How helpful can gratitude be for your overall wellbeing?

Gratitude is beneficial for general wellbeing, but the impact varies depending on the context and culture.“Experiencing gratitude has consistently been associated with better wellbeing outcomes, such as life satisfaction, meaning, resilience and mental health,” according to researchers in a preprint study on the arXiv website, part of the Center for Open Science. It has not been peer-reviewed.Other studies on the connections between gratitude and wellbeing focused on age, gender, socioeconomic status (SES), and cultural differences but results have been mixed.In this context, practicing gratitude can include activities like expressing being thankful such, perhaps in the form of writing gratitude letters or listing things one feels thankful for in a journal. The approach is sometimes used to help deal with hardship.The researchers conducted a four-part study encompassing 220,314 people from 67 countries. The data for the studies were collected during and post pandemic. The first part compared groups of 1,000 people each in U.K. and the U.S. during the more acute stage of the COVID-19 pandemic. Questionnaires were used to assess wellbeing, stress, depression and other factors. Subjects were also asked about gratitude.The second part assessed gratitude and wellbeing across 63 countries during the pandemic and used existing data for over 24,000 people. The data included similar measures that were used in the first part. There were also data for prosociality—measures of whether people helped others.The third part used data from the Global Flourishing Study which had information on wellbeing, gratitude and prosociality. The fourth part used data from a U.K.-based daily diary study of 110 subjects during the pandemic.Discussing the study on the social media site, BlueSky, lead author and psychology researcher Irene Teulings from the University of Oslo stated “we show that wellbeing is closely tied to gratitude experiences, with no meaningful universal moderation effects of age, gender, subjective SES, or education attainment. However, not everyone benefits equally: context and culture mattered a lot.”Gratitude didn’t help wellbeing much in highly stressful contexts. The study found a weaker impact during the pandemic and in countries with greater hardships such as lower national income, less democracy, lower education and life expectancy, and other metrics.Overall, the findings “could indicate that gratitude feelings might not protect wellbeing as much in collectively stressful or resource-scarce contexts,” she wrote.

How helpful can gratitude be for your overall wellbeing?

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