Don’t you feel good being genuinely thankful to a person? Or well you know how journaling in the gratitude would change your whole mood? It turns out, the science behind those feelings is pretty remarkable.
“We actually think there are biological mechanisms at play that help contribute to this,” says Simon-Thomas. What exactly happens in our brains when we practice gratitude? What the researchers have found out is pretty freaking incredible. And we’re not just saying you feel a bit happier – we’re talking about measurable changes to your brain structure that can have a big impact on everything from anxiety to depression to how well you cope when life gets tough.
Let me sweep you on a quick ride through what scientists have learned about gratitude and the brain. Trust me, after this, you’re gonna have a whole new take on the simple act of the thank you.
Key Takeaways
- You get your natural reward hit – When you feel grateful, the parts of your brain that respond to chocolate or your favourite tunes light up, giving you that warm, satisfied feeling that follows indulging in a little of what you fancy
- It’s happiness boot camp – Gratitude acts as a type of “happiness” muscle, the more regularly you work it out, the stronger it gets – the easier you find it to think positively, and the quicker you can bounce back when life gets a little rough
- Small habits big results – Simply by writing down three things you are grateful for each day can increase your levels of happiness, help you become a more understanding person, and foster better relationships
- You become a magnet for goodness – It encourages your brain to look for things to feel optimistic about and it’s a nice virtuous cycle, as you naturally keep an eye out for more reasons to feel grateful
- But it’s for everyone – Whether you’re an eternal optimist or a remorseless cynic, your brain’s plasticity allows you to build up a stronger gratitude muscle.
“Gratitude is the bridge that connects your present moment to a life of abundance”
When psychologists talk about gratitude, they’re not referring to something vague or squishy or, ugh, hashtag-blessed. It’s that glow that comes over you when someone does something good to you, or when you see good in your life – it’s basically, how we acknowledge the good stuff that percolates to the top.
Here’s how the experts say it: gratitude is that warm, emotional response we have when we or notice a benefit we’ve received (or will receive) from someone else. It is not about something we had worked hard for, or something we felt we deserved – it is about recognizing when good things come to us as a result of other people’s kindness or just because grace had taken us by surprise.
Consider those moments – when someone you don’t even know holds a door for you, when someone you care about sends you a text just to check on you after a bad day or you get to see a sun setting magnificently beautiful at the end of a stressful week. That feeling of ‘wow, that’s really nice’ or ‘I’m so lucky this happened’ — that’s gratitude in motion.
The great thing about gratitude is how malleable it is. You can feel grateful to other people, to yourself for working your way through something hard, to nature for giving us that perfect weather day or to the higher power you might believe in. Not that it matters. Gratitude has this uncanny ability to nourish your soul and make you feel more connected with the world around you.
And what’s even better? Researchers have discovered that this simple human emotion actually has the power to heal. There’s a reason why, when we practice gratitude regularly, it doesn’t just give us warm fuzzies in the moment — it can actually make us happier, healthier people in the long run. It’s pretty amazing that such a natural, low cost thing can be so effective, no?
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How Gratitude Works
Try to remember the last time you felt truly grateful. Perhaps someone pitched in for you when you were overwhelmed or you experienced a lovely sunset on a bad day. What went on when that happened was more than the surge of pleasurable emotion you experienced — your brain kicked into high gear.
Gratitude works on so many levels in your noggin. First, there’s the paying attention part – your brain has to acknowledge that something good is happening. Then there is the thinking – thinking about what this good thing means to you. And then there’s the feeling component — that warm, positive emotion that makes you just want to smile, or perhaps even cry a bit.
“Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more.”
Your brain loves this process. When you express gratitude, what you’re really saying to your mind is “This is important. “That’s the sort of thing I want to pay attention to.” Your brain hears that and begins searching for other such moments.
Here’s where it gets particularly interesting: gratitude turns your focus away from what you lack to what you have. That doesn’t mean ignoring problems or acting as if everything is perfect. It’s to make part of a weight that you’re looking at so you’re not constantly staring at what’s wrong.
The super-cool part is how this shows up in your relationships. When you feel thankful toward someone, your brain lights up in the same regions of the brain associated with empathy and social bonding. That’s why gratitude makes you feel more connected to others and why grateful people are more likely to have strong relationships.
Gratitude brings happiness
Gratitude is associated with better interpersonal relationships, at home and at work (Gordon, Impett, Kogan, Oveis, & Keltner, 2012). It seems to have a rather deep and many-faceted connection to the concept of happiness. Maintaining or showing gratitude towards others or ourselves, encourages positive (especially joyful) emotions. These are also feelings that feel great and help you get and stay healthy and happy overall.
In British psychologist Robert Holden’s study of 100 adults in the workplace for example, 65 of them said that they thought “happiness was more important to ‘a good life’ than ‘success’ or ‘wealth’.” These professions should not be unhappy so to think happiness was more important than health is very interesting. He said that many mental health problems such as depression, anxiety and stress are the result of a lack of happiness.
Even small gestures such as gratitude journaling, giving compliments, or sending thank-you notes can add to our happiness and enhance our mental well-being. Couples who regularly show their gratitude toward one another are found in research to be more trusting, loyal and enduring.
Gratitude improves health
Feeling grateful isn’t just something that makes you feel warm and fuzzy (or sad and weepy) inside; it’s actually something that makes you healthier.
And individuals who keep gratitude journals report better sleep, less stress and more energy throughout the day. It’s as if thankfulness rewires your entire system for well-being.
The Quick Benefits:
- Improved sleep (rather than your mind running with worries, it relaxes)
- Lowered stress (you’re simply more robust against hits when they come)
- How about you? More energy (Thanking fuels excitement)!
- Increased emotional awareness (you connect more with yourself)
The cool part? And it sets up this positive cycle where when you feel grateful you’re healthier, which gives you more to feel grateful for. Simple practice, powerful results.
Gratitude builds professional commitment
You know how some colleagues just make everything feel okay? They’re the ones people actually want to work with, who get things done without drama and who — somehow, some way — even manage to make stressful projects feel manageable. Here’s their little secret: they’re awesome at gratitude.
This Year, Make Gratitude Work for You When employees feel and express gratitude at work, they transform — they create supportive colleagues and teams. They’re the ones who actually volunteer for side projects, the ones who go the extra mile without being asked, the ones who actually enjoy working with others, instead of viewing collaboration as a chore. It’s as if thankfulness flips a switch that causes work not to feel like work.
“Gratitude turns every day into a celebration, and every challenge into a stepping stone.”
Managers Who Get It It’s not the managers with the fanciest degrees who are the best bosses — it’s the ones who know how to say “thank you” and really mean it. Teams stick together better and do more when their managers are grateful. Why? It is because they feel visible, and valuable.”
These leaders spot good work, make sure everyone feels important to the team’s success and genuinely speak interactively with their people, not just speak at them.
The Ripple Effect And here is what’s really exciting – at work, gratitude is contagious. And once one person begins to truly appreciate others, it’s infectious. Next thing, you have a whole band that’s more connected and more motivated — and way more enjoyable to be with.
Leaders who are grateful don’t merely manage, they inspire. They are the ones who people respect not because they have to respect them, but because they want to respect them. And that kind of leadership? That’s what makes mundane workplaces places people actually want to go.
The Neuroscientific Research Into Gratitude
“Gratitude is the antidote to negativity; it transforms the way we see the world.”
Scientists began taking gratitude seriously about 20 years ago, and the technology we have today enables us to literally see what happens inside people’s brains when they are grateful. It’s pretty incredible stuff.
One of the paradigm-changing studies had individuals lie down inside brain scanners, thinking grateful thoughts. The researchers were able to see precisely what portions of the brain were lighting up. What they discovered was unexpected — acts of gratitude didn’t confine themselves to one particular region. It was lighting up networks across the brain, from those responsible for emotion to those related to decision making.
They found that when you think about the people who make you feel gratitude, your brain’s reward pathways become active – the same areas that are activated when you feast on the food you most enjoy or hear a song you love. So no wonder gratitude feels so naturally good and your brain wants more of it.
Other studies examined people who regularly meditate on gratefulness compared to those who do not. Their brains were strikingly different. The thankful meditators had thicker tissue in regions associated with learning and memory and their brains had stronger connections between the emotional and explicit thinking centers.
They included some of the most intriguing studies that used EEG machines to capture brain waves. They discovered that those who practiced gratitude had patterns of activation related to calm, peacefulness and alertness, and protection from anxiety. Their brains were actually humming at levels associated with a sense of well-being.
Recent researches even studied the effects of gratitude on the “malevolent mood system”, or “default mode network” — the things your brain does when it’s not doing anything in particular. The researchers found that more grateful participants had less activity in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, part of the brain’s network related to guilt and conscious processing of emotions. They had rested their minds and were the more tranquil for it.
How Gratitude Affects the Brain
When you experience gratitude, your brain sends a tiny squirt of reward chemicals. Your body floods with dopamine – that’s your brain’s way of saying: “yes, this is good, we should do more of this”. Serotonin increases, stabilizing your mood and making you feel content. Oxytocin also is released, which increases your sense of connection to other people.
But the feel-good chemicals are only part of it. In truth, gratitude turns on your parasympathetic nervous system (the one that kicks in during “rest and digest” mode). This the naturally opposite of the response in the stress process. Your heart rate decreases, your blood pressure lowers and your body moves into repair and recovery mode.
When you’re in a grateful state, the part of your brain that’s always looking for danger — the amygdala — goes inactive. “Your prefrontal cortex — the part of the brain that manages clear thinking and emotional regulation —becomes more activated.” That means you’re quite literally thinking more clearly and feeling more emotionally balanced.
Gratitude practice also helps your hippocampus — the area of your brain responsible for forming new memories, and managing stress. That could help to explain why people who feel grateful also have better memories for positive events, and quickly recover from negative experiences.
One of the most exciting aspects of gratitude is that it’s not necessary to fully develop a grateful person in order to experience these brain-changing benefits. It means that practicing gratitude isn’t just a feel-good exercise of fleeting value; it is rewiring your brain in ways that could improve your mental health.
Does Gratitude Change the Brain?
This is when the studies start getting really interesting – Yes, gratitude is physically changing your brain structure. And we’re not talking about just subtle, minor tweaks here; we’re talking about measurable differences that appear on brain scans.
Studies using MRI technology have shown that people who practice gratitude have more gray matter in a couple of regions of the brain. The prefrontal cortex, the CEO of your brain, who makes decisions and manages your emotions, actually grows thicker with gratitude practice. There is also a denser density in the regions associated with empathy, consideration of the perspectives of others.
Even the links between brain regions — the highways of white matter that connect different regions — become more efficient with gratitude. The bridge from your emotional brain to your thinking brain becomes stronger, meaning better emotional regulation and more integrated decision making.
The pace of these changes is remarkably swift. Structural differences have even been documented following just a few months of regularly giving thanks. But the people who exhibit the most transformative changes are those who have been practicing gratitude for months or years.
You don’t have to spend years training to be a meditation guru to realize these gains. Practicing simple things like writing down three things you are grateful for each day, sending thank-you notes or taking a moment to appreciate something beautiful can help to initiate the brain changes. The key is frequency, not the degree of intensity.
What’s even cooler is this stuff seems to stick around even if we take a break for a little bit. The way I think about it is like your brain learning and holding on to it, although continuing to meditate undoubtedly sustains and strengthens the benefits.
Joy, Gratitude, and the Brain
Joy and gratitude are best friends in your brain — because when they connect, they grow stronger. There are two different emotions, but they share a huge portion of the same neural real estate and have this gorgeous way of sort of amplifying one another.
When you feel both grateful and happy at the same time — when you’re laughing with friends, for example, and suddenly feel awash in gratitude for those friendships — your brain’s pleasure circuits are inundated. It’s like getting a double hit of the good stuff.
Here’s something pretty cool: gratitude can actually produce happiness, even if you aren’t feeling particularly happy. When people think about things they are grateful for, brain scans show activity in areas that control this emotion. You are quite literally conjuring up positive feelings through thinking of things to be grateful for.
Anxiety and Gratitude
If you suffer from anxiety, you’d want to read this section. These studies on gratitude and anxiety are revealing some really promising results that could literally transform the way we approach dealing with anxious thoughts and feelings.
Anxiety is essentially when your brain’s alarm system is stuck in the “on” position. Your amygdala is always on the lookout for danger, your mind going down paths to the worst of them, and the thinking part of your brain has a hard time getting a word in edgewise. It’s exhausting and overwhelming.
Gratitude And Grief
This may seem an odd pairing — how can you feel grateful when you’re grieving? But the evidence about gratitude and grief leads to some really deep findings about the ways we can locate light even amidst the gloom.
Grief is one of the most difficult emotions our brains can process. The parts of the brain involved in attachment and bonding go into overdrive producing that deep ache that comes in missing something or someone that is important to us. The old way of thinking was that we had to go through the pain first before we could heal it.
But new research suggests that positive emotions like gratitude can also coexist with grief and that these emotions may be vital to helping us cope with loss. This isn’t to say that we should trade grief for gratitude, or to pretend that pain doesn’t hurt. It’s learning to find moments of gratitude amid the pain.
The Relationship Between Resilience And Gratitude
Resilience – that state of bouncing back after tough times, and of continuing to push on when life is challenging – is actually very closely related to gratitude in some very interesting ways. What the research suggests is that people who count their blessings aren’t just happier; they are also more mentally and more resilient.
Resilient people have several patterns in their brains during stress: They produce more emotional and physical control, recover more quickly and can find meaning in painful experiences. Experience of gratitude similarly strengthens all of these same brain systems, which may explain why grateful people are happier and less depressed and anxious, and more satisfied with their lives. Perhaps this is also why viewing a life through the lens of appreciation can counteract patterns of neural plasticity and build more resilient psyches.
The regular practice of gratitude, it turns out, actually strengthens the connections between your emotional brain and your rational one. And when adversity comes your way, this increased connectedness allows you to more effectively manage your emotional response and thoughtfully consider solutions. You are then less likely to become overwhelmed and more able to remain functional when things go awry.
Gratitude and Stress
And now, stress — something too many of us are all too familiar with. Chronic stress is as if the alarm on your body’s stress system is going off nonstop, flooding you with stress hormones and never giving your system a break from its fight-or-flight state. It’s bad for your health, draining to live with.
And this is where being grateful is just so damn useful. When you become grateful, your brain literally ceases to function in stress mode. The amygdala settles down, your parasympathetic nervous system takes over, and your body shifts from crisis mode to recovery mode.
In fact, researchers have measured stress hormones, like cortisol, in people both before and after doing these kinds of practices. They are promising; even short gratitude practices can lower these stress hormones in minutes. People who engage in gratitude consistently have long-term changes in their stress hormone balance.
A Look at Depression and Gratitude
Depression feels as though your brain’s reward system is turned off. Things that used to make you happy suddenly leave you flat, your inner critic starts yelling and won’t let up, and it can feel as though you’re stuck in a gray fog that won’t lift. The science of gratitude and depression provides some quantified hope for people with these difficulties.
The brain of the depressed person exhibits some very clear features: less activity in regions responsible for clear thinking and regulating emotions, more activity in those responsible for rumination and self-criticism, and a reward system that simply fails to respond to positive experiences the way it should.
Many such patterns seem to be directly counteracted by the practice of gratitude. When people with depression experience gratitude, this changes in the brain seem to be associated with a sense of relief and reduction of negative feelings. The brain’s reward system also becomes more activated, which may help to re-awaken a person’s capacity to experience pleasure and positive emotions, too.
How Does Gratitude Impact Mental Health?
At the end of all this research, the big picture is extremely clear: Gratitude has multiple benefits for mental health. And we’re not just talking about being a little happier — we’re talking about feeling significantly better than before in terms of how your brain handles emotions, stress and relationships.
At a simpler level, gratitude raises the strengths in your emotional regulation system. [The prefrontal cortex] gets better connected to the emotion centers, so all of your emotions are toned down. You are less likely to be swept away by negative emotions and more likely to be able to hold on to positive ones.
It also appears that gratitude protects us from something psychologists call “hedonic adaptation” — we adjust quickly to good things and take them for granted. Gratitude results in mood and life satisfaction being elevated for extended periods following a positive event. Their brains literally take more pleasure in good experiences.
A Take-Home Message
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The science is there — practicing gratitude in real, measurable ways changes your brain in ways that can lead to anxiety, depression, stress, and overall mental health relief. These are not simply brief mood boosts; they are lasting changes in how your brain operates.
It’s that gratitude is available even to people who may not be grateful all the time, that in every moment, no matter how bad, I can always find something to be grateful for. Because your brain is malleable, anyone can increase their gratitude by simply practicing it — no matter where they are starting from.
And the practices don’t need to be complex or to take up much time. Simple activities — such as taking time each day to jot down three things you are thankful for, or sending a note of thanks to someone, or when things get tough, trying to summon up something you’re grateful for and then writing it down — can help you tap into this beneficial circuit. It’s about being consistent, not perfect.
Gratitude is not about denying problems or faking positivity. It’s framing a more equitable understanding of the factors that are hard, and those that are a gift. This balance actually makes you stronger and better able to cope with whatever life throws your way.
In a world that can seem obsessed with what is wrong, what is missing and what is scary, gratitude provides a scientifically-researched path for focusing on the good and contributing to our own lives and the lives of others in a positive way. And, practicing gratitude is not only nice — it may be one of the smartest things you do for your mental health.
The brain you have today is not the brain you are stuck with. By routinely tuning in to what’s good in your life, you have the ability to rewire your neural networks for happiness, connection and resilience. And that’s something to be thankful for.
