With the rise of managed health care, which emphasizes cost-efficiency and brevity, mental health professionals have had to confront this burning question: How can they help clients derive the greatest possible benefit from treatment in the shortest amount of time?………Continue reading….
Source: Greater Good Magazine
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Gratitude not only contributes to positive emotions, but it also leads to a reduction in negative emotions. People who are more grateful have higher levels of subjective well-being. Grateful people are happier, less depressed, less stressed, and more satisfied with their lives and social relationships. Gratitude may shield against depression by enhancing the encoding and recall of positive experiences.
Grateful people tend to exercise greater levels of control over their environments, experience personal growth, find purpose in life, and accept themselves. They also tend to employ more constructive coping strategies when faced with life’s challenges. They are more likely to seek support from other people and to reinterpret and grow from experiences, and they spend more time planning how to deal with problems.
Grateful people rely less on negative coping mechanisms, such as avoidance, self-blame, or substance use. Grateful people also sleep better, because they think more positive thoughts just before going to sleep. They tend to have better relationships, as a person’s gratitude can positively impact their partner’s satisfaction in the relationship. Grateful people are more likely to have higher levels of happiness and lower levels of stress and depression.
Although many emotions and personality traits are important to well-being and mental health, gratitude may be especially important. A longitudinal study showed that people who were more grateful coped better with a life transition. Specifically, people who were more grateful before the transition were less stressed, less depressed, and more satisfied with their relationships three months later.
Two other studies suggested that gratitude may have a unique relationship with well-being and can explain aspects of well-being that other personality traits cannot. Both studies showed that gratitude was able to explain more well-being than the Big Five and 30 of the most commonly studied personality traits. Gratitude also has a positive impact on physical well-being. For example, in one study, teens who wrote letters expressing gratitude to other people over the course of a month were more inclined to eat healthier food.
This phenomenon might be explained by the notion that when people experience gratitude, they are more motivated to reciprocate the kindness shown by others. Therefore, rather than engaging in behaviors that may undermine their own health, they feel driven to adopt healthier lifestyles as a way of acknowledging the support they have received from others. Moreover, gratitude is known to trigger positive emotions, which in turn direct individuals’ attention towards optimistic possibilities in the future.
As a result, people are more likely to embrace behaviors that are conducive to a better future, such as healthy eating. People who express gratitude also demonstrate improved overall health by way of greater physical activity, better sleep, fewer health care visits, and better nutrition. Practicing gratitude may be correlated with small improvements in cardiovascular health. Gratitude may reinforce future prosocial behavior in benefactors. For example, one experiment found that customers of a jewelry store who were called and thanked showed a subsequent 70% increase in purchases.
In comparison, customers who were called and told about a sale showed only a 30% increase in purchases, while customers who were not called at all showed no increase in purchases. In another study, a restaurant’s regular patrons gave bigger tips when servers wrote “Thank you” on their checks. Some starkly distinguish between gratitude and indebtedness. While both emotions may occur in response to help or favors, indebtedness is said to occur when an individual subjectively perceives that they are under an obligation to provide repayment or compensation for the aid.
The two emotions then lead to different actions: Indebtedness may motivate the recipient to avoid the person who helped them, whereas gratitude may motivate a recipient to seek out their benefactor and to improve their relationship with them. A study of the feelings of migrant adolescents towards their parents noted that “gratitude serves and indebtedness challenges intergenerational relations after migration”.
The study also noted that, “when the expectations of return from the benefactor increase, indebtedness of the beneficiary increases but gratitude decreases”. Unlike compassion or sadness, gratitude decreases cigarette craving suggesting a potential role in public health reductions of appetitive risk behaviors. A study on the benefits of mental health counseling divided approximately 300 college students into three groups prior to their first counseling session.
The first group was instructed to write one letter of gratitude a week for three weeks, the second group was asked to write about their negative experiences, and the third group received only counseling. When compared, the first group reported better mental health after completing their writing exercises. The study suggests that practicing gratitude may help the brain react more sensitively to the experience of gratitude in the future, and therefore, may improve mental health.
A social-cognitive model of trait and state levels of gratitude”
Highlights from the Research Project on Gratitude and Thankfulness”.
A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections
How Cultural Differences Influence Gratitude Development”.
The assessment of gratitude.”.
Conceptualizing gratitude and appreciation as a unitary personality trait”
Designing Positive Psychology: Taking Stock and Moving Forward.
Gratitude predicts psychological well-being above the Big Five facets”
Coping style as a psychological resource of grateful people”
Gratitude influences sleep through the mechanism of pre-sleep cognitions”
Gratitude: The parent of all virtues”
Grateful individuals tend to experience less depressive symptoms”.
Gratitude facilitates healthy eating behavior in adolescents and young adults”.
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