The differential effects of gratitude and sleep on psychological distress in patients with chronic pain
Among 224 chronic pain patients, gratitude was linked to lower depression largely through a direct route, while its link to lower anxiety ran more strongly through sleep - suggesting gratitude and sleep act on distress by partly different paths.
A useful nuance: gratitude does not appear to work on anxiety and depression by the same route.
Two hundred and twenty-four patients with chronic pain completed measures of pain, depression, anxiety, gratitude and sleep disturbance.
Regression analyses found a modest mediating effect of sleep on the gratitude-depression link, and a stronger mediating effect of sleep on the gratitude-anxiety link. Most of gratitude’s association with depression was direct.
The practical reading: if gratitude helps anxiety, sleep may be a large part of how. If it helps depression, something else is doing more of the work.
Treat all of this as a hypothesis. The design is cross-sectional, everything is self-reported, and no one was randomised to anything. It is a map of where to look next, not a finding about what to do.
Cross-sectional data cannot establish causation or direction, and the authors describe the mediation as cross-sectional throughout. Everything is self-reported questionnaire data from one chronic pain population, and no intervention was tested, so nothing here shows that practising gratitude would change either outcome.
Summarized by Tiago Martins · Last updated: · How we write these
