SHOWING GRATITUDE: Thanksgiving is a great time to count your blessings, and evidence shows that being grateful throughout the year can lead to better health and well-being.

• Author: Lindberg, Eric
• Position: PSYCHOLOGY

BEFORE the feast begins, everyone around the table shares something that makes them feel grateful. It is a Thanksgiving tradition for many American families, but you might be surprised to learn that the simple exercise can have dramatic benefits. For those who can resist diving into the turkey and mashed potatoes for a few minutes to share their thanks first, evidence indicates that gratitude can boost health and well-being.

"Benefits associated with gratitude include sound sleep, more exercise, reduced symptoms of physical pain, lower levels of inflammation, lower blood pressure, and a host of other things we associate with better health," explains Glenn Fox, head of program design, strategy, and outreach at the USC Performance Science Institute. "The limits to gratitude's health benefits are really in how much you pay attention to feeling and practicing gratitude."

You might get a warm glow from expressing gratitude once a year at Thanksgiving. To truly derive long-lasting benefits, though, you should make it a part of your daily or weekly routine. Scientific evidence from gratitude research backs up a few typical approaches, including saying thanks to people who do not expect it and writing down a few things each day that make you grateful.

"It's very similar to working out, in that the more you practice, the better you get," Fox indicates. "The more you practice, the easier it is to feel grateful when you need it."

Fox first started researching gratitude as a doctoral student in neuroscience at USC. Some people scoffed at his interest in the emotion, which had received little attention from researchers, but he pressed forward with what would become the first study of how gratitude manifests in the brain. He found links between gratitude and brain structures also tied to social bonding, reward, and stress relief. Other studies have bolstered his findings, revealing connections between the tendency to feel grateful and a chemical called oxytocin that promotes social ties.

Research on gratitude also has found associations with other health benefits, including general well-being and less depression. Fox says it makes sense that gratitude is beneficial from an evolutionary perspective. "Gratitude is such a key function of our social lives and our evolution as a species. People who did not develop gratitude or grateful relationships with others . . . it's very unlikely they would have survived in a social context."

Dene Rosenstein, a...