At Thanksgiving, between mouthfuls of turkey and sweet potato pie, many of us will ask ourselves: What are we thankful for?

Thus taking a moment to practice gratitude is not an empty holiday tradition. It’s good for us mental And the physical Health and here’s another thing: It can actually change our brains in ways that make us more altruistic—just in time for Giving Tuesday.

The past two decades have seen a flurry of research on gratitude, beginning with a landmark paper by Robert Emmons, Michael McCullough and other psychologists in the early 2000s. In recent years, we have learned through quite a few scientific Study That there is a deep neural connection between gratitude and giving – they share a pathway in the brain – and our brains become more charitable when we are grateful.

Christina Kearns, a neuroscientist at the University of Oregon, is a leading researcher in the field. In 2017, he wondered what happens in the brain when you receive a gift versus when you give a gift — and whether neural responses differ depending on your personality. So he put study participants in a brain scanner and forced them to watch the computer transfer real money to their own account or instead of giving it to a food bank.

Cairns described What he learned:

It turns out that the neural connection between gratitude and giving runs deep, both literally and figuratively. A region deep in the brain’s frontal lobe, called the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, is key to supporting both. Physiologically, this region is connected as a center for processing the value of risk and reward; It is richly connected to deeper regions of the brain that provide pleasurable neurochemicals under the right conditions.

Participants I will identify as more grateful and more altruistic through a questionnaire [showed] A stronger response in this reward region of the brain when they see charity receiving money. They were happy to see the food bank doing well.

Next, Kearns wanted to know if, by changing how grateful people felt, he could change the brain’s response to giving and receiving. So he divided the participants into two groups. Over three weeks, one group journaled about their gratitude, while the other group journaled about other (non-gratitude-specific) events in their lives.

People in the gratitude-journaling contingent reported feeling more grateful. What’s more, the reward regions of their brains begin to respond more to charitable giving than to earning money for themselves. As Kearns wrote:

Gratitude practice alters the value of giving in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex. It changes the exchange rate in the brain. Giving to charity has become more valuable than receiving one’s own money. After the brain calculates the exchange rate, you pay in the neural currency of reward, the supply of neurotransmitters that signal pleasure and goal achievement.

These are interesting (though probably not permanent) effects. Of course, we still need it More research to fully understand the brain processes of gratitude, giving, and how they relate. But for those of us who don’t always find resonance in the old adage that “it is better to give than to receive,” Kearns concludes, If true, suggest a useful correction: Giving might actually be better – if you do it. You can actively choose to retrain your brain so that it gets more pleasure from giving.

Here are some effective ways to cultivate gratitude

If increasing people’s gratitude is an effective way to increase their charity, then maybe tricking people into cultivating more gratitude is worth it.

For now, we’ve made at least one such nudge on our calendar: Thanksgiving. Many religious traditions also include daily practices to increase gratitude, and scientific studies have shown that some—eg prayer – really has that effect.

If practicing gratitude isn’t yet part of your daily routine and you want to cultivate it throughout the year and not just at Thanksgiving, here are a few practices that researchers have found to be effective in increasing gratitude.

Gratitude Journaling: This simple practice — writing down the things you’re grateful for — has grown in popularity over the past few years But research shows that there is More and less efficient ways to do it. Researchers say that writing in detail about a particular thing, really tasting it, is better than writing off a superficial list of things. They recommend that you try to focus on people you’re grateful for, because it’s more impactful than focusing on things, and that you focus on events that surprised you, because they usually elicit stronger feelings of gratitude.

Researchers also note that writing in a gratitude journal once or twice a week is better for your well-being than doing it every day. In one study, people who wrote once a week for six weeks reported an increase in happiness afterward; Those who do not write three times a week. That’s because our brains have a disturbing habit called hedonic adaptation. “We adapt quickly to positive events, especially if we constantly focus on them,” says Emmons explains. “It sounds counterintuitive, but that’s how the mind works.”

Acknowledgments and Visits: Another habit is to write a thank you letter to someone. Research shows that this significantly increases your gratitude levels, even if you don’t actually send the letter. And the effects on the brain can last for months. in one StudySubjects who participated in writing gratitude letters expressed more gratitude and showed more activation in their anterior anterior cingulate cortex — involved in predicting the outcome of our actions — three months later.

Some psychologists, such as Martin Seligman, Sonja Lyubomirsky, and Jeffrey Froh, A variation of the thank you letter exercise studied had participants write a letter to someone they had not properly thanked, then meet with that person and read the letter aloud to them. A2009 study led by Frohfound that teenagers experienced a large increase in positive emotions after having a gratitude visit — even two months later.

Empirical use: There’s another way to increase gratitude and thwart hedonic orientation that seems especially relevant to the upcoming gift-buying season: Spend your money on experiences, not things. Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley summary A major study of empirical costs like this:

Across six experiments, the study found that people felt and expressed more gratitude after buying an experience (eg, concert tickets or eating out) than after buying a good (eg, clothing or jewelry). According to the researchers, these experiments suggest that “as a natural behavior that is relatively resistant to adaptation, experiential consumption may be a particularly simple way to encourage the experience of gratitude.”

In other words, if you’re going to buy something special this holiday season, consider it an experience. As a result gratitude is more likely to stick around in the brain – and where gratitude abounds, altruism can follow.

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