The Profound Health Benefits of Being Grateful

November 24th, 2023

By Dr. Joseph Mercola

Contributing writer for Wake Up World

Gratitude is a simple practice that can have profound effects on your health and well-being. Its underpinnings are believed to be principles of cooperation that were pivotal in the development of human communication and social reciprocity, and the ability to experience gratitude to others is a fundamental feature of human cognition.1

The positive effects linked to gratitude include social, psychological and physical benefits,2 which increase the more you make gratitude a regular part of your daily routine.

“The limits to gratitude’s health benefits are really in how much you pay attention to feeling and practicing gratitude,” noted neuroscientist Glenn Fox, Ph.D., a gratitude expert at the University of Southern California. “It’s very similar to working out, in that the more you practice, the better you get. The more you practice, the easier it is to feel grateful when you need it.”3

How Gratitude Changes Your Brain

Gratitude has distinct neurobiological correlates, including in brain regions associated with interpersonal bonding and stress relief.4 When Fox and colleagues elicited gratitude in 23 female subjects, via stories of survivors of the Holocaust, “ratings of gratitude correlated with brain activity in the anterior cingulate cortex and medial prefrontal cortex,” which are associated with moral cognition, value judgment and theory of mind.5

Individual differences in proneness to gratitude are also linked to increased gray matter volume in the brain,6 and it’s possible that it elicits long-term changes in your psyche. Fox grew deeply interested in gratitude after his mother’s death from ovarian cancer. During her illness, he would send her studies on the benefits of gratitude in cancer patients, and she kept a gratitude journal in her last years.

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