The Impact of Gratitude on Mental Health

According to a study conducted by Wong et al. (2018), gratitude is associated

with regions in the brain that regulate the parasympathetic nervous system, the system responsible

for rest, relaxation, and calming the body. Gratitude activates

areas within the limbic system, including the hippocampus and amygdala, which influence

emotional processing (Wong et al., 2018). Their study sought to discover the

positive effects of gratitude writing to improve the mental health of psychotherapy patients,

finding that there was a long-term effect lasting 4 to 12 weeks after the experiment that

showed an overall improved mental state in psychotherapy patients. This proves that