Just One Thing - Count Your Blessings By Dr Michael Mosley

let's see we'd all like some quick and simple ways to improve our health but we're bombarded with often conflicting advice so if you were going to do just one thing to improve your mental and physical well-being what should it be maybe a few squats to enhance your brain or more bacteria to improve your mood or even a cold show to boost your immune system I'm Dr Michael and this is just one thing where each episode we'll explore one thing you can start doing tomorrow to improve your health or life in ways you might not expect let's see had a lovely early morning walk and uh yeah enjoyed my cold CH for a change what I'm doing at the moment is counting my blessings by writing a few good things down on my computer over the last year many of us have had our lives turned upside down some have responded by getting angry and depressed while others have found ways to become more appreciative of Life the idea that you should count your blessings may sound a bit oldfashioned but there is solid science behind the claims that getting into the habit of expressing gratitude will not only make you feel better but can actually rewire our brain with lasting effects that's why right now I'm writing down a list of things that I'm grateful for in fact today's just one thing is all about the science of gratitude exploring how it can not only make you feel happier but lower your blood pressure and improve your sleep but would you do it hi there my name is m and I'm a fitness instructor I'm 31 years old my current schedule at the moment is generally quite busy the reason I like to do the journaling practice is just to see how I can improve on my own Wellness as well as learning a bit bit more about Wess so I'm looking forward to trying this process and letting you know how it [Music] goes we've asked Nathan to write down three things he's grateful for every night before he goes to sleep expressing gratitude is part of the positive psychology movement and not surprisingly a lot of the research has been done in the USA a study of 200 students there found that writing gratitude lists for 9 weeks resulted in higher rates of happiness and less physical illness the students also began doing more exercise perhaps because they were feeling better about life in another study patients suffering from a range of painful neuromuscular diseases were asked to write down five things they were grateful for every day for 3 weeks those who counted Their Blessings reported significantly less pain as well as better sleep than a control group and perhaps most surprisingly in another study where people were asked to cultivate feelings of gratefulness researchers saw changes in the brain with greater activation in the medial prefrontal cortex the area of your brain associated with decision- making and social reward why should practicing being grateful have these effects I'll be talking with an expert a bit later on but before I do it is worth pointing out that not all the research has produced glowingly positive results and if you have serious concerns about your mental health then it is important you talk to your GP but if like me you simply tend to dwell on the dark side of life then this may help right time to check back in with Nathan and find out how he is getting on I'm sitting down to write down uh the things I'm grateful for at the end of the day already it seems to be a bit difficult to find the time at night to start gratitude journaling generally because when I go to bed I just want to liter to pass out after a full day so I would probably start to try and do it in the morning cuz it will be far more convenient and it's a good way I think to start off today nonetheless I'm sitting here now with my diary and in reflection there's quite a lot of things I'm really grateful about this has been a good day [Music] today so we know that counting your blessings can make you feel better about your life but how strong is the evidence that he does anything more than that Dr fucha sirua is a researcher at the University of Sheffield investigating gratitude self-compassion and their role in health and well-being so Dr Sira can you tell me about your research into gratitude a lot of the research that I've done into gratitude is looked at um the uh potential benefits of gratitude um in ongoing stressful situations uh specifically people living with chronic health conditions because when you're living with a chronic health condition it's very much uh like you're living with an ongoing stress or you've got a lot of pain and functional limitations to to deal with how do you get people to Express gratitude so there's a number of of ways that are that are used in research and and that have been shown to be effective um is that one of the simplest ways is just asking people to think about three things that they're grateful for that day and often these are events that are triggered by other people so we refer to this as a benefit triggered gratitude um where somebody has done something nice for us and that might you know make us feel grateful um but sometimes it can just be a general sense of gratitude you know if you wake up and you know maybe you didn't have much interaction with other people but you could have just noticed it was a bright sunny day and you were just grateful um for that and for the opportunity maybe to to get outside and enjoy that in your studies do you ask people to write it down to keep a sort of gratitude um journal in some of the research that my clinical students have done yes we've we've looked at um the sort of idea of a gratitude um Journal where you get people either daily or every other couple of days to write about something that um they were grateful for that that day so that's often how we do it but we also study gratitude as a more of a dispositional tendency as well um so you can think about gratitude as being uh along a Continuum for those moments where we feel grateful where somebody's done something for us but over time we might develop something more of a dispositional gratefulness or grateful mindset we call this a trait gratitude and so some of the research that I've done especially with chronic um illness populations has looked at uh people who are have tendency to be grateful and the effects it might have on their their mental and physical well-being why might being grateful expressing gratitude writing about it why does it have the effects you're describing um now that's that's that's sort of one of those big questions out there there's a lot of different theories um on this and Depends Al also on the effects that you're looking at so um when you think about sort of the effects on things such as sleep for example it may be some of the research suggests that um what Fe being gratitude does is it puts you in a more positive state it opens up your perspective um and allows you to um focus more on the positive and appreciate that rather than thinking about sort of all the worries of the day which can interfere with your sleep um and other other um types of outcomes such as uh pain relief for example um and some of the research we've done on health behaviors it there's similar potential channels there through the sort of decreasing of stress and decreasing of of negative thoughts and feelings and amplifying some of more the positive feelings um that people have about themselves and about how they view the world um so this I mean some people see it's a coping mechanism gratitude others see it has to do with mood regulation I think it has a variety of different effects and certainly in the research we've conducted um we've not been able to pinpoint one you know exact mechanism I think it's gratitude operates through a number of different mechanisms to to bring these uh potential benefits to health and well being no I can absolutely see the psychological benefits of expressing gratitude and indeed um receiving lovely messages from people but what about the physical benefits I'm read for example that um when you Express gratitude it has an impact on your immune system yes so there's there are some research that I'm starting to look at the impact on the immune system and I think the the general idea here is that if we think about um the expression of gratitude is something that can uh reduce our stress levels so it makes us see things from a broader perspective instead of that very narrow view of things that that we tend to see things through when our fight ORF flight mechanisms are are activated and we're sort of in that full stress response um and so you would think then that if it's downregulating our stress response should also be having a a positive impact on um you know the bio correlates of the stress response one of them being inflammation and risk for inflammation of course inflammation is a really important marker because it it's a risk marker for the development of a number of chronic diseases I believe you've been doing some research looking into the way that cultivating uh grateful mindset can also alter your tendency to do healthy things can you tell me about that um yeah so we looked at everything from getting good night sleep to eating healthy getting your five a day regular exercise managing your stress reducing junk food and caffeine all you know the full range what we consider sort of a healthy wellness type behaviors um and we looked at these across um a number of different samples and not just one study here but actually looking across 17 different samples um and almost 5,000 people and what we found is that in each of the samples um if you were more more likely to have this A Grateful mindset you're also more likely to engage in healthy behaviors so that was kind of really good news and it's actually what some of the other research is suggesting they're finding these these positive Health outcomes and they're suggesting it has to do because the fact that people are grateful practice Better Health behaviors but we're also curious as to why so why would being grateful make you more likely to want to take care of your health and we looked at their future orientation in other words How likely they were to think about their future selves and to be very future and forward-looking um and the reason we included this particular mechanism is because we know that um being future oriented in general is is one of the predictors of being able to take care of one Health behaviors um so we thought well maybe there's some link with gratitude even though gratitude is very much in the present and in fact we did find some support for that we found that the link between um being grateful and having better practice of Health behaviors was explained in part by people's uh people who are grateful thinking more about their future self um and so this is kind of an interesting finding but it actually is it makes some sense if you take it and link it up with some of the recent research has been looking at the um neural changes and neural activity um and neural profiles of people who are grateful and what that research suggests is that the areas of the brain that are activated when people experience um gratitude um or when they undergo a great you know gratitude intervention um are the same areas of the brain that have to do with our capacity you think about the outcomes of our actions in other words our future thinking so there seems to be some overlap there um between those different research streams that's absolutely brilliant and I am very grateful for your time thank you very much okay thank you I'm grateful for having the chance to talk about this research so it's not just about our emotional well-being gratitude can also have some longlasting effects on our physical health as well time to check back in with Nathan and see if he's feeling grateful for our help hi there it's been a whole week now of doing my gratitude journaling uh which I moved to the morning uh because it felt a lot easier for me to collect my thoughts without being tired from an obvious perspective it just kind of makes you think about what you're happy about it makes you uh appreciate what you have it just kind of broadens your mindset a little bit I think into what you should be grateful for and what you are grateful for and then just lets you reflect on other things that have happened generally in life for this so it's been a very nice experience I will keep doing it in the mornings very grateful that I got the opportunity to practice gratitude Gan um I would recommend it definitely Dan said his job is going well like Nathan I've actually quite enjoyed writing down the simple things I'm grateful for it does immediately change your thought process from negative to positive and it's those feel-good chemicals that can really change your mood and in the long term you can even rewire your brain on top of that the potential for better heart health and sleep and lower blood pressure and if you can get that from just writing a few things down each day I'd say it's worth it so that's it it's just one thing you can incorporate into your daily routine which really could benefit your body and life if you want to hear more of the series