Is Gratitude Good for Your Health?

I just read this article: Is Gratitude Good for Your Health?

Is gratitude good for health or are healthy people more grateful?

"In one study, more grateful participants reported fewer health problems." On the surface of it it seem that if there is any causal connection between being grateful and being healthy is that that healthier people are more grateful and not the other way around as the article seem to suggest.

OK, so reading further the article they also got to the same question.

"Results from the GGSC's own Thnx4 project found that participants who kept an online gratitude journal for two weeks reported better physical health."

I think that's actually easy to explain. If you start to collect your thoughts and every day or every week come up with something that you can be grateful of, then you will brighten up your daily (or weekly) life. Normally, I guess ordinary people, usually pass by all the good things they have in life and primarily notice the bad ones. I might assume this is the difference between optimistic and pessimistic people as well, right? The optimistic probably see a lot more of the good things in their life while the pessimistic more the bad things.

Pointing out the good things will make life seem better that probably impacts health as well.

I doubt that being grateful can impact health directly, but being thoughtful about the good parts of your life can. This is exactly how the gratefulness projects might work. They make you think about good things in your life.

I am really interested what are people grateful about and how do these gratefulness projects work? Do people have to come up with totally original items that they are grateful about or do they get a list of items they can expand on?

As I was reading the article I tried to make myself a list of things for what I am grateful for, and got stuck after just a few items. Of course if I invested more time in it, I might be able to come up with new ideas, but I am not sure.

I am also not sure how deep that feeling need to be in order to "count".

I mean I can be grateful that the weather is not bad, but is that it? Could that be one of the items?

If are already at it, I am grateful that I can read articles like the ones linked from this post and I can understand most of the words without looking up in a dictionary.

However what I am really grateful is that after a year and half of the pandemic I could visit and spend some time with my mother.