Gratefulness Significantly Correlated with Better Sleep
Among the changes I’ve made to my life over the past couple of years, one that I’ve stuck to very well is practicing gratitude.
This isn’t something that came naturally to me. I work on it every morning and night, and I try to remember to be grateful at other times during the day.
I practice gratitude for the peace that it brings me, but as science is beginning to show, there are many other benefits.
Gratitude Helps Us Sleep
Here’s a recent study from the Journal of Psychosomatic Research:
Gratitude influences sleep through the mechanism of pre-sleep cognitions
The study tracked over 400 people and accounted for a number of variables, including other psychological factors.
What the researchers found is that the more grateful people were, the better they slept, the longer they slept, and also the better they functioned during the following day.
As with many studies, this isn’t one that proves causality, and it’s likely that it will be a while before we get that kind of proof for something like gratitude. And yet, what’s the downside to practicing a little more gratitude? Not much that I can see.
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