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I’ve been having kind of a hard time lately.
This is the first real winter I’ve experienced in
a long time, so with the weather getting colder and the evenings getting darker, the pandemic
raging on and political upheaval surrounding us, I’ve been finding myself wondering how
we’re going to get through the next few icy, depressing months.
It’s hard to see the spring on the other side,
and it’s hard to not feel sad about all the things we’ve lost or missed out on this year.
But the other day, I was sitting at home trying to distract myself from feeling stuck inside
when I realized the silver lining.
With the cold and dark comes a new sort of comfort — the dreamy coziness of long nights
in front of the fireplace, sipping hot cider and tea, watching movies and starting art projects,
more time to write and sleep and carry on quiet conversations.
Even though I think winter will be tough, I’m really grateful to be here in my new home, with
my partner and my cats, with so many activities and hobbies I can explore in the coming months.
I’m really grateful for a lot of things, actually.
I have been incredibly lucky in many ways, and I’m thankful that despite the challenges of this year,
my family and I are happy, healthy, and relatively stable.
Even though I can’t really get together with my family in person
because of the pandemic, I know we’ll all be feeling a lot of gratitude for
what we /do/ have when we gather around our virtual Thanksgiving dinner table.
So this week, particularly as we approach the holiday, I’ve been thinking about
gratitude - /why/ we feel it, why it’s good for us, and perhaps most mysterious of all,
how it manifests in the brain. Here’s what I’ve figured out.
Gratitude is, in essence, a positive feeling
that’s experienced in response to receiving kindness or assistance from another entity.
We feel appreciation for the generosity of others, and it makes us feel...good!
While gratitude might sound like kind of a weird thing to try and study scientifically,
there are actually entire research centers working on understanding how being appreciative
affects our brains and our mental health.
The Positive Psychology Center at the University of Pennsylvania
and the Greater Good Science Center at the University of California Berkeley are both
places that support research on happiness, compassion, and gratitude, among other things.
Broadly, they’re interested in better
understanding how to protect and foster human well-being.
The findings from these institutions and others in the last couple of decades have begun to provide
some interesting pictures of how and why gratitude is good for us, individually and collectively.
Psychologically, gratitude is associated with an increased sense of well-being.
People who maintain a sense of gratitude report a whole bunch of positive emotions,
like feeling less stressed, less depressed, and having stronger relationships.
Grateful people also tend to be more resilient to trauma.
Some of this is probably linked to coping strategies — grateful people tend to use
more positive coping strategies when they encounter difficulties in life,
like getting support from other people, growing from their experiences, reframing
their challenges, and working out plans to address obstacles.
On the flip side, they’re less likely to use negative coping strategies,
like denying there’s a problem, abusing substances, or blaming themselves.
But it can be kind of hard to know how, exactly,
gratitude is having these positive effects on an individual’s life.
Like, maybe if a person is *already* less stressed or sleeps better, they’re more
able to feel grateful about their current circumstances — on paper, it could end up
looking like gratitude is good for sleep or stress levels, when it’s really the other way around.
So researchers had to actually create situations where some volunteers
were forced to think grateful thoughts, while other control volunteers were not.
In one study from the early 2000s, a group of American college students were asked to keep
a gratitude journal, where they wrote about things that they were grateful for,
while others wrote about less positive emotions, like things that annoyed them.
Their results showed that just writing about things they were grateful for led the students
to feel better about their lives as a whole and to have more optimism for the upcoming week.
They also found some evidence that gratitude journaling was linked to increased physical
activity and improved sleep — results that are supported by more recent research as well.
Proponents of gratitude argue that it’s beneficial because it basically
shifts your focus away from your negative emotions to your healthy ones.
When you’re spending your time thinking about how grateful you are to your sister
for making you soup when you’re sick, you’re not spending as much time thinking about how
annoyed it is that being sick means you can’t spend time with friends.
That doesn’t mean that feeling negative emotions is bad, or that you should avoid it,
but rather that maintaining a sense of gratitude about your life and the people
around you can help keep you focused on the positive instead of dwelling on the negative.
Still, psychology is something that’s kind of nebulous to me.
I know it’s real and it works, but I’m a biologist.
I wanted to look beyond the psychology and dig a little bit more into the neuroscience.
What happens in the brain when I’m feeling grateful for my turkey and mashed potatoes?
It’s only been in the last fifteen years or so that neuroscientists
have really tried to understand what gratitude looks like in the brain.
There’s some (small) evidence that individual differences in proneness to gratitude
might be linked to differences in grey matter volume in some areas of the cortex.
Really interestingly, at least one study has linked relationship satisfaction and a sense
of gratitude to a specific genetic variation in a gene affecting oxytocin secretion.
Sometimes called the “love hormone”, oxytocin is secreted by the pituitary gland,
and it’s important for social bonding and feelings of empathy.
Apparently, that also includes gratitude!
Other research has looked directly at brain activity.
In one study, scientists took two groups of participants - one who
had written gratitude letters for people they appreciated,
and one who hadn’t - and stuck them in an fMRI machine to look at their brain activity.
While in the fMRI scanner, they had the volunteers do a “pay it forward” task,
where they were given money and were told to pass it on to a charitable cause if they felt grateful.
Participants who reported feeling more grateful were, of course, more likely to give more money
to a charitable cause — and, interestingly, they showed increased activity and sensitivity in
their medial prefrontal cortex, a brain region associated with learning and decision making.
The researchers interpreted these results as indicating that people who are more grateful
are more attentive toward how they express that gratitude.
Another fMRI study pulled from the stories of
Holocaust survivors who had strong feelings of gratitude
for the people who had sheltered them and provided life saving food and clothing during the war.
The scientists had participants imagine they were survivors themselves
and think about how they would feel if they received such gifts.
Participants who reported feeling more grateful showed higher levels of activity
not only in the medial prefrontal cortex, but also the anterior cingulate cortex,
a brain region associated with attention, motivation, and modulation of emotional responses.
These brain regions are important for a lot of our higher-order cognition and decision making,
including our personalities, our understanding of other people’s minds,
social bonding, and our morality.
So essentially, it seems that when we feel grateful or when we express
gratitude, we feel more connected to others,
are better able to empathize, and that in turn improves our social awareness and relationships.
Why does this happen at all?
Why bother feeling gratitude?
Well, we really don’t have a clear idea - like I said, this is a pretty new field.
But if I had to guess, like so many things, I’d say it’s probably evolutionary
advantageous in some way. It’s not too hard to understand how that might be.
Humans are super social creatures, and we’ve evolved to thrive in highly
interconnected groups with a lot of social bonds to others around us.
Gratitude is associated with relationship satisfaction and improved communication,
as well as personal well-being and reduced stress.
If an emotion feels good, we’re inclined to seek it out again in
the future - and maintaining a healthy sense of gratitude for
the gifts and assistance we receive from others is good for maintaining a society!
On a personal level, I totally believe that gratitude is good for me.
While being grateful doesn’t erase the challenges in my life,
it helps me remember all of the ways in which I’m lucky to be where I am,
and to acknowledge all of the people who have helped support me.
It makes me a little less resentful, and a little more resilient.
So I think I’ll hold on to my gratitude as tight as I can
during these upcoming winter months — I think I’ll need it!
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What are you grateful for this fall, brainiacs?
Let me know in the comments.
Thanks for watching this episode of Neuro Transmissions!
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where we talk about all kinds of topics like this one.
Until our next transmission, I’m Alie Astrocyte. Over and out.