How gratitude changes your brain

Imagine living with someone who always reminds you of the beautiful things in your life. Someone who shows you in the morning that the crispy Froot Loops in your cereal look just like a rainbow and which birds you can hear chirping on your way to work. When you lie in bed in the evening, they remind you that the blanket is warm and protective over you and, quite incidentally, that negative emotions such as envy, anger, or fear seem to vanish in their presence. [1] [1] Please flex your gratitude muscle: www.spiegel.de/Psychologie/Dankbarkeit In fact, someone like that already lives inside you. Or rather, SHE already lives inside you. The name of this good lady? Gratitude!

Your brain as a house

In our brain, millions of nerve cells bundle together into various regions that are responsible for the most diverse things: for speaking, roller skating, the thought of Halle Berry [2] [2] The Halle Berry cell: www.welt.de/Eine-Nervenzelle-erkennt-Halle-Berry  or, in other words, gratitude. Very simply, you can imagine the brain as a house with many thousands of apartments in which little helpers live who are particularly knowledgeable in their respective areas of expertise.

An untrained brain is more harmful to health than an untrained body. George Bernard Shaw

What gratitude does

To see how the regular use of gratitude changes the brain, researchers from the University of Indiana asked their participants to practice gratitude for three weeks by expressing their gratitude to someone in a letter. [4] [4] Kini et al. (2016): The effects of gratitude expression on neural activty They were allowed to decide for themselves who they wrote to and whether they really wanted to send the letter. It had already been observed in other studies that the guinea pigs felt significantly better afterwards. [5] [5] Jackowska et al. (2015): The impact of a brief gratitude intervention on subjective well-being, biology and sleep But what's new is that this effect could also be proven in a brain scan: Writing the letters created a change in the structures of the medial prefrontal cortex – a region associated with gratitude and self-referential mental activities. [6] [6] Fox, Kaplan and Damasio (2015): Neural correlates of gratitude The brain was, so to speak, remodelled by gratitude.

If you sometimes can't think of anything you could be grateful for, then we have a few ideas for you here.

Let gratitude move in with you  

This clearly demonstrates: gratitude isn’t just a feeling that floats around somewhere. It sits in your head and becomes more and more anchored there the more grateful you are. Every time you consciously focus your attention on something you are grateful for, the neural connections in your brain are strengthened – much like turning up the heat in the room and making gratitude feel really cosy.

And then it's like well-practised mental math: You don't have to think long about what you are grateful for, it becomes more and more of an automatic process. Two times two is four and I'm grateful for ...!

Are you looking for your personal moving helper to let gratitude move in with you? Then take a look at our 6-Minute-Diary here :-)

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This post is by Frauke Harlis. She loves writing just as much as psychology and has studied both. When she's not typing or entertaining her two offspring, she lies on the deck of her houseboat and looks for cloud shapes.

Sources:

[1] Please flex your gratitude muscle: www.spiegel.de/Psychologie/Dankbarkeit

[2] The Halle Berry cell: www.welt.de/Eine-Nervenzelle-erkennt-Halle-Berry 

[3] Thinking helps: www.zeit.de/Hirnforschung

[4] Kini et al. (2016): The effects of gratitude expression on neural activty

[5] Jackowska et al. (2015): The impact of a brief gratitude intervention on   subjective well-being, biology and sleep

[6] Fox, Kaplan and Damasio (2015): Neural correlates of gratitude