The U.S. has an epidemic of loneliness. More than half of American adults are lonely, according to a recent study from Cigna and Morning Consult.
There are many remedies for the problem, but one is pretty straightforward: practicing gratitude.
Research shows that gratitude can improve physical health and make us feel less lonely. In fact, an analysis across dozens of studies showed that as gratitude increased, loneliness decreased.
Monica Bartlett, a social psychology professor and head of the Positive Emotion and Social Behavior Lab at Gonzaga University, studies how our emotions have evolved to help us make good decisions.
“And so within that framework,” she says, “I understand gratitude as the positive emotional experience that we’re feeling when we recognize that others have done a kindness for us.”
4 questions with Monica Bartlett
How does her research support the idea that gratitude is linked to decreased loneliness?
“This is a fairly common gratitude cultivating exercise. It’s very simple. People are asked to jot down at the end of a day three things that they’re grateful for no matter how small, and to recognize who [or] why that thing has happened. That’s an attempt to get people to be looking outside of themselves, right?
“What we wanted to look at is how people that were doing this gratitude habit forming exercise, how did their outcomes look differently than those who were not? And what we found is that those older adults who were in the gratitude writing condition showed reductions in loneliness and consequently, improvements in their well-being in a way that people in the control condition did not.”
How does practicing gratitude lead to decreased loneliness?
“We think that it’s helping us recognize that we are cared for by others. Like indeed, we’re not alone. In fact, other people are bringing good into our lives so that this sort of cognitive shift is what underlies reductions in loneliness.
“I think if you begin to know that I’m going to be doing this exercise every day, tonight I’m going to write down what I’m grateful for, that then by habit forming, I’m thinking that means you begin to scan your day differently once you grow accustomed to doing this. So that you are noting when it’s happening, even when it’s something very small. You know, what a lovely thing that person just did for me. Whereas for many of us, I think by the end of our day, we may have forgotten these things. Gratitude habit forming exercises push us, I think, to actually note and then remember these things.
“Humans tend to notice the negative. We’re sort of built to be very aware of the negative in our lives. That’s probably very adaptive [because] if you overlook something negative, that could be extremely costly to you. But then an outcome of that is the positive, and particularly many small positive things, may go unnoticed. This sort of cultivation is trying to push back on that so that it becomes more regular and sort of spirals in this flourishing way.
How can people build a gratitude practice in their daily lives?
“I have two ideas that I talk to my students [about] in my human flourishing and my resiliency courses. The first you and I have been discussing, that is the gratitude journal [as] you might call it. The second thing that can be so beautiful, the stories that my students have brought back to class to share have been very lovely, sometimes quite emotional. That is a gratitude letter writing exercise in which students will choose someone from their past, that they have not thanked them for some good that they brought into their lives. And the student takes time to write a letter of gratitude to express gratitude to this person and then delivers it, either mails it or hand delivers it.
“And what’s happening in that exercise is that not only are you feeling grateful, you’re reliving why it is that you’re thankful to this person so that you’re experiencing gratitude for yourself in that moment. But then there’s this really neat thing that happens when you express that gratitude to your benefactor. And you see what joy, sometimes pretty intense feelings, positive feelings that brings for the benefactor.”
Why is practicing gratitude important for our daily lives?
“People often ask, ‘Is thinking about the positive and what’s going right in our lives, simply icing on the cake and you should be taking care of everything else first?’ And my response to that is this can be one of the tools in your tool kit for helping feel better for helping deal with difficulties and setbacks and hurts. I know that being told that you should feel grateful, really has a very aversive, you know, sound to it. But I think if this sounds like something a person might enjoy doing, there’s every reason to think that it could be another tool that’s relatively simple, that could help people that are hurting, not just for flourishing.”
Samantha Raphelson produced and edited this interview for broadcast with Catherine Welch. Raphelson also adapted it for the web.
This segment aired on December 12, 2024.
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