with very positive implications for people with anxiety and depression.

In people with depression, they found that the amount and quality of sleep was not related to lower depression, but rather to gratitude that relieved their depressive symptoms, no matter how much or how well the patient slept. This suggests that one thing gratitude does is reduce the symptoms of depression.

In people with anxiety was , however, sleep and reduced anxiety associated. This led to the conclusion that lower anxiety was the result of healthy sleep. Thus, gratitude indirectly led to better sleep, which in turn led to a reduction in anxiety.

Being grateful gives you energy

Ultimately, to say that  gratitude makes us stronger, both physically and mentally, should not surprise us. On the one hand, gratitude makes us healthier. And on the other hand, it helps us to be more optimistic and give us energy.

Research on gratitude has repeatedly shown that grateful people have higher energy levels and are more relaxed. They are happier and healthier. Therefore, the conclusion is that  being grateful has the potential to prolong our productive life.