# The Health Benefits of Gratitude A WORD FROM THE DOCTOR Language: en Author: Vincent “John” Waldron, MD Gladys, Virginia Original issue: The Heartbeat of The Remnant, Winter 2025 Source pages: 30–32 Read article: Original PDF: Winter\-2025\-Remnant\.pdf [The Heartbeat of The Remnant, Winter 2025]() “Dr\. Waldron, you know, last week something good almost happened to me\.” Edith was looking anywhere but at me, as though it was hard to admit such a pleasant fact\. “Really?” I asked her\. Edith was not someone who ever had anything nice happen to her – at least that I had heard her admit to anyone else in the human race\. “Yes\. Almost\. You know my son William picks up my medicines for me at the pharmacy?” I did know this and nodded\. Edith had given up driving a couple of years before, and she relied heavily on William to continue living independently in her rapidly advancing years\. “Well, while William was at the pharmacy, he put my name in for a drawing for an electric scooter – a sort of power chair that would help me get around my home\.” Once again, I nodded\. “That would be a big help to you, wouldn’t it?” “You would think,” my patient said acidly\. “Well, what do you know, but I won the scooter? I’ve never won anything before, except a gift certificate to an ice cream store for winning a spelling bee in fifth grade – and I really earned that by being a good speller\. The winning word was chrysanthemum – I can still spell it today\!” “That’s amazing,” I said, wondering what the catch was\. “Well, they delivered the scooter last week, and I discovered that it is too big for my home\! I just can’t maneuver it around the way that I need to\. I was so discouraged, and I just wanted to send it back, but William says he thinks he can fix it so I can use it, but I’m sure it is just a waste of time and money\. Let someone have it who can really use it, is what I say\. I guess I just wasn’t meant to have nice things\.” I didn’t know Edith when she was a girl, but chances are good that she was pessimistic then – at least a little bit\. Twin studies have indicated that pessimism is linked to genetics but is complex\.1 That is, upbringing and life experiences play major factors in the attitudes with which people face their life events\. Some people sail through life, rising above the billows on which they are tempest\-tossed, while others are certain that few silver linings present themselves without a dark cloud somewhere nearby\. What is interesting to me is that wherever you are on the optimism/pessimism spectrum, there is one thing you can do that is guaranteed to make your life better: work on gratitude\. ## The Biblical Imperative It is hard to know where to start in the Bible when it comes to thankfulness\. There is Paul’s command, “**In every thing give thanks:** for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus concerning you” \(I Thessalonians 5:18\)\. Then, there is the command, “Continue in prayer, and watch in the same with thanksgiving” \(Colossians 4:2\)\. Throughout the Psalms, there are repeated statements of thanksgiving and praise\. “**Enter into his gates with thanksgiving,** and into his courts with praise: be thankful unto him, and bless his name” \(Psalm 100:4\)\. I think as well of the statement that Paul made about contentment, “Not that I speak in respect of want: for I have learned, in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content\. I know both how to be abased, and I know how to abound: every where and in all things I am instructed both to be full and to be hungry, both to abound and to suffer need\. I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me” \(Philippians 4:11\-13\)\. There is perhaps no bigger enemy to gratitude than discontent\. Paul’s life wasn’t easy – in fact, it was full to the brim with suffering, but he had purposed that each day he would arise and thank God for what he had\. When he had enough and when he wasn’t certain when he would eat his next meal, Paul was grateful\. Perhaps more difficult, he was content when he had an abundance\. He was satisfied with what God had for him\. I wonder if the great resources most of us have actually make us less grateful and more discontented\. Paul never owned a pickup truck, probably didn’t own a home, and worked late into the night sewing tents in order to pay for his role as an itinerant evangelist\. Despite all privations, he counted his blessings regularly\. We should do no less\. ## Health Benefits of Gratitude Of course, it should be enough to realize that we have been given undeserved grace\. Certainly, that should stir us to live grateful lives, but scientists have found that grateful people are often healthier\. Studies have found that grateful people tend to have lower systolic and diastolic blood pressures\. People who rated themselves as more grateful on a screening questionnaire averaged blood pressures that were about 10% lower than those who were less thankful\. In addition, they found that sleep was rated as more restful for grateful people than for those who rated themselves low on the same scale\.2 Interestingly, in one trial, when young women kept a gratitude journal for two weeks, they found themselves more optimistic about their lives as well as feeling that the quality of their sleep had improved\.3 Another benefit seemed to be less chronic pain for people who practiced gratitude\. Possibly this is related to the sleep benefit, or perhaps there are underlying inflammatory factors in our bodies that are downregulated when we experience a grateful heart\. It is worth noting that this is no magic bullet\. It isn’t as though if everyone with cancer or heart disease would simply remember to thank those around them, that their lives would immediately explode into the health Adam and Eve experienced before the Fall, but it does make things better\. More importantly, it helps us feel better about the good parts of our days\. Optimistic people tend to rate the worst parts of their day better than pessimists – somehow their lows aren’t as low as other people’s lows\. On the other hand, grateful people feel better about the best parts of their days as they focus on remembering the times they felt uplifted during the day\. These are both useful attitudes to have when it comes to realizing how blessed we really are\. A final thing to mention is that grateful people tend to have lower mortality \(all causes death\) compared to ungrateful people\. In the Harvard Nurses Trial, the most grateful people had 9% fewer deaths than the least grateful people\. This is mostly due to lower levels of heart disease among those with the highest levels of gratitude\.4 ## Psychological Benefits of Gratitude It makes sense that anything that could help us sleep better would improve our mental outlook\. Depression and anxiety do seem to be reduced among those who live lives filled with gratitude\. A fairly large meta\-analysis of studies on gratitude found that gratitude interventions tended to reduce feelings of depression by 7 percent and symptoms of anxiety by nearly 8 percent\.5 One thing that seems to happen when people are grateful is that they experience better relationships with the people around them\. Simply put, reducing your level of criticism while bumping up the number of times you say thank you to those you live and work with will improve your relationship with them\. One researcher discovered that healthy marital relationships have five positive interactions for every negative interaction\. That is to say, if you are simply trying to keep the number of times you criticize your spouse to the same number of times a day that you tell them you appreciate them, you are undershooting your appreciation level by about eighty percent\. There is an epidemic of disconnected, lonely people in our society\. Some of this is related to replacing real\-world relationships with shallow, online connections\. Some is related to gratitude\. Studies show that grateful people have significantly less loneliness than ungrateful people – roughly 60 percent less\. No one knows exactly why this is true, but it might be because grateful people realize what a blessing it is to have a community around them and let the people in that community know how much they appreciate them\. If we can improve our level of gratitude, it will certainly help others feel grateful for our presence in their lives and improve our connection with them as a result\. ## Improving Our Gratitude The question comes up, how can we improve our level of thankfulness? Is it simply by saying thank you when someone gives us something nice? Or is it that we dutifully pray for things we know we should be grateful for, like religious freedom, Christ’s death and resurrection, our families, and beautiful weather? I have often wondered how much we think about these sorts of things when we aren’t praying\. I am thankful for religious freedom, but I can make it through whole weeks and never think about it, except when I drive to my church – and sometimes not even then\. It doesn’t seem to mean much that I thank God for something that I seldom think about\. It is possible that we say thank you regularly, but do not live as though we are grateful\. James said that if we really have faith, it should be demonstrated by activity in our lives\. Similarly, grateful people should show their gratitude by making a difference in their lives\. As we think of the servant who was forgiven a huge debt in Matthew 18, he might have said thank you to his lord\. That didn’t matter at all, because he went out and immediately threw his fellow servant in prison for a much smaller debt\. Saying “thank you” is not the same thing as living a grateful life\. ![A silhouetted person with raised arms against sunlit hills\.]() There are a few things that can make a positive impact on our gratitude\. One of the easiest ones is to keep a gratitude journal\. Spend ten minutes each day, sitting down and writing about the positive things that happened to you during the day\. As you relive your blessings, they will become more real to you and stick in your memory\. Make a specific effort to reach out to people around you and thank them for something specific that they did\. This could be as simple as sending your minister a text to let him know that you appreciated a recent sermon and that you are praying for him, or perhaps calling your mother to thank her for some time when she was there for you\. One psychologist suggests thinking about a person who did something special for you in the past that you didn’t acknowledge at the time \(like King Ahasuerus and Mordecai in Esther 6\)\. Write a letter to that person thanking them and specifically telling them about how what they did made you feel\. Then, if possible, deliver the letter in person\. At the end of the visit, both of you will feel much better\. These are a few ways we can expand our gratitude bank account, and in so doing, we will not only help ourselves but also help those around us to feel appreciated\. ## Enemies of Gratitude There are a number of things that can stand in the way of our experiencing the thankfulness we should\. Maybe we have a mental block to doing it, but I think there are a few things that are specific to our society that make this challenging\. Narcissism is one such thing\. People who are narcissists see the world as revolving around them\. The problem is that this level of expectation just leads to disappointment\. If you expect life to meet your every need and desire before you even realize them, you will only feel discouragement when it doesn’t measure up to those desires\. This is draining for the people who surround someone who is a narcissist, but it also leads to general unhappiness on the narcissist’s part\. Envy and covetousness also lead to a lack of thankfulness\. When your attention is on what others have that seems better than yours, it becomes difficult to feel grateful\. It is no wonder that Scripture is clear that this is wrong\. All the way back to the Ten Commandments, we are instructed not to covet the lives and things of others\. A final thing that tends to steal away our thankfulness is materialism\. Even if we don’t envy the people around us, the world is constantly telling us that we need more and better things in our lives\. We want a newer vehicle, a smarter phone, or an espresso machine with more knobs and buttons than the original Apollo rockets had in them\. The world promises that if we only get these things, we will achieve satisfaction\. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way\. No one ever achieved contentment through the pursuit of things\. It is when we make a conscious decision to be content with what we have that we truly begin to experience gratitude\. If we are waiting for that one special item to make us never desire something new again, it just won’t happen\. ## Conclusion Gratitude is a Scriptural imperative\. It, along with contentment, is sorely lacking in our society today\. Instead, people have expectations that are seldom met, and they live lives of quiet desperation\. When we realize that this kind of attitude will not only lift our spirits but also help our physical and emotional well\-being, then maybe we would work harder on it\. Most importantly, gratitude will improve our relationship with both God and others around us\. When those relationships are good, we are on a path leading to shalom\. *The Glass is Half Full and Half Empty: A population\-representative twin study testing if Optimism and Pessimism are distinct systems \- PMC* *Comparing Daily Physiological and Psychological Benefits of Gratitude and Optimism Using a Digital Platform \- PMC* *The impact of a brief gratitude intervention on subjective well\-being, biology and sleep \- PubMed* *Gratitude and Mortality Among Older US Female Nurses \| Nursing \| JAMA Psychiatry \| JAMA Network* *The effects of gratitude interventions: a systematic review and meta\-analysis \- PMC* ## Magazine citation - [A silhouetted person with raised arms against sunlit hills\.](): © Adobe Stock Images