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StillnessWellbeing insight

Gratitude exercises, such as writing down a few things you are thankful for each week, raise wellbeing slightly on average. A 2025 review of studies with nearly 25,000 people in 28 countries found a real but small effect that varied between countries and methods.

PNAS meta-analysis, 2025

MindHealth

The story behind the card

One of the first experiments on the practice was a 2003 study by the psychologists Robert Emmons and Michael McCullough. Students who kept a weekly list of things they were grateful for felt better about their lives than those who listed everyday hassles, and a rise in good mood was the most consistent result. The 2025 meta-analysis, a study that pools the results of earlier studies, was published in the journal PNAS by a team that included McCullough. It combined 145 papers covering 24,804 participants and put the average effect at about 0.19 on a standard scale on which 0.2 counts as small. Effects were larger when researchers measured positive feelings, when several kinds of gratitude exercise were combined, and in studies that assigned people to groups by chance. The authors could not explain why results varied between countries and called for more research.

Türkçe oku
Minnettarlık egzersizleri, örneğin her hafta minnet duyduğunuz birkaç şeyi not etmek, kendinizi iyi hissetmenize ortalamada biraz katkı sağlar. 2025'teki bir incelemede 28 ülkeden 25 bine yakın kişinin katıldığı çalışmalar bir araya getirildi: Etki gerçekti ama küçüktü, ülkeye ve yönteme göre de değişiyordu.
PNAS meta-analizi, 2025

Bu konudaki ilk deneylerden biri, psikologlar Robert Emmons ile Michael McCullough'un 2003'te yayımladığı çalışmadır. Her hafta minnettar oldukları şeyleri listeleyen öğrenciler, gündelik sıkıntılarını listeleyenlere göre hayatlarından daha memnundu; en tutarlı sonuç, olumlu ruh hâlindeki artıştı. 2025'teki meta-analiz, yani önceki çalışmaların sonuçlarını birleştiren inceleme, PNAS dergisinde yayımlandı; yazarları arasında McCullough da vardı. Ekip toplam 24.804 katılımcıyı kapsayan 145 makaleyi bir araya getirdi ve ortalama etkiyi 0,19 buldu; bu tür ölçümlerde 0,2 “küçük etki” sayılır. Araştırmacılar olumlu duyguları ölçtüğünde, birkaç minnettarlık egzersizi bir arada uygulandığında ve katılımcıların gruplara kurayla ayrıldığı çalışmalarda etki daha büyüktü. Yazarlar sonuçların ülkeden ülkeye neden değiştiğini açıklayamadı ve bu konuda daha fazla araştırma gerektiğini belirtti.

Sources and further reading

Background reading: Gratitude
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While you sleep, the brain strengthens what you learned during the day. This process, called memory consolidation, works both on facts, such as names and dates, and on skills, such as playing a piece of music. After a short or broken night, the brain holds on to new learning less well.

Memory consolidation is the slow process that turns a fresh, fragile memory into a lasting one, and much of it happens during sleep. In 1997 the German researchers Werner Plihal and Jan Born showed that different parts of the night help different kinds of memory. Twenty healthy men learned lists of word pairs and practised mirror tracing, drawing a shape while watching only its reflection. Recall of the word pairs improved most over the first half of the night, when deep, slow-wave sleep dominates, while the drawing skill improved most over the second half, when REM sleep, the stage of vivid dreams, lasts longer. Researchers think that during sleep the brain replays the day's experiences and moves new memories from temporary storage in the hippocampus, deep in the brain, into longer-lasting networks in its outer layer, the cortex.

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Some benefits of exercise begin on the day you do it, according to US guidance promoted by the CDC. After a single session of moderate or vigorous activity, such as a brisk walk, blood pressure can fall, anxiety can ease, and sleep that night and some kinds of thinking can improve.

The CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) is the United States' national public health agency, founded in Atlanta in 1946. Its advice on exercise follows the Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans, whose second edition, published in 2018, drew on a review of the previous decade's research. Earlier advice had focused on preventing disease over the years; the new edition also listed benefits people can feel at once. Besides easing anxiety and lowering blood pressure, a single session helps the body respond to insulin, the hormone that moves sugar from the blood into cells. Most of these effects grow with regular activity, while others, such as fitness, strength and a lasting fall in blood pressure, take weeks or months. The guidelines recommend at least 150 minutes of moderate activity a week.

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Regular physical activity protects the heart, lifts mood, eases anxiety and improves sleep, according to the World Health Organization. These benefits do not depend on losing weight: people of every shape and size gain them, even when nothing changes on the scales or in the mirror.

The World Health Organization counts any movement that uses energy as physical activity: walking, cycling, sport, active play, housework and physical work. Its 2020 guidelines advise adults to do 150 to 300 minutes of moderate activity a week, such as brisk walking, or 75 to 150 minutes of vigorous activity, such as running, plus muscle-strengthening exercise on at least two days. In 2022 about 31% of adults worldwide, some 1.8 billion people, fell short of that. Weight is a poor guide to these benefits. The US Physical Activity Guidelines state that they are generally independent of body weight, and a 2014 analysis of ten studies found that fit people who were overweight or obese had death rates similar to fit people of normal weight, while unfit people had about twice the risk, whatever their weight.

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Sleeping soon after you learn something helps you remember it. In a 2012 study, people who learned word pairs in the evening and slept soon afterwards remembered more 24 hours later than people who learned them in the morning and spent the day awake first.

The study was led by Jessica Payne of the University of Notre Dame, with colleagues including Robert Stickgold of Harvard Medical School. Volunteers learned pairs of words at 9 am or 9 pm. Twelve hours later those who had slept remembered more, mainly because a day awake had worn away memory for pairs of unrelated words, which are harder to link in the mind. After 24 hours everyone had had one night's sleep and one day awake, only in a different order, and those who slept soon after learning still remembered more. Memory also faded more slowly across a day awake when a night's sleep had come first, which suggests that sleep steadies new memories against the interference of waking life. It is one reason sleep researchers advise against giving up sleep to cram for an exam.

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Sleep is part of learning, not a pause from it: while you sleep, the brain goes back over what you practised during the day and strengthens it. That is why a new skill often runs more smoothly the next morning than it did the evening before.

In a 2002 study at Harvard Medical School, led by Matthew Walker, volunteers learned to type a short number sequence as quickly and accurately as they could. After a night's sleep they were about 20 per cent faster, with no loss of accuracy, while the same number of hours awake brought no significant gain. The size of the improvement was linked to how much light sleep, known as stage 2, people had, especially late in the night. Animal studies from the 1990s suggest how this might work: in rats, groups of brain cells that were active while the animals explored became active together again during sleep, as if the day were being replayed. It is one reason why an extra tired hour at the desk may help less than a full night's sleep.

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