How Feeling Appreciated Impacts Your Brain and Your Health
You’ve probably heard that feeling grateful for the good things in your life improves your mental outlook and boosts your mood. But it turns out that feeling appreciated has an even more powerful impact on your mental, emotional, and physical health.
When it comes to gratitude and appreciation, is it better to give or receive? The results of recent studies may surprise you. But first, let's look at how these two powerful mindsets impact your brain.
How Appreciation and Gratitude Impact Your Brain
When we feel or express appreciation, our brains release two powerful chemicals (neurotransmitters) called dopamine and serotonin. Dopamine is released is a neural pathway when a reward is received or is anticipated. Any activity we find pleasurable activates this pathway, which enables our brains to remember the circumstances that led to the pleasure so we can repeat re-create those circumstances in the future. Serotonin stabilizes and boosts mood while also improving the quality of our sleep and digestion.
When we feel gratitude or appreciation, two major brain areas are activated, the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC), and the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC). The MPFC provides meaning to our experiences. For example, if someone deliberately breaks your arm in a fit of rage, you experience this as a traumatic and sadistic event. If a doctor deliberately breaks your arm to reset it so that it will heal properly, you experience it as a painful but tolerable experience that will benefit you in the long run. Your beliefs about these identical events set the context for how you will experience them, and those beliefs are processed in the MPFC. The ACC is central to social interaction, and plays a key role in predicting and evaluating the outcomes of actions in social contexts. The ACC becomes highly active in response to evaluating potential losses and situations that might elicit regret. Activity in this region has also been found to correlate with empathy, especially empathy for other people's pain.
A mindset of gratitude or appreciation activates the MPFC and sets the context for our experiences. This mindset is under our conscious control, and the more frequently we activate it, the more we strengthen the neural circuitry involved in gratitude and appreciation. Ultimately, we change our nature and outlook on life.
How to Activate Your Appreciation/Gratitude Neural Pathways
There are essentially two ways:
In a recent peer-reviewed journal article on gratitude, researchers reported the results of a study in which participants’ brain functions were monitored while listening either to a letter of gratitude read by a coworker in a face-to-face setting or listened to a conversation on a neutral topic. The results showed greater activation in MPFC and greater improvement in mood occurred when participants listened to a letter of gratitude than when they read the letter aloud or listened to a neutral conversation. In other words, feeling appreciated had a more profound positive impact than expressing appreciation did.
Another intriguing study on gratitude found that listening to stories of others receiving help in times of need strongly activated gratitude pathways in the brains of listeners. The stories were of Holocaust survivors who were sheltered by strangers or received lifesaving food and clothing. The participants were asked to place themselves in the context of the Holocaust and imagine what their own experience would feel like if they received such gifts. For each gift, they rated how grateful they felt. The results revealed that ratings of gratitude correlated with brain activity in the MPFC and ACC.
The Most Powerful Gratitude Practice
Here are four ways to strengthen your gratitude neural pathways:
Practicing one or more of these for just 5 minutes three times weekly can profoundly change the way you feel about your life.
For a deeper dive into the topic of the impact of appreciation and gratitude on the brain, I highly recommend this episode of Stanford neuroscientist Andrew Huberman HubermanLab podcast on the science of gratitude.
Copyright Denise D. Cummins, PhD December 6, 2021
denisecummins.com
You’ve probably heard that feeling grateful for the good things in your life improves your mental outlook and boosts your mood. But it turns out that feeling appreciated has an even more powerful impact on your mental, emotional, and physical health.
When it comes to gratitude and appreciation, is it better to give or receive? The results of recent studies may surprise you. But first, let's look at how these two powerful mindsets impact your brain.
How Appreciation and Gratitude Impact Your Brain
When we feel or express appreciation, our brains release two powerful chemicals (neurotransmitters) called dopamine and serotonin. Dopamine is released is a neural pathway when a reward is received or is anticipated. Any activity we find pleasurable activates this pathway, which enables our brains to remember the circumstances that led to the pleasure so we can repeat re-create those circumstances in the future. Serotonin stabilizes and boosts mood while also improving the quality of our sleep and digestion.
When we feel gratitude or appreciation, two major brain areas are activated, the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC), and the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC). The MPFC provides meaning to our experiences. For example, if someone deliberately breaks your arm in a fit of rage, you experience this as a traumatic and sadistic event. If a doctor deliberately breaks your arm to reset it so that it will heal properly, you experience it as a painful but tolerable experience that will benefit you in the long run. Your beliefs about these identical events set the context for how you will experience them, and those beliefs are processed in the MPFC. The ACC is central to social interaction, and plays a key role in predicting and evaluating the outcomes of actions in social contexts. The ACC becomes highly active in response to evaluating potential losses and situations that might elicit regret. Activity in this region has also been found to correlate with empathy, especially empathy for other people's pain.
A mindset of gratitude or appreciation activates the MPFC and sets the context for our experiences. This mindset is under our conscious control, and the more frequently we activate it, the more we strengthen the neural circuitry involved in gratitude and appreciation. Ultimately, we change our nature and outlook on life.
How to Activate Your Appreciation/Gratitude Neural Pathways
There are essentially two ways:
- Focus on expressing gratitude and appreciation toward others.
- Receive expressions of gratitude or appreciation from others.
In a recent peer-reviewed journal article on gratitude, researchers reported the results of a study in which participants’ brain functions were monitored while listening either to a letter of gratitude read by a coworker in a face-to-face setting or listened to a conversation on a neutral topic. The results showed greater activation in MPFC and greater improvement in mood occurred when participants listened to a letter of gratitude than when they read the letter aloud or listened to a neutral conversation. In other words, feeling appreciated had a more profound positive impact than expressing appreciation did.
Another intriguing study on gratitude found that listening to stories of others receiving help in times of need strongly activated gratitude pathways in the brains of listeners. The stories were of Holocaust survivors who were sheltered by strangers or received lifesaving food and clothing. The participants were asked to place themselves in the context of the Holocaust and imagine what their own experience would feel like if they received such gifts. For each gift, they rated how grateful they felt. The results revealed that ratings of gratitude correlated with brain activity in the MPFC and ACC.
The Most Powerful Gratitude Practice
Here are four ways to strengthen your gratitude neural pathways:
- When someone expresses appreciation to you, let yourself really feel it in the moment.
- Remember times when you received thanks or appreciation, particularly times when you needed help and help was given. It may help to journal about these experiences.
- Read or listen to stories of people receiving help and really put yourself in their shoes. Allow yourself to identify emotionally with the person receiving help in the story.
- Allow yourself to feel and express appreciation toward those who help make your life easier, richer, and more meaningful.
Practicing one or more of these for just 5 minutes three times weekly can profoundly change the way you feel about your life.
For a deeper dive into the topic of the impact of appreciation and gratitude on the brain, I highly recommend this episode of Stanford neuroscientist Andrew Huberman HubermanLab podcast on the science of gratitude.
Copyright Denise D. Cummins, PhD December 6, 2021
denisecummins.com