Does Gratitude Help With Anxiety?

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Written by Consensus AI
3 min read

Check out this answer from Consensus:

Gratitude interventions have a modest but positive impact on reducing anxiety symptoms. They work by decreasing repetitive negative thinking, improving self-compassion, and enhancing overall mental well-being. While the effects are generally small, they are sustained over time and can be particularly effective in specific contexts, such as reducing attachment and death anxiety.

Gratitude interventions have been explored as a potential method to improve psychological well-being, including reducing symptoms of anxiety. This synthesis examines the efficacy of gratitude interventions in alleviating anxiety based on findings from multiple research studies.

Key Insights

  • Modest Reduction in Anxiety Symptoms:
    • Gratitude interventions have a small but significant effect on reducing symptoms of anxiety at both post-test and follow-up periods .
  • Reduction in Repetitive Negative Thinking (RNT):
    • Gratitude interventions significantly reduce repetitive negative thinking, which is a risk factor for anxiety. This reduction in RNT mediates the effect of gratitude on anxiety.
  • Improvement in Mental Well-being:
    • Gratitude interventions improve overall mental well-being, which indirectly contributes to reduced anxiety, although the effect on distress is less clear.
  • Self-relating Processes:
    • Gratitude predicts lower anxiety symptoms by fostering a more compassionate and less critical relationship with oneself.
  • Comparison with Other Interventions:
    • Gratitude interventions outperform measurement-only controls in improving psychological well-being but show limited superiority over alternative activities in reducing anxiety specifically.
  • Long-term Effects:
    • The positive effects of gratitude interventions on mental health, including anxiety, can be sustained for several months .
  • Attachment Anxiety:
    • Perceiving gratitude from a romantic partner is linked to reduced attachment anxiety, suggesting that gratitude can improve specific forms of anxiety related to relationships.
  • Death Anxiety:
    • Gratitude interventions specifically reduce death anxiety, although they do not significantly affect general positive or negative affect .


Does gratitude help with anxiety?

David Cregg has answered Uncertain

An expert from Ohio State University in Psychology

When I get asked this question, it’s always a bit tricky to answer. If the question is, “Are grateful people less anxious?”, then the answer is undoubtedly yes. For example, a 2010 review paper outlined evidence that people who report being more grateful have less anxiety (along with greater mental health in a number of other domains). So grateful people do seem to be less anxious, along with being happier, physically healthier, and a number of other things. However, if the question is, “will doing a gratitude intervention make me less anxious [or less depressed, happier, healthier, etc.]?”, then the answer becomes much more murky.

Recently, Dr. Jennifer Cheavens and I published a meta-analysis on the effectiveness of gratitude interventions for depression and anxiety symptoms. Think of a meta-analysis like a summary of all the data on a given topic. Essentially, you extract all the data from individual studies and then combine it into one massive dataset that allows you to summarize the overall impact of an intervention. What we found is that gratitude interventions have an overall weak effect on reducing anxiety based on the 5 studies that included anxiety data. However, 5 studies is not alot for a meta-analysis. In contrast, we had 24 studies that included depression data (in case you’re curious, we found gratitude interventions are not effective for depressive symptoms either).

So I would say that based on the currently available data, there’s not much evidence that gratitude journals, gratitude diaries, or other types of “gratitude interventions” are especially effective at reducing anxiety. However, we really need more studies that include anxiety measures to be more confident in this conclusion. Right now, I would suggest individuals seek out other techniques with greater evidence for anxiety, such as mindfulness or other techniques drawn from CBT (cognitive behavioral therapy).

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