Your Brain on Thanks: What Brain Scans Suggest About Gratitude
A brain scan study suggests that practicing gratitude may make the brain more sensitive to it over time. Here is what it found, and what it didn't.
Daniel sat in the waiting room before his weekly counseling session, scrolling through nothing on his phone. It had been a heavy few months. When his counselor suggested he try writing a short thank-you letter to someone, he almost laughed. He did not feel very grateful. He felt tired. But that night he wrote a few lines to his older sister, who had driven three hours to sit with him on a bad weekend. He did not even send it. He just wrote it. And he noticed, a little to his surprise, that he slept a bit easier.
Daniel’s story is made up, but the question behind it is real. When we practice gratitude, is anything actually changing inside us? A small group of researchers set out to look, using brain scans and a group of people who, like Daniel, were already getting help for their mental health.
The Study: Letters, Then a Brain Scan
In 2016, a research team led by Kini published a study in the journal NeuroImage. The participants were people in psychotherapy. Some of them were asked to write gratitude letters as part of the study. Others were in a control group that did not.
About three months later, the researchers invited people into a brain scanner. While inside, participants took part in a “pay it forward” task, a setup built around receiving kindness and choosing whether to pass some of it on. This gave the researchers a way to see how the brain responded during moments involving gratitude and giving.
Here is the key finding. The people who had written gratitude letters showed greater gratitude-related activity in a part of the brain called the medial prefrontal cortex, compared with the control group. This area sits toward the front of the brain and is often linked to thinking about other people, values, and rewards.
What makes this interesting is the time gap. The letter writing happened months before the scan. That suggests the practice may have left a lasting trace. The researchers raised the idea that practicing gratitude might make the brain more sensitive to gratitude over time, a little like how a path through grass gets easier to walk the more you use it.
The Mental Health Side
The same research group also looked at a simpler question: did the gratitude writing help people feel better?
In a 2018 randomized controlled trial published in Psychotherapy Research, Wong and colleagues compared three groups of counseling clients. One group got counseling alone. One got counseling plus expressive writing about negative experiences. And one got counseling plus gratitude letter writing.
The gratitude group reported better mental health weeks later than the other two groups. It is worth noting that everyone in this study was already in counseling. The gratitude writing was added on top of professional care, not used instead of it.
Reading the Results Carefully
It is easy to see a headline like “gratitude rewires your brain” and run with it. The real picture is more modest, and more honest.
- This is one brain scan study. One study can point in a direction, but it cannot settle a question. Other researchers need to test the same idea and find the same thing.
- The samples were small. Brain scan studies are expensive, so they often include relatively few people. Small studies are useful for ideas but can be shaky as proof.
- “Activity” is not “happiness.” Seeing more activity in one brain area during a task does not mean a person is simply happier. It means their brain responded differently in that moment.
- Gratitude was an add-on to therapy. These were people already receiving care. Writing letters did not replace that care.
So the fair way to put it is this: the research suggests that a simple gratitude practice may shape how the brain responds to gratitude later on, and that it may help people in counseling feel a bit better. That is encouraging. It is not a miracle.
Try It Tonight
- Write to one person, even if you don’t send it. In these studies, the act of writing mattered. Pick someone who helped you and put a few honest sentences on the page.
- Name one specific moment. Instead of “thanks for everything,” write about a single day or act. Specific memories tend to feel more real than general ones.
- Repeat it next week. If gratitude works a bit like practice, one letter is a start, not a finish. Set a small reminder to do it again.
Practice Makes a Path
If you are going through a hard time, gratitude is not a replacement for talking with a counselor or doctor, and the research above was done alongside that kind of support. But as one small, kind habit, it may be worth building, one page at a time.
NOTETYPE gives you a private place to do that, with a gratitude question on each new page to help you begin when the words don’t come easily.
Sources
- Kini, P., Wong, J., McInnis, S., Gabana, N., & Brown, J. W. (2016). The effects of gratitude expression on neural activity. NeuroImage, 128, 1–10.
- Wong, Y. J., Owen, J., Gabana, N. T., Brown, J. W., McInnis, S., Toth, P., & Gilman, L. (2018). Does gratitude writing improve the mental health of psychotherapy clients? Evidence from a randomized controlled trial. Psychotherapy Research, 28(2), 192–202.
