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 Gratitude was linked to better sleep and mood, as well as lower
levels of inflammation in people coping with heart failure in a
California study.
Lead author Paul Mills said in an email that previous studies have
focused on the benefits of spirituality in general, and have tied it
to a better quality of life and better physical health.
Mills, who works in the departments of public health and psychiatry
at the University of California, San Diego, decided to narrow this
focus. He and his research team were inspired by the link between
gratitude and the heart in language, such as the expression “a
grateful heart,” he told Reuters Health.
“We wanted to examine gratitude in a population that has been
challenged in terms of their cardiac health,” said Mills, who is
also affiliated with the Chopra Center for Wellbeing in Carlsbad,
California.
More than five million people in the U.S. suffer from heart failure,
according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Rates
are expected to nearly triple in the next few decades as the
population ages, the researchers point out in Spirituality in
Clinical Practice.
The study team, which included Deepak Chopra, an author and widely
known proponent of alternative health, recruited 186 patients from
California cardiology clinics.
All had Stage B heart failure, meaning they had some heart
dysfunction and swelling but not more serious symptoms. The
researchers say Stage B is an important time to intervene, as damage
may still be reversed.
The participants assessed their own levels of gratitude, spiritual
wellbeing and self-efficacy - the belief in their own ability to
succeed at managing their heart function. The patients also rated
their own depressive symptoms, sleep quality and fatigue. Lastly,
researchers checked participants' blood for indicators of
inflammation.
The researchers analyzed the data to determine the relationships
between gratitude and spiritual wellbeing and the symptoms patients
reported.
They found that patients who were more grateful reported better
sleep, less depressed mood, less fatigue, higher self-efficacy and
lower indicators of inflammation.
Spiritual wellbeing was tied to the same positive symptoms, but not
to lower inflammation.
Mills and his colleagues also found that the link between improved
health and spiritual wellbeing was at least partially explained by
the role gratitude plays in spirituality. “It was the gratitude
aspect of spirituality that accounted for those effects, not
spirituality per se,” Mills noted.
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Nina Kupper, a professor of medical psychology at Tillburg
University in the Netherlands, thinks the researchers may be
overemphasizing the role of gratitude, saying that it is not
responsible for all the effects of spirituality.
However, Kupper noted in an email, positive emotions are generally
associated with better health and that, “Gratitude as a concept
might be tapping into these positive emotions more than spirituality
does.”
Mills also described a sub-study, in which some patients were
assigned to add eight weeks of gratitude journaling to their usual
treatment. “We used gratitude journaling as a way to consciously
cultivate gratitude, with the aim of increasing its presence in the
patients’ lives,” he explained.
The sub-study found that patients who did the journal exercise had
reduced indicators of inflammation and increased heart-rate
variability, another measure of reduced risk, compared to their
readings at the beginning of the study. A comparison group that
didn’t do the journaling exercise had no changes in these measures.
Kupper, who was not involved in the study, stressed the importance
of positive emotions to the recovery process, saying that these
feelings are “very important in keeping the balance between illness
burden and a person’s capacity to deal with the illness.”
She noted that this is especially true for heart failure patients,
who often experience other illnesses as well, such as kidney
disease, anemia and diabetes.
According to Mills, “It seems that a more grateful heart is indeed a
more healthy heart.” He advised that “gratitude journaling is an
easy way to support cardiac health.”
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/1Ht2MW9 Spirituality in Clinical Practice,
March 2015.
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