Double Feature: Optimistic? Live longer / Why Practicing Gratitude is Good For Your Health
Friends,
Here is a fascinating article about the benefits of optimism—live longer, sleep better, and reduce stress. Wow. If you’re generally optimistic, that’s good news, of course! If you’re not, never fear, there is a simple yet powerful thing you can do to increase your optimism—it’s called gratitude. Gratitude produces happy chemicals in your brain and can actually rewire your neural pathways to be more optimistic. It takes a little work, but it’s well worth it!
Enjoy.
Optimistic? Live longer.
https://nl.understandably.com/posts/some-very-good-news
by Bill Murphy
Here’s some good news about good news, especially if you’re the kind of person who wants to sleep better and live longer -- maybe even many years longer.
(Honestly, who doesn’t fit into at least one of those two categories?)
Let’s start with living longer. An enormous study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences combined two research projects that examined data on a total of 71,173 people—some of them over 30 years—and found that having an optimistic outlook on life was associated with living significantly longer.
How much longer? As much as 15 percent, which could easily translate to 10 years or more.
The researchers, from several institutions including Harvard, drew on data from the Nurses’ Health Study (NHS) the Veterans Affairs Normative Aging Study (NAS).
They found that maintaining an optimistic outlook was associated with greater longevity than their less-optimistic peers, regardless of other factors that we associate with longer life, such as:
making healthy choices (or lack thereof),
socioeconomic status,
health conditions,
incidence of depression, and
“social integration.”
“Our results further suggest that optimism is specifically related to 11 to 15 percent longer life span, on average, and to greater odds of achieving ‘exceptional longevity,’ that is, living to the age of 85 or beyond,” the study’s authors wrote.
That’s pretty darn good news, right? Especially if you can train yourself to be the kind of person who instinctively looks on the bright side.
But wait, there’s still more.
Separately, a five-year study of 3,500 people living in three different U.S. cities found that optimistic people fall asleep faster, sleep better and longer, and are generally better rested than their less-optimistic peers.
Longer life and better sleep, what’s not to like?
The causal relationship between optimism and sleep isn’t determined by this study, but one theory is that the behaviors that ultimately make people more optimistic also can lead to more restful sleep (as opposed to the idea that optimism itself leads to better sleep).
“Optimists are more likely to engage in active problem-focused coping and to interpret stressful events in more positive ways,” said the study’s author, Rosalba Hernandez, a professor of social work at the University of Illinois, “reducing worry and ruminative thoughts when they’re falling asleep and throughout their sleep cycle.”
Either way: Sleep better, and live longer, and it’s all associated with simply having a more optimistic outlook on life. Even if it’s all a self-fulfilling prophesy, it’s one worth trying to adopt
Why Practicing Gratitude is Good For Your Health
https://ckarchive.com/b/o8ukhqhkx3oo4tp2ww025apnpe8rr
By Catherine Sanderson, author of The Positive Shift
For as long as I can remember, my mom’s family has spent Thanksgiving together. For years we gathered — uncles, aunts, cousins — at my grandmother’s small ranch home in Southern Georgia — with some of us supplementing the traditional dinner with a late night trip to Waffle House.
Then in 2004, our family suffered two tremendous losses. First, my mother died in July — only 4 months after being diagnosed with late stage ovarian cancer. Then, my grandmother died in November, following a short illness likely brought on by the death of her only daughter.
That year we gathered at a funeral, not over turkey. And I wondered whether our tradition would continue, given the absence of the two women who had — like in most families — organized our family gatherings for decades.
But my uncle — now the oldest living child — rose to the occasion. He set up a schedule in which each family would alternate hosting, with my brother and I stepping in for our mom. We’ve now continued that plan for the last 18 years (with a one year interruption in 2020 due to covid).
Much will be written this week about the stress of Thanksgiving, from the difficulties of traffic jams and delayed flights to the challenges of cooking a turkey and pleasing picky eaters. But this week is a great time for us all to instead focus on what we’re grateful for in our lives — and empirical research reveals that doing so is good for our happiness and our health.
Researchers in one simple study randomly assigned people to one of three groups:
People in one group were told to write down five things they were grateful for in their lives over the last week (their lists included such things as God, kindness from friends, and the Rolling Stones).
People in another group were told to write down five daily hassles from the last week (their lists included such things as too many bills to pay, trouble finding parking, and a messy kitchen).
People in a third group simply listed five events that had occurred in the last week (their lists included attending a music festival, learning CPR, and cleaning out a closet).
Before the study started, all participants had kept daily journals recording their moods, physical health, and general attitudes. The researchers could then compare how people in these different groups changed over time.
Can you predict the findings? People who focused on what they were grateful for felt 25 percent happier — they were more optimistic about the future and they felt better about their lives. People in this group also reported exercising more and had fewer symptoms of illness.
Although this study was conducted with relatively young, healthy people, other research reveals very similar benefits for people struggling with serious challenges. People with neuromuscular disorders, which cause joint and muscle pain as well as muscle atrophy, who write about things they are grateful for in their daily lives show greater satisfaction and more optimism. Women with breast cancer who spend ten minutes a day writing about their gratitude toward someone in their life show better psychological well-being as well as better adaptation to cancer. These findings all tell us that focusing on what you are grateful for has real and substantial benefits, even among people struggling with serious, even life-threatening health conditions.
This year it’s my turn to host the annual family gathering, and I’m feeling very grateful that our tradition has continued. My family includes a diverse range of people: meat-eaters and vegetarians, Southerners and Northerners, Republicans and Democrats. We share allegiances to different sports teams and almost definitely voted differently in this year’s midterm elections.
But we’re family — and this year will add yet another set of Thanksgiving memories, from putting out a brush fire that nearly got dangerously out of control in my grandmother’s yard to canoeing on a river in Northern Florida to eating deep dish pizza in Chicago. And I’m grateful not only for another year of creating memories with aunts and uncles and cousins, but also for my wisdom in ordering the entire meal from Whole Foods.