Gratitude
The Soft Power of Gratitude
The misunderstood practice of gratitude won’t fix your problems, but it can help.
Posted November 22, 2025 | Reviewed by Margaret Foley
THE BASICS
Key points
- It’s human nature to dwell on the negative.
- Feeling grateful can have a powerfully positive effect on our lives, health, and well-being.
- You can experiment with ways of incorporating a gratitude practice into your daily life.
It’s human nature to dwell on the negative. This tendency is called the “negativity bias,” or the propensity to focus on problems, annoyances, and injustices in our lives rather than focusing on being grateful for the events or people in our lives that are working and that we feel good about. Evolutionary psychologists believe we developed this negativity bias for our survival: Our brains developed a system that gives more weight to negative information, thus prioritizing threats such as predators and natural disasters. However, while this bias may have been crucial for our survival, it can now cause us to overemphasize negative aspects of life.
Dismiss positive thinking as Pollyanna, New Age, or even as outdated ancient or religious thinking if you like, but there’s a wealth of evidence that feeling grateful can have a powerfully positive effect on our lives, health, and psychological and emotional well-being. To be clear, when I refer to gratitude, I’m not talking about simply being thankful. I’m talking about a cognitive-emotional process (involves both thinking and feeling) that can be momentary (state gratitude) and/or long-term (trait gratitude). This means gratitude is not simply an emotion—it comes from appraisal: recognizing positive aspects of life as gifts rather than thinking of them as an entitlement or not noticing them at all.
Benefits of Gratitude
Research by Jeffrey J. Froh of Hofstra University in New York has found that adults who feel grateful are more optimistic, report more social satisfaction, experience less envy, less depression, and fewer physical complaints. They also sleep better and get more exercise. Kids who experience more gratitude do better in school, set higher goals for themselves, derive more satisfaction from life, friends, family, and school, and are generally less materialistic and have more desire to give back.
Gratitude can also have a social benefit. In other research by Robert Emmons, a professor of psychology at the University of California-Davis and a pioneer in gratitude research, people who were assigned the task of making a daily gratitude list were more likely to report having helped someone with a personal problem or having offered emotional support to another relative to those who focused on the hassles of life or comparing themselves to others.
Gratitude can help to alleviate depression and anxiety, lessen rumination, help with trauma recovery, and even improve sleep quality.
See Also: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/what-the-wild-things-are
Continue/Read Original Article Here: The Soft Power of Gratitude | Psychology Today
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