Gratitude is Good for Your Health

Gratitude is Good for Your health

For centuries the heart has been connected with emotions of love, gratitude and  compassion as well as with courage, wisdom and spirituality. More recently research has found that not only are these feelings are experienced by the heart, but they also have a very stabilizing and beneficial effect on total health. We now know that stress and negative emotional states affect hormonal fluctuations, immune response, heart and brain function. Stress and negative emotions lead to disordered heart rhythms, and unbalance the autonomic nervous system affecting the smooth function body and mind. Fortunately the opposite is also true: positive emotion leads to increased harmony, coherence and balance within these same systems. Significant positive changes in mind and body systems have been repeatedly documented when techniques are used that purposefully create feelings of appreciation, gratitude and unconditional love. The voluntary triggering of these emotional states was found to increase coherence in both heart rhythm and in the autonomic nervous system which regulates heart rate, breathing and other vital functions. This results in a positive effect on all psychological and physical functions. It has also been found that people’s perception of stress shifted as they developed an inner resilience or “stress hardiness”. This translates to being less prone to react negatively to stress and being better able to actively manage and reduce unavoidable stress. That is all great news, but there is more. Improvements have also been documented with physical performance, creativity, problem solving and intuition.
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Counting Your Blessings: How Gratitude Improves Your Health
A third study reproduced the results among a group of people suffering from various neuromuscular diseases, including post-polio syndrome, which has symptoms similar to those in CFS. People using daily gratitude journals reported more satisfaction with their lives and were more optimistic about the future than the control group. Interestingly, the gratitude group also reported getting more sleep, spending less time awake before falling asleep and feeling more refreshed in the morning.
In a related study, researchers at the University of Connecticut found that gratitude can have a protective effect against heart attacks. Studying people who had experienced one heart attack, the researchers found that those patients who saw benefits and gains from their heart attack, such as becoming more appreciative of life, experienced a lower risk of having another heart attack.
The research on gratitude challenges the idea of a "set point" for happiness, a belief that, just as our body has a set point for weight, each person may have a genetically-determined level of happiness. The set point concept is supported by research that shows that people return to a characteristic level of happiness a short time after both unusually good and unusually bad events. But the research on gratitude suggests that people can move their set point upward to some degree, enough to have a measurable effect on both their outlook and their health.
Summarizing the findings from studies to date, Emmons says that those who practice grateful thinking "reap emotional, physical and interpersonal benefits." People who regularly keep a gratitude journal report fewer illness symptoms, feel better about their lives as a whole, and are more optimistic about the future. Emmons conclusion is that gratitude is a choice, one possible response to our life experiences.



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