The gift of being born and embodied is remarkable! We have within us abundant resources for healing, staying well, and thriving. Living gratefully has a key role to play in each of these outcomes, as proven by the science of gratitude.
Focusing solely on the spiritual benefits of gratitude would neglect the physiological benefits and vice versa. Together, the spiritual and health benefits of living gratefully provide a transformative way to live and the opportunity to thrive.
Your ability to live a meaningful and good life corresponds to your mind-body connection. Every single human has a biological superhighway running from the stem of the brain to the gut. On this superhighway, we have opportunities to cultivate better physical and emotional health for ourselves. According to wisdom traditions and the science of gratitude, living gratefully is one sure way to strengthen our mind-body-spirit connection.
Here’s the science that explains how:
The vagus nerve starts at the base of your brain and runs all the way down into your heart, lungs, and gut. This nerve controls your mood, immune response, digestion, and heart rate. It is the main component of your parasympathetic nervous system. How you perceive and respond to the world around you literally affects your health. For example, many of us have experienced how feeling anxious leads to feeling our hearts pounding in our chests. According to Dr. Stephen Porges, who developed the Polyvagal Theory, the vagus nerve helps to mediate trauma responses. It’s where we experience fight or flight and a sense of safety, and it can also cause us to freeze or shut down when facing a threat. The vagus nerve is incredibly important to our health and where so many of the benefits of gratitude originate.
While there are many benefits associated with living gratefully — enhanced perspective, stronger social bonds, greater care and appreciation for self and others, and a deeper sense of meaning — all of these outcomes are entangled with the physiological benefits of gratitude.
Science of Gratitude: Three Benefit Zones
1. Physiological benefits of gratitude
Research finding: Living gratefully is a protective factor that increases longevity and decreases mortality.
How: Researchers at Harvard discovered that gratitude increases your longevity and decreases mortality because it significantly improves cardiovascular health. Heart health is improved by lowering stress and depression. This study saw nearly a 10% decrease in mortality rates among grateful people.
How to practice: We recommend changing your perspective. Stress is often caused by how we perceive and respond to the world around us. Oftentimes, when our perspective is expanded we observe what is working well or see something we might otherwise have overlooked. We begin to make connections and this also helps decrease loneliness and non-clinical depression. By practicing Stop.Look.Go you can expand your perspective and lower your stress.
2. Social benefits of gratitude
Research finding: Gratitude rewires your brain for connection.
How: According to Dr. Christina Karns at the University of Oregon, gratitude changes our neural pathways. By using an MfRI to study patients, she and her team saw that gratitude increases our enjoyment of others and makes us more charitable towards them. In an age of othering, gratitude is critically important for tolerance, patience, and compassion. Gratitude is also a positive social emotion that allows us to recognize that others have improved our lives through their contributions, whether through the nourishment of food, love, resources, companionship, or the interdependent web of relationships that sustains all of life.
How to Practice: We recommend expressing gratitude to others by: showing appreciation, receiving gratitude from others by giving of yourself to others in the forms of service and presence, and cultivating community. Expressing gratitude shows others they matter. Caring for the needs of another serves everyone. And building belonging fosters kindness and requires honesty and vulnerability among people. Better yet, when you make an improbable friend you learn about yourself and the complexity of the human situation, which makes you more empathic and understanding and more willing to be a helper.
3. Emotional and mental wellness benefits of gratitude
Research finding: Practicing gratitude reduces fear and anxiety.
How: Our perspective shapes our reality. Living gratefully is not toxic-positivity but an encounter with the fullness of life and all of its challenges and opportunities. Dr. Joel Wong and others have observed the crucial role gratitude plays in emotional, cognitive, and social functioning. Perhaps, most interestingly, as you form new neural pathways with gratitude, you will leave less room in your thoughts for perceiving and reacting fearfully. Researchers have also observed that practicing gratitude changes emotions in the brain and decreases anxiety, while also increasing feelings of well-being and motivation.
How to practice: According to Dr. Joel Wong and neuroscientist Dr. Josh Brown, gratitude is like a muscle that you need to train through practice. Practice requires commitment. It is not an occasional act that you do sometimes, when you feel like it, or when the conditions are just right. First commit, then practice, and then do it again and again. New neural pathways are forming every time you practice. You can begin with Stop.Look.Go. Every time you feel anxious or fearful, catch yourself having these thoughts and feelings. Then look for a clue in your life that challenges these thoughts. When you find it, revisit your observations and notice your evolving perspective.
Daily practice: Your pathway to better health through living gratefully
Practice isn’t about reaching completion or perfection. Practice is the habit of acquiring skills. Acquiring these life skills — becoming more resilient and experiencing wholeness — is a lifelong process. This is why living gratefully is a way of being, a day-to-day practice for responding to life with a trained and always emerging perspective.
If you want to live a good and healthy life that is full of meaning, the science of gratitude confirms that it’s time to practice living gratefully.
Photo by Ben Hickingbotham
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