At the end of the movie The Life Of Brian, when the hero is being crucified alongside some other chaps, Eric Idle famously advises, in a song, to always look on the bright side of life.

Always? One supposes that if you’re hanging on a cross, you won’t have to do the dishes later.

Years later, a form of looking on the bright side, gratitude, has become a mantra in the wellness sector. It can come across as a bit precious and fluffy.

Does it really make a big difference to the quality of your life? What about quantity?

A new study out of the Harvard Institute for Quantitative Social Science has found that people “who more frequently notice and feel grateful for the positive things in their lives may be less likely to die prematurely”.

This was a large observational study, and goes nowhere near proving causation. But the scale of it makes the findings more than suggestive.

Nearly 50,000 older US nurses were given questionnaires to assess how often they felt grateful.

In a follow-up three years later, about 4600 of them had died.

The researchers say those who scored highly on the gratitude questionnaire were 9 per cent less likely to have died compared to those who scored the lowest.

This was after “accounting for other factors including physical and mental health, demographic information and their social lives”.

Short- and long-term benefits

When you look at the gratitude studies that have emerged over the past 15 years, they roughly divide into two categories.

There are those that suggest you can get a momentary glow from expressing and receiving gratitude.

Doing so can reportedly improve your relationships and even lead you to make new friends.

An interesting article from the University of California (UCLA) details some of the ways that gratitude can be called upon as a intervention.

The author cites a 2021 review of research found that keeping a gratitude journal can cause a significant drop in diastolic blood pressure – the force your heart exerts between beats.

The article also suggests that gratitude can help calm the nervous system.

The author writes: “Taking a moment to be thankful causes physiological changes in your body that initiate the parasympathetic nervous system”.

This is the part of your nervous system that helps you rest and digest.

“Gratitude and the response it causes help bring down your blood pressure, heart rate and breathing to help with overall relaxation.”

Maybe, maybe not

It could be, though, that simply being aware of stress and taking some deep breaths and a moment to apply some logic to the situation might be equally helpful.

More evidence is needed before we can say for sure that is gratitude is a reliable intervention in moments of crisis.

This brings us to the other type of gratitude, where it’s an underlying attitude. This would explain why the nurses in the study mentioned above lived longer. 

 A 2021 study found that older people in Japan have an “attitude of gratitude” which keeps them feeling hopeful, even when they experienced difficulties and were anxious about getting older.

Finally, keep in mind that gratitude has limits as a trendy tool to be grabbed from the first-aid kit.

In 2020, researchers analysed results from 27 separate studies that examined the effectiveness of gratitude interventions on reducing symptoms of anxiety and depression.

The analysis showed that these interventions had limited benefits at best.

Jennifer Cheavens, associate professor of psychology, and co-author of the study said: “Telling people who are feeling depressed and anxious to be more grateful likely won’t result in the kind of reductions in depression and anxiety we would want to see.

“It might be that these sort of interventions, on their own, aren’t powerful enough or that people have difficulty enacting them fully when they are feeling depressed and anxious.”

Exercise and therapy will work better. Be grateful for that.