Recently, some researchers from Irish universities carried out a study involving 68 adults. They found out that having gratitude can help protect people from feeling overwhelmed when something stressful happens and helps them get back to normal afterwards. It might also be helpful for making sure your heart is healthy.
Stress can be really bad for your health, like giving you high blood pressure or making it more likely that you’ll get a heart condition. It’s important to figure out how stress affects us and what we can do to make ourselves less stressed.
A study, which recently appeared in the Journal of Psychophysiology, has found that gratitude and a positive attitude can help people recover better from stress. Previous research has suggested that this is the case but it hasn’t been proven until now. Brian Leavy, Brenda H. O’Connell and Deirdre O’Shea have showed that these two things have an impact on recovery especially when it comes to our heart health.
So, two researchers from the Universities of Maynooth and Limerick were studying how gratitude can affect cardiovascular reactions when people are in an psychologically stressful situation. They also wanted to see if it made a difference depending on a person’s emotional balance.
Researchers at the Irish University of Maynooth did a study that involved 68 people. 24 were boys and 44 were girls, and all of them were between 18 and 57 years old. This research used an experiment with lab tasks to induce stress on the participants while taking measures of their cardiovascular reactions and recovery afterwards.
Research has shown that when people are feeling grateful, it helps reduce the amount of stress they experience. People whose emotions were in balance also had an extra boost of the positive effects that gratefulness brings. Essentially, having a thankful attitude can help keep stress levels low!
Research has found that there are lots of cheap ways to make us feel better! Scientists have already noticed that people who write down the things they are grateful for in a ‘gratitude journal’ often have fewer heart problems than those who don’t. From this and other experiments, experts think that being thankful may help improve our heart health.
This study studies the impact of gratitude, affect balance and stress buffering on a person’s cardiovascular responses to a laboratory stress test. The research work was funded by the BIAL Foundation.
Reference: “Gratitude, affect balance, and stress buffering: A growth curve examination of cardiovascular responses to a laboratory stress task” by Brian Leavy, Brenda H. O’Connell, and Deirdre O’Shea, 25 November 2022, International Journal of Psychophysiology.
DOI: 10.1016/j.ijpsycho.2022.11.013
