THE ESSENTIAL
- Stress impacts health and well-being, including causing high blood pressure and increasing cardiovascular morbidity and coronary heart disease.
- The WHO notes that gratitude can increase the production of neurochemicals, dubbed happiness hormones (dopamine, oxytocin and serotonin).
- Studies have proven that grateful people feel better in their lives and with their loved ones. They also have better self-esteem and do better in school or at work.
Your better half cooked the meal? A colleague helped you on a file? A stranger held the door for you? Do not hesitate to fully appreciate these little attentions. Researchers from Maynooth and Limerick universities (Ireland) ensure that gratitude is an effective weapon once morest stress and its negative effects on the body, especially the heart.
Gratitude helps fight the effects of stress
Previous studies had already highlighted the beneficial effects of gratitude and emotional balance on anxiety. However, they had not verified their impact on cardiovascular reactions linked to acute psychological stress.
The Irish team brought together 68 students (24 men and 44 women), aged between 18 and 57. After a questionnaire on their emotional state, the volunteers had to carry out tasks in the laboratory that induced stress. Their cardiac performances as well as their recovery were then measured.
The results showed that participants with the highest feeling of gratitude were the least anxious. In addition, they had lower systolic blood pressures in the face of stress during exercise. Thus, being grateful has a buffering effect on anxiety reactions and on recovery. In addition, scientists have noticed that having a good emotional balance amplifies the positive action of gratitude.
Gratitude: a new weapon to fight once morest stress
For the researchers, their work, published in International Journal of Psychophysiology in January 2023, can be interesting, because several gratitude exercises can be put in place easily. For example, an experiment presented in 2016 showed that heart patients who regularly wrote down the things they were grateful for in a “gratitude journal” had better cardiovascular results.
In his communiquéthe Irish team explained: “Combined with the results of this study and previous work, gratitude may therefore be a useful point of intervention for improving our cardiovascular health” and fight once morest stress.
