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With the rise of managed health care, which emphasizes cost-efficiency and brevity, mental health professionals have had to confront this burning question: How can they help clients derive the greatest possible benefit from treatment in the shortest amount of time? Recent evidence suggests that a promising approach is to complement psychological counseling with additional activities that are not too taxing for clients but yield high results.

In our own research, we have zeroed in on one such activity: the practice of gratitude. Indeed, many studies over the past decade have found that people who consciously count their blessings tend to be happier and less depressed.

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The problem is that most research studies on gratitude have been conducted with well-functioning people. Is gratitude beneficial for people who struggle with mental health concerns? And, if so, how? We set out to address these questions in a recent research study hTe nearly adults, mostly college students who were seeking mental health counseling at a university. We recruited these participants https://amazonia.fiocruz.br/scdp/blog/gregorys-punctuation-checker-tool/case-study-food-and-beverage.php before they began their first session of counseling, and, on average, they reported clinically low levels of mental health at the time.

The majority of people seeking counseling services at this university in general struggled with issues related to depression and anxiety.

We randomly assigned our study participants into three groups. Although all three groups received counseling services, the first group was also instructed to write one letter of gratitude to https://amazonia.fiocruz.br/scdp/blog/woman-in-black-character-quotes/mass-media-s-influence-on-the-development.php person each week for three weeks, whereas the second group was asked to write about their deepest thoughts and feelings about negative experiences.

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The third group did not do any writing activity. What did we find?

Compared with the participants who wrote about negative experiences or only received counseling, those who wrote gratitude letters reported significantly better mental health four weeks and 12 weeks after their writing exercise ended. This suggests that gratitude writing can be beneficial not just for healthy, well-adjusted individuals, but also for those who struggle with mental health concerns. In fact, it seems, practicing gratitude on top Betwen receiving psychological counseling carries greater benefits than counseling alone, even when that gratitude practice is brief. When we dug deeper into our results, we found indications of how gratitude might actually work on our minds and bodies.

First, by analyzing the words used by participants in each of the two writing groups, we were able to understand the mechanisms behind the mental health benefits of gratitude letter writing. What if we didn't take good things for granted?]