The impact of a brief gratitude intervention on subjective well-being, biology and sleep
Two weeks of a gratitude practice increased hedonic well-being, optimism and sleep quality, and lowered diastolic blood pressure, compared with an active control that simply reported everyday events. Improvements in well-being tracked with better sleep and lower blood pressure - but showed no relationship with cortisol.
The randomised evidence behind the claim that gratitude helps you sleep - and it is better evidence than most of what gets cited for it.
One hundred and nineteen young women were randomly assigned to two weeks of a gratitude intervention, an active control that reported everyday events, or no treatment.
The gratitude condition produced increases in hedonic well-being, optimism and sleep quality, along with decreases in diastolic blood pressure. Improvements in subjective well-being correlated with better sleep and lower blood pressure.
Cortisol showed nothing. The one objective neuroendocrine marker did not move, which the authors report plainly.
The active control is what makes this worth citing. Comparing gratitude against reporting everyday events rules out the explanation that any daily writing task would have done the same - the same design logic as Cheng et al.’s hassle diaries and Tolcher et al.’s activity-matched control.
Read it alongside Boggiss et al. 2020, whose systematic review found subjective sleep quality improved in 5 of 8 gratitude studies. This is one of the 5.
All 119 participants were young women, so it says nothing about anyone else. The intervention ran two weeks with no long-term follow-up, so durability is unknown. Cortisol - the objective stress biomarker - showed no relationship at all, which weakens the biological story the rest of the results suggest.
Articles citing this study
Summarized by Tiago Martins · Last updated: · How we write these
