The Power of Gratitude in Health Care

"Gratitude is a vaccine, an antitoxin, and an antiseptic."

— John Henry Jowett (1863–1923)

While it's widely understood that practicing gratitude can lead to a higher quality of living in a person's average day-to-day, there isn't nearly enough conversation about the benefits of gratitude in specific settings.

Let's talk about health care. How can adopting a culture of gratitude foster healthier patients, more resilient staff, and ultimately more collaborative organizations?

According to the Greater Good Science Center, gratitude-based research reveals a myriad of direct health benefits: improving sleep, exercise tendencies, cardiovascular health, adherence to medication, as well as general mood, hope, and optimism; while reducing substance abuse, fat intake, blood pressure, suicidal thoughts, and perceived stress and depression in health care providers.

In a study conducted in 2015 on adults and college students in psychotherapy for depression and anxiety, one group was asked to write weekly gratitude letters, a second group wrote their thoughts and feelings about stressful experiences, and a third had no writing activity. The result? The gratitude group reported significantly better mental health than the other 2 groups, suggesting that gratitude interventions can do wonders to combat negative emotions and thought patterns.

Gratitude isn't just for patients. Let's not forget about health care practitioners, too.

Take a look at this sobering stat: 43% of nurses and over 50% of physicians say they have struggled with burnout. On top of experiencing emotional exhaustion and assuming a callous, cynical attitude toward others, burnout also results in a reduced ability to be effective in one's job and relationships. Not exactly something you want to hear about your health care provider, huh?

Here's how gratitude can combat this issue. In another 2015 study, health care providers were asked to write down things they were grateful for twice a week for 4 weeks. By the end of the study, they reported a 28% reduction in perceived occupational stress and a 16% reduction in depressive symptoms—effects which can boost productivity and quality of patient services.

So the question is, how can we enforce gratitude efforts on a systemic level, not only supporting individual practice amongst patients and health care providers but baking it into organizational culture?

Gratitude programs and practices need to be promoted in ways that respect staff time and feel organic. For instance, the Greater Good Science Center has partnered with several health care organizations including Kaiser Permanente, Marin General Hospital, and Dignity Health, to run gratitude challenges on their online gratitude journaling platform, "Thnx4."

Another organic gratitude practice patients, providers, and organizations can consider adopting is Soul, which runs in a similar vein to journaling but is SMS-based. After signing up, Soul texts you intelligent nudges to share gratitude by asking consciously varied and research-informed gratitude prompts, at spontaneous times and days. There are no guidelines to the answers you text back—even one word is a win.

Soul is designed to be accessible, authentic, and deeply personal. And it’s exactly the kind of thing health care innovators need to be taking up to facilitate a culture of gratitude.