The Caring Catalyst

Who Cares - What Matters

CHANGEMAKING

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C H A N G E M A K I N G

.          .          .isn’t always about launching and scaling new ventures and initiatives. Sometimes it’s about turning an everyday moment into a moment of positive change.  These are opportunities that we can’t plan for, but that when they appear, give us a chance to step up, take action, and change someone’s life. Some call that microleadership.         .         .I merely call it CHANGEMAKING or better, LIFECHANGING and the best part about THAT is everyone of us is capable of making IT happen at any time with anyone.       .       .This video is a moving example of how we all can have impact, anywhere.

Watch this barber shave off his own hair in unity with a cancer patient shaving hers and see how these small acts can add up to huge impact and then go and DUPLICATE IT as often as you can, everywhere you can, with whoever you can.   .   .

Being a CHANGEMAKER is being A Caring Catalyst on steroids
K   I   C   K
I  T
U     P

Fa-La-La-La-Whaaaaaaat?

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W     E     L     L.            .            .
are you ready to bring some
B  A  H
to everyone else’s
H  U  M  B  U  G.               .               .

Hold on there, Sparky
before you pull the plug on all of the festivities
there just may be

Two Surprising Ways to Make Your Holidays Less Stressful

We can find joy even if the holiday season doesn’t live up to our expectations.     .     .

Christine Carter, Ph.D. is a Senior Fellow at the Greater Good Science Center. She is the author of The New Adolescence: Raising Happy and Successful Teens in an Age of Anxiety and Distraction (BenBella, 2020), The Sweet Spot: How to Accomplish More by Doing Less (Ballantine Books, 2015), and Raising Happiness: 10 Simple Steps for More Joyful Kids and Happier Parents (Random House, 2010). A former director of the GGSC, she served for many years as author of its parenting blog, Raising Happiness.  She may put some twinkle in your tinsel with some of these simple suggestions to keep you going as A Caring Catalyst during this Holiday Season.

Feeling overwhelmed? Wondering how you’re going to get it all done? Wishing you could just lie down? You aren’t alone.

The holidays can be stressful. Often, there’s a lot to do and a lot to buy and a lot of people to see. Sometimes we get so busy we have a hard time enjoying events that we’re otherwise looking forward to.

But we can make this holiday season less stressful for ourselves. Below are two tips to enjoy the holidays more.

 Accept that the holidays will probably be, at times, disappointing.     .     .

Bet you weren’t expecting that one! But acceptance is a strangely effective strategy for feeling happier and more relaxed at any time of the year. When we accept a person or a situation we find challenging, we let go of the resistance that creates stress and tension. There’s a lot of truth to the adage that “what we resist, persists.”

Here’s how this works. When someone or something is being a pain in your rear, take a deep breath and accept the situation. Say to yourself something like, “I accept that Jane is upset right now; I allow this situation to be as it is.” Then notice how you are feeling, and accept how you are feeling, as well. You can say to yourself, “I accept that I am feeling angry at Jane and disappointed. I allow my feelings to be as they are right now.”

If accepting a disappointing situation or person seems too hard for you, here are the handy alternatives you’re left with:

  • You can judge and criticize others and the disappointing situation in general, and blame others for your own negative feelings. As a bonus, everyone around you will no doubt feel your judgment. Some people will likely feel wrongly accused, or like you are trying to “fix” them. You’ll achieve the dual outcomes of being hurtful to others while simultaneously making yourself feel tense and lonely.
  • Another alternative to acceptance is to nurse your anxiety and despair over the situation through rumination. To ruminate effectively, think about what is wrong with the situation or person as often as possible. Don’t let yourself become distracted from the negative. Tell everyone what you don’t like about the situation or person. This will successfully amplify both your negative feelings and the difficulty of the situation.
  • You can also definitely deny how difficult the situation is by pretending that nothing is bothering you. You can stuff your hard feelings down by drinking too much or by staying really, really busy and stressed. Simply avoid situations and people you don’t want to deal with, because that’s more important than participating in meaningful traditions and events.

Criticism, judgment, rumination, blaming, denial, and avoidance are almost like holiday rituals for some of us. But they are all tactics of resistance, and they won’t protect you. Ironically, these tactics will allow the disappointments or difficulties to further embed themselves into your psyche.

This is a long-winded way of pointing out that resistance doesn’t make us less stressed or more joyful in difficult situations. What does work is to simply accept that the circumstance is currently hard. We can accept a difficult situation, and still make an effort to improve things. This gentle acceptance does not mean that you are resigned to a miserable holiday, or that nothing you do will make the situation better. Maybe it will get better—and maybe it won’t.

Accepting the reality of a difficult situation allows us to soften. This softening opens the door to our own compassion and wisdom; and we all know that over the holidays, we are going to need those things.

 Let go of expectations while turning your attention to what you appreciate.     .     .

Some people (myself included) suffer from what I think of as an abundance paradox: Because we have so much, it becomes easy to take our good fortune for granted. As a result, we are more likely to feel disappointed when we don’t get what we want than to feel grateful when we do.

This tendency can be especially pronounced during the holidays, when we tend to have high hopes that everything will be perfect and wonderful and memorable. You might have a fantasy of a sweet, close relationship with an in-law, for instance, or grand ideas about the perfect Christmas Eve dinner.

This sort of hope, as my dear friend Susie Rinehart has reminded me, can be a slippery slope to unhappiness: Hoping a holiday event will be the best-ever can quickly become a feeling that we won’t be happy unless it is, leading to sadness and disappointment when reality doesn’t live up to our ideal.

Unfortunately, the reality of the holidays is unlikely to ever outdo our fantasies of how great everything could be. So the trick is to ditch our expectations and instead notice what is actually happening in the moment. And then find something about that moment to appreciate.

Can you appreciate that your spouse did a lot of planning (or dishes, or shopping) this week? Do you feel grateful that you have enough food for your holiday table? Are you thankful for your health (or if your health is not great, that you are still here)?

It’s enough to notice and appreciate the small things, but when I’m having trouble with this, I like to practice an extreme form of gratitude that involves contemplating how fleeting our lives may be. There’s nothing like facing death to make us appreciate our lives—and sure enough, research finds that when people visualize their own death in detail, their gratitude increases.

If you feel stuck on what isn’t going well rather than what is, set aside some time to reflect on the following questions. Take each question one at a time, and try journaling an answer to each before moving on to the next one.

  • What would I do if this were the last holiday season I had left to live? What would I do the same, and what would I do differently?
  • What would I do if this were the last holiday season that my spouse, parents, or children had left to live? What would I do the same, and what would I do differently?

It’s a little heavy, I know, but contemplating death does tend to put things in perspective.

As the holidays approach, we will likely feel stressed and exhausted, but we need not feel like victims to this time of year. We often have a great deal of choice about what we do and how we feel. We can choose to bring acceptance to difficult situations and emotions, and we can choose to turn our attention to the things that we appreciate.

This holiday season, may we all see abundance when it is all around us—not an abundance of stuff, necessarily, but rather an abundance of love and connection. Even during the difficult bits.

There’s still a whole lot of
F   A
to go along with your
L    A
L    A
L    A
Hopefully this will help keep your
lights burning
b r i g h t
and bring you some
M E R R Y
M E R R Y
to share your cup of
C  H  E  E  R

 

O-V-E-R is the New Beginning

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EmptyPiePan

My family hates it,

mostly because it’s an obsession of mine.

It happens every time we get back from vacation

or a family reunion or any big event

.          .          .I   CAN’T   LET   IT   GO!

When we come back from vacation I ask questions like,

“Hey, do you remember what we were doing exactly this time last week or three weeks ago or even,

THIS      TIME      LAST      YEAR?”

Drives’em  crazy.

It’s late.

All are asleep.

I just finished watching parts of the third of three football games.     .     .

Unlike years past
WE were homebound;
we did not do more traveling today

than a gaggle of Turkey’s

P R E-T H A N K S G I V I N G;

I can’t tell you how many times

I’ve walked back into the kitchen after the big dinner,

the table was cleared,

dishes done.     .     .
Thank God the refrigerator door

doesn’t have an automatic lock on it after a certain amount of accessing times.     .     .

My pants are tight (yeah, even these sweat pants)
and my heart is even fuller.      .      .

I    R E – M  E  M  B  E  R.         .         .

constantly putting back together the pieces of my life

and those that have

 t      h      a      n      k      f      u      l      l      y

 intermeshed their fabric into my Tapestry.       .       .

Is   I T    O v e r ?

I think not.       .       .

This won’t be the first time you’ll see something like this here.     .     .

I am always reaching back and bringing it all forth again;

I think the    r e a l    Thanksgiving
isn’t on the day with all of the parades,

football,

repeated eating fests—-

it’s the  DAYS  After.     .     .

EVERYONE  is Thankful on  THAT  day!

But it’s the days following where the

T   H   A   N   K   F   U   L        M   E   T   E   R

might find its truest test.      .      .

What then?

Get your Thanksgiving  ON

the days following when Time blurs on to the next Holiday;

Seriously, are we less thankful the days following?

Do we have to reach back to actually RE-MEMBER

or is it, truly, not just a day, or a season–

Dare it actually be a Lifestyle?

Well.       .       .

it’s what I ponder

as I finish that last lonely piece of pie—

it  was begging for it!

Hmmmmmmmmmmm.              .              .

I just can’t let it go.         .         .

I’m thinking

I’m thanking

I’m THINKING

I’M THANKING.       .       .

that could be a Great thing.         .         .

A Very Great, Tasty,

FULL – FILLING  THING.       .       .

Y  o  u ?

As much as you JUST

celebrated THANKSGIVING

.         .          .and even though your Stomach might still be full,

I hope your heart is EMPTY enough to

truly continue this Season of

T     H     A     N     K     S
G           E          T          T          I          N          G

.          .          .may it be way better than you have planned

or    i m a g i n e d

GREAT-FULL-NESS

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piglet_gratitude_(1)

It’s Thanksgiving

A       G       A        I        N

Tomorrow.      .      .
in the middle of flu/RSV/Covid
which all seem to be raging fiercely
in and out of hospitals
IT  begs  the 
q  u  e  s  t  i  o  n
(almost in a mocking tone)

Are you full of

G R E A T    F U L L    N E S S ?

Bet the Turkey Farm

YOU   ARE;

ONCE AGAIN 

family and friends will gather together to eat,

watch football,

talk,

remember,

laugh,

cry,

drink,

eat again,

watch movies,

play games,

take naps,

shop and.        .        .

Guess what?

It’ll do more than add pounds or inches.       .       .

Your Gratefulness

will multiply

Your  GREAT – FULL – NESS

in a huge way;

For starters–it’ll make you feel better–literally.

WebMD reports that Gratefulness

is linked with more of a
Full-glass-over the rim

feeling of Optimism,

which boosts your immune system.        .        .

GREAT – FULL – NESS

It lowers your Blood Pressure and Cholesterol so says a 2007 study on the health benefits of giving back and being Thankful.  The American Journal of Cardiology showed that appreciation and positive emotions are linked with changes in heart rate variability.        .        .

GREAT – FULL – NESS

Who doesn’t want to sleep better?

Experts suggests that expressing what you’re Thankful for will help you actually sleep better.   .   .Researchers found that when people spent 15 minutes jotting down what they’re grateful for in a journal before bedtime, they fell asleep faster and stayed asleep longer, Psychology Today, reported.        .        .

GREAT – FULL – NESS

According to The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, gratitude could also boost pro-social behaviors, like helping other people who have problems or lending emotional support to another person.  .  .

GREAT – FULL – NESS

WebMD reported that negative events can boost gratitude, and that gratitude can help to boost feelings of belonging and decrease feelings of stress.  Their survey showed that feelings of gratitude were at high levels after 9/11.       .       .

GREAT – FULL – NESS

Pssssssst: We are all Grateful

for many things.        .        .

We are all

G R E A T  F U L L

for many things.        .        .

So somewhere between the turkey,

dressing,

potatoes

and pie and everything else that comes with it—-

if you find the

Z  I  P  P  E  T  Y

Going  out  of   Your

D O – D A H.        .        .

Sing Anyway !

You’re  Filled  with

G R E A T – F U L L- N E S S

C H E E R S !

A N D. . .
WILL YOU. . . ?

FALLINGS

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James Crews is a poet who teaches Poetry at the University at Albany and lives on a organic farm with his husband in Shaftsbury, Vermont.  Each Friday he posts a poem, sometimes one of his own that serves as more than just some mere Poetry Prompt.  He recently posted this:

I’ve been sitting with this very short but very powerful poem by Jane Hirshfield ever since a dear friend passed it along to me earlier in the week. It speaks to the season so many of us might find ourselves inhabiting, not only that of autumn, but a moment of loss and transition during which we’re asked to accept such changes as necessary, and perhaps even sacred. In this poem, she invites us to see each shedding tree as an icon, “thinned/back to bare wood,/without diminishment.” And there is almost a haiku-like quality to those final three lines that urges us toward deeper contemplation of the richness inherent in these wooden beings. Perhaps what we see as loss and a kind of death each year as fall comes is really just wind and weather having worshipped the trees so much they are returned to their basic essence. In this way, we might reframe any difficult season when we are worn back to our essential selves as holy, worthy of worship for the way such trying times allow us to become something new.

Autumn

by Jane Hirshfield

Again the wind
flakes gold-leaf from the trees
and the painting darkens—
as if a thousand penitents
kissed an icon
till it thinned
back to bare wood,
without diminishment.

Invitation for Writing & Reflection: How might you reframe a difficult season in your own life as sacred or holy, seeing how you were worn back to the truest version of yourself even while in pain? 

It prompted me to write in kind:

FALLING

And just like that
Summer fell
into a colorfully crisp confetti
of blazenous colors
that never reached the ground
Flutterings
into what can’t always be planted
but never fails to be garnered in
whatsoevers

that find us all
softly soaringly sheltered
in a cooling uplifting Breath
A heavenly satisfied Sigh

May this Fall Season bring you lots of
Oooooh and A W E

 

FRIENDLY(LESS)

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Come on everybody.          .          .
Let’s break out in a robust chorus of TOY STORY’S
YOU’VE GOT A FRIEND IN ME
o  r
did the Pandemic take care of
T  H  A    T,
t  o  o?

Did the Pandemic Make Us Less Friendly?

A new study observed rapid changes in personality during the pandemic, with people becoming less open, conscientious, agreeable, and extraverted.      .      .

JOLANTA BURKE Ph.D., is a chartered psychologist specializing in positive psychology and a senior lecturer at the Centre for Positive Psychology and Health at the RCSI University of Medicine and Health Sciences. She has authored eight books, the latest one The Ultimate Guide to Implementing Wellbeing Programmes for School published by Routledge.  She  recently  wrote  an  article  about  what  we  knew   had  to be  coming  after  these  past  few  years.

For many of us, some personality traits stay the same throughout our lives, while others change only gradually. However, evidence shows that significant events in our personal lives that induce severe stress or trauma can be associated with more rapid changes in our personalities.

A new study, published in PLOS ONE, suggests the COVID pandemic has indeed triggered much greater shifts in personality than we would expect to have seen naturally over this period. In particular, the researchers found that people were less extroverted, less open, less agreeable, and less conscientious in 2021 and 2022 compared with before the pandemic.

This study included more than 7,000 participants from the U.S., aged between 18 and 109, who were assessed before the pandemic (from 2014 onwards), early in the pandemic in 2020, and then later in the pandemic in 2021 or 2022.

At each time point, participants completed the “Big Five Inventory.” This assessment tool measures personality on a scale across five dimensions: extroversion versus introversion, agreeableness versus antagonism, conscientiousness versus lack of direction, neuroticism versus emotional stability, and openness versus closedness to experience.

There weren’t many changes between pre-pandemic and 2020 personality traits. However, the researchers found significant declines in extroversion, openness, agreeableness and conscientiousness in 2021/2022 compared with before the pandemic. These changes were akin to a decade of normal variation, suggesting the trauma of the COVID pandemic had accelerated the natural process of personality change.

Interestingly, younger adults’ personalities changed the most in the study. They showed marked declines in agreeableness and conscientiousness, and a significant increase in neuroticism in 2021/2022 compared with pre-pandemic. This may be due in part to social anxiety when emerging back into society, having missed out on two years of normality.

Personality and well-being

Many of us became more health-conscious during the pandemic, for example by eating better and doing more exercise. A lot of us sought whatever social connections we could find virtually, and tried to refocus our attention on psychological, emotional, and intellectual growth—for example, by practicing mindfulness or picking up new hobbies.

Nonetheless, mental health and well-being decreased significantly. This makes sense given the drastic changes we went through.

Notably, personality significantly impacts our well-being. For example, people who report high levels of conscientiousness, agreeableness, or extroversion are more likely to experience the highest level of well-being.

So the personality changes detected in this study may go some way to explaining the decrease in well-being we’ve seen during the pandemic.

If we look more closely, the pandemic appears to have negatively affected the following areas:

  • our ability to express sympathy and kindness toward others (agreeableness);
  • our capacity to be open to new concepts and willing to engage in novel situations (openness);
  • our tendency to seek out and enjoy other people’s company (extraversion);
  • our desire to strive toward our goals, do tasks well, or take responsibilities toward others seriously (conscientiousness).

All of these traits influence our interaction with the environment around us and, as such, may have played a role in our well-being decline. For example, working from home may have left us feeling demotivated and as though our career was going nowhere (lower conscientiousness). This in turn may have affected our well-being by making us feel more irritable, depressed, or anxious.

What next.        .        .        ?

Over time, our personalities usually change in a way that helps us adapt to aging and cope more effectively with life events. In other words, we learn from our life experiences and this subsequently impacts our personality. As we age, we generally see increases in self-confidence, self-control, and emotional stability.

However, participants in this study recorded changes in the opposite direction to the usual trajectory of personality change. This is understandable given that we faced an extended period of difficulties, including constraints on our freedoms, lost income, and illness. All these experiences have evidently changed us—and our personalities.

This study provides us with some very useful insights into the impacts of the pandemic on our psyche. These impacts may subsequently influence many aspects of our lives, such as well-being.

Knowledge allows us to make choices. So you might like to take the time to reflect on your experiences over the past few years, and how these personality changes may have affected you.

Any changes may well have protected you during the height of the pandemic. However, it’s worth asking yourself how useful these changes are now that the acute phase of the pandemic is behind us. Do they still serve you well, or could you try to rethink your perspective?

QUESTIONS WORTH EMBRACING
as we go about
not so much discovering
A n S w E r S
as actually
LIVING THEM
in new ways.          .           .

As we
Caring Catalysts
help others along
Their W a Y s

 

 

LABORED DAYS

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Muhammad Mashali was a doctor who treated Egypt’s poorest citizens completely free of charge for 50 years.

Mashali passed away in 2020 at the age of 76.
He spent 12 hours a day in the clinic and received 30-50 patients a day. Not only did a line of people form in front of his ambulance every day, people would approach him on the street and he would give them medical advice. Dr. Muhammad Mashali never had a car or even a telephone. He walked from home to work.

When a rich man heard about his story, he gave him $20,000, a car and an apartment. But a year later, when his benefactor returned to Egypt, he learned that the doctor had sold his car to help poor patients and bought new medical equipment.

When Muhammad Mashali graduated from Cairo Medical School in 1967, he explained why he wanted to sacrifice himself for the good of others:
“My father sacrificed his life so that I could become a doctor. Then I promised God that I would not take a penny from the poor and live a life of service to people of all cultures and religions.”

BUT LABOR DAY WAS THIS PAST MONDAY.           .          .
or may be
it’s today
or any day
you wake up
to be
A Caring Catalyst
NOT AGAIN.          .          .
but
O            N            C            E

M               O               R               E.        .        .


MAKE YOUR JOB
SOMEONE’S PLEASURE.        .        .

PHRASES PERSONIFIED

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SO.          .           .
ARE WE MORE THAN OUR WORDS.           .               .
WHAT ONE PERSON SAID:

 

“I have reached the pinnacle of success in business.” In other people’s eyes my life is a success.

However, aside from work, I’ve had little joy.

At the end of the day, wealth is just a fact I’ve gotten used to.

Right now, lying on my hospital bed, reminiscing all my life, I realize that all the recognition and wealth I took so much pride in, has faded and become meaningless in the face of imminent death.

You can hire someone to drive your car or make money for you, but you can’t hire someone to stand sick and die for you.

Material things lost can be found again. But there is one thing that can never be found when it is lost: Life.

Whatever stage of life we are currently at, in time we will face the day the curtain closes.

Love your family, spouse, children and friends… Treat them right .

Cherish them.

As we get older, and wiser, we slowly realize that wearing a $300 or $30 watch both give the same time

Whether we have a $300 or $30 wallet or purse, the amount inside is the same.

Whether we drive a $150,000 car or a $30,000 car, the road and the distance are the same, and we reach the same destination.

Whether we drink a $1000 or $10 bottle of wine, the hangover is the same.

Whether the house in which we live is 100 or 1000 square meters, loneliness is the same.

You will realize that your true inner happiness does not come from material things of this world.

Whether you travel first class or economy class, if the plane crashes, you go down with it…

Therefore, I hope you realize, when you have friends, brothers and sisters, with whom you discuss, laugh, talk, sing, talk about north-south-east or heaven and earth,… this is the real happiness!!

An indisputable fact of life:
Don’t raise your children to be rich.

Educate them to be happy.

When they grow up, they will know the value of things and not the price. “

THE
A     N     S     W     E     R:

Uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.          .          .
Anyone can deliver a good line
few can
p  e  r  s  o  n  i  f  y
or
l        i        v       e
them.          .          .
(Thank you Steve Jobs for continuing to live a life you never dreamed possible
and making good–Better)

HOROSCOPED

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B     I     R     T     H     D     A     Y     S
they come and go
and the older we get the
faster they get here and the quicker they are gone
but what remains are
those ominous words that
predict
warn
pretell
just what kind of a day and a year ahead might entail.              .              .
(or not)
PICK ONE:

LEO HOROSCOPE

AUGUST 06, 2022

An impulsive mood can guide you toward opportunities as well as mishaps today if you trust that your path is the right one. The spontaneity you exhibit at work and at home can be a boon to you as you may find yourself in situations where the options before you are confusing. If you give yourself permission to surrender to the flow of the universe today — whether that means acting impulsively or following an uncertain avenue — you can release your cares into the ether. The confidence you will likely feel will no doubt be a result of your no longer having to worry that you are on the wrong track.

We lose the troubles and care that might otherwise have compelled us to give up our dreams when we dedicate ourselves to the focused flow of the universe. We may feel that we have come unmoored, yet later we see clearly that our fates were mapped out in ways we could not yet comprehend. The universal flow will nearly always speed us toward those forms of accomplishment that will prove rewarding as its current is just another aspect of the plan put in place for us before our birth. Unlike when we fight against the tide or attempt to outrun it, we are carried forward and can feel at ease as we contemplate the richness that is to come. Today your spontaneity and your desires will be defined by a directness that proves beyond a doubt that you are following a path laid out for you in time immemorial.

O  R
O   R
O    R
Maybe the best Horoscope of all isn’t found in the papered news or from some fancy website or anywhere remotely in or out of the stars and the stratosphere but somewhere snuggled not all that deep within that reminds you it’s not so much seemingly wise words that come to us from some cosmic zodiac sign but our relationships that make our days and years worth living and celebrating.   .   .
So before this Birthday Boy’s Wish Filled candle is blown out as I begin another trip around the sun, I’m grateful for not all who remember and wish me the best on ‘my day,’ so much as how severely grateful I am for all of threads that have intentionally interwoven themselves into my tapestry and let me know that my darkest threads have taken on a richer color when next to those golden threads that never lose their shine as they brighten mine.
I humbly thank each of you for your immensely kind thoughts and warmest wishes. I don’t do good with compliments and gifts. I’m not a good “GETTER”. All the more reason for you all to know how much you enchant my life and inspire me to live larger; to bless as I have severely been blessed.
I’m most grateful for each of you for making me Better
t  h a  n  k
   y  o  u

The TUDE of GRATITUDE

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THE DATA-BASED EVIDENCE
is undeniable
and seems to be adding up
Study by Study
G R A T I T U D E
IS
GOOD FOR
Y      O      U
and apparently for others
t  o  o

Does Practicing Gratitude Help Your Immune System?

New research suggests that gratitude plays an indirect role in improving our health.          .          .

JILL SUTTIE, did some investigating for us and is showing us what’s not all that surprising giving the abundance of studies that echos what she shares.  Jill is Greater Good’s former book review editor and now serves as a staff writer and contributing editor for the magazine. She received her doctorate of psychology from the University of San Francisco in 1998 and was a psychologist in private practice before coming to Greater Good. 

Being grateful seems to have a lot of positive effects on our lives. In fact, grateful people may have better sleep, healthier hearts, and fewer aches and pains.   .   .

 

 

 

 

 

 

But what is going on in our bodies when we’re grateful, that might help us be healthier? A couple of recent studies aimed to find out.

In the first study, 61 healthy women between the ages of 35 and 50 were randomly assigned to either a six-week online gratitude activity or a writing activity (as a comparison). Once a week, the gratitude group were given a writing prompt that asked them to write about someone they were grateful for (for example, “Think of someone in your life who you feel like you have never fully or properly thanked for something meaningful or important that they did for you”). The control group wrote about neutral topics (“Think about the longest distance that you walked today”).

Before and after the six weeks, the participants reported on how much they tended to offer support or receive support from other people and provided a blood sample, which was used to check for the presence of inflammatory cytokines (interleukin 6 and tumor necrosis factor-α). Inflammatory cytokines are linked to chronic diseases of aging, like diabetes, atherosclerosis, and even cancer.

After analyzing the data, the researchers found that women assigned to the gratitude condition did engage in more supportive care, which is consistent with the idea that gratitude may inspire people to “pay it forward” and help others. But they didn’t find any significant drop in cytokine levels—meaning, no improved immune function. Naomi Eisenberger, director of the Social and Affective Neuroscience Lab at UCLA and a coauthor on the study, was a little surprised by this.

“You read all the news stories about gratitude and you assume you’re going to see these magical beneficial effects. We didn’t see that,” she said. “The effects were actually harder to see than we thought; they were subtler.”

To get at what might be going on, she and her colleagues looked women’s supportiveness, whether or not they’d participated in the gratitude activity. Here they did see an effect: Women who engaged in more supportive care had lower levels of interleukin 6, suggesting that supportive care (and not gratitude, per se) might improve immune function. Gratitude could affect inflammation, perhaps, but only if it leads to more support for others.

“When people feel grateful, one of the first things they want to do is give back,” she says. “Maybe that doesn’t lead straight to better immune function. But it does lead to more support-giving, and that’s interesting.”

Is gratitude good for our brains?

These findings still left an open question for the researchers: Could experiencing gratitude affect people’s brains in a way that promotes better health? To find out, Eisenberger and her colleagues did a second studylooking at how gratitude affected brain centers associated with support-giving and responding to distress, both of which are tied to better health.

Drawing from the same participants, they used MRI scans to monitor brain activity while the women were shown names of people they felt grateful for and asked to either think about why they felt grateful to the person or to describe the person’s physical appearance. Occasionally, an image of a threatening face was flashed on the screen to startle participants and induce a threat response.

Participants experiencing gratitude didn’t have more neural activity in the caregiving centers of the brain than the control group. But those who’d reported high levels of support-giving had a healthier response to the threatening imagery (decreased amygdala activity) after focusing on gratitude. In other words, for highly supportive people, feeling momentary gratitude seemed to play a role in soothing their stress response—a possible pathway to better health.

“There seems to be something about people engaging in more support-giving over time that makes them less threat-sensitive when primed with gratitude,” says Eisenberger.

This finding mirrors previous work showing that volunteering or giving to others improves health, says Eisenberger. On the other hand, it contrasts with some people’s views that feeling gratitude in and of itself is key to better health, she adds.

“Our study brings up an interesting question of what contributes to better health: Is it the emotion of gratitude, or is it actually engaging in behaviors that help somebody else?” she says. “I don’t know for sure, but maybe it’s tied to behaviors more than to feelings.”

She also mentions that some of the people in her studies reported having trouble feeling grateful. That could be a barrier when it comes to promoting gratitude for improving health.

“These effects didn’t seem to happen for individuals who were higher in things like depression and stress,” she says. “So, I think for those individuals, a gratitude intervention can sometimes backfire.”

Though Eisenberger believes much more research needs to be done to know for sure, her work shows that the effects of gratitude on health may be more nuanced than past research suggests. It doesn’t mean gratitude doesn’t play a role—after all, it seems to encourage more kind and helpful behavior. But it may only play an indirect role.

“If we’re trying to take care of our own health, maybe the best way to do that is helping take care of others,” says Eisenberger. “One way to getting to helping other people could be through experiences of gratitude. But it’s not necessarily the only way to get there, either.”

 

The STUDIES
are irrefutable
and they mean
absolutely nothing at all
u          n          l          e          s          s
they are utilized
i m p l e m e n t e d
s h a r e d
to
repeat
and
repeat
again
and
again.        .       .
The studies may prove it
but if you want to
make it a
VERB
go and ahead
and
TUDE
your
G R A T I T U D E
to another.             .            .
JUST LIKE A SMILE
if Someone doesn’t have one
GIVE THEM YOURS
.          .          .BE THE REASON
A N O T H E R
IS
GRATEFUL

 

 

Professional Speaker, Author, Assurance Man