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People who express gratitude for the people and things in their life at the Thanksgiving table are helping their health and self-confidence, according to a University of Iowa professor who has made the physical benefits of gratitude a subject of her research.
Harleah Buck, University of Iowa professor and director of the Barbara and Richard Csomay Center of Gerontological Excellence, has spent her career researching “non-pharmacological interventions,” or, as she described it, treatments or methods that people can employ to better their health that don’t involve medication.
“I’m really interested in helping people find ways to improve their quality of life that doesn’t include another pill,” Buck said. “But more importantly, there are ways that you do it for yourself, so it makes you feel more in control over what’s going on.”
Many people, especially older adults, deal with the issue of “polypharmacy,” Buck said, where they take multiple medications for various reasons. Sometimes these drugs interact with each other, leading to unforeseen consequences, so Buck works to find ways of helping people that could lower the need for further medication.
It was this avenue of thinking that led her to the concept of gratitude. She was looking into literature on the subject while at the University of South Florida, where she worked from 2016-2020 before coming to the UI, when then-doctoral student Lakeshia Cousin expressed an interest in researching the link between gratitude and heart health.
Buck said she agreed to advise Cousin, and over the course of the next few years, the two worked together to publish two studies about gratitude and how it impacts heart health and people’s determination to take care of themselves, and a third showing the longevity of these effects.
Cousin is now an assistant professor in the University of Florida College of Nursing and assistant director of community outreach and engagement in the UF Health Cancer Center.
Over those three studies, what we really established is that gratitude is good for your heart.
– Harleah Buck, University of Iowa professor and director of the Barbara and Richard Csomay Center of Gerontological Excellence
Their first paper, published in 2018, brought together 13 different previous studies that included almost 4,000 participants to “establish the state of the science,” Buck said. It showed that gratitude does create physiological responses, including better response by blood vessels to stress and positive impacts on inflammatory markers.
“I expected the responses to be much more related to mood states, that you’re not as anxious, you’re not as depressed …,” Buck said. “The fact that it actually changes your body physically was new information to me.”
How does one measure gratitude? Buck said researchers use a “gratitude instrument” called the Gratitude Questionnaire-Six Item Form, or GQ-6. The questionnaire includes just six statements relating to gratitude, which participants rank their agreement with on a scale from one to seven.
The questionnaire has been “widely used” and compared to other methods of measuring gratitude, Buck said, proving its effectiveness.
The second study looked directly at the relationship between gratitude and practices like medication adherence, which some cardiac patients, who take many medications, have trouble with. Buck said they wanted to use secondary data to see whether practicing gratitude would positively impact someone’s belief in their actions making a difference in their health, which this study proved.
For the third report, Buck said they collected primary data to examine those same relationships between gratitude, health and good health practices, which they confirmed remained.
“Over those three studies, what we really established is that gratitude is good for your heart,” Buck said.
In order to garner the benefits gratefulness can bring, Buck said people need to express their gratitude for good things in their life, big and small. Gratitude tips and strategies are easy to find online, she said, and many are fairly simple.
Incorporating gratitude into your day doesn’t need to be a huge undertaking, Buck said, but can be slipped into habits that have already been formed. Using journaling as an example, she said something as small as adding a sentence about what you’re grateful for in each entry is a good way to keep those thoughts in your mind and provide proof of positive things that can be looked back on later.
“We tend to remember the hard things, but sometimes we lose track of the small good things that just keep us going from day to day,” Buck said.
There are also ways to spread gratitude, and hopefully the health benefits it can cause, to the people around you, Buck said. If you say you’re grateful for something to a friend, they’re more likely to agree and might even express their own gratitude for something else.
While it can be helpful to vent to a group of friends and get negative emotions out in a healthy way, Buck said she’s seen the positive results that come with telling those you hang out with regularly that you’re grateful for them and the space you create together.
“The underlying principle is emotional contagion, that we catch each other’s emotions,” Buck said. “So the same way, if somebody yawns, more people are likely to yawn.”
This article was first published by the Iowa Capital Dispatch, part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Iowa Capital Dispatch maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Kathie Obradovich for questions: info@iowacapitaldispatch.com. Follow Iowa Capital Dispatch on Facebook and X.