What Is the Mind-Gratitude-Heart Connection?
The mind-gratitude-heart, or MGH, connection is a term coined herein describing gratitude and its benefits.
A 2011 study on gratitude and well-being highlights how a four-week gratitude "contemplation" intervention improves long-term well-being.
This approach to discussing stress and well-being incorporates "stress elements," or minuses, and "well-being elements," or pluses.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), yoga, meditation, and seeing a chiropractor are the top sought-after complementary health approaches by U.S. adults. This blend of Eastern and Western approaches to healing and treatment seems to continue to grow year after year.
Mind-body medicine, and specifically the benefits of positive psychology—including gratitude—I believe, are at a crossroads.
What this means is that the benefits of positive thinking—including optimism, acknowledging our various feelings, and gratitude—are beginning to be grounded and reframed in the light of mind-body medicine that is from the time of Hippocrates in the 4th and 5th centuries B.C. As a result, one of the central, universal, and cross-cultural feelings of human beings, which is gratitude, can be reframed or thought of as the mind-gratitude-heart connection, or MGH, connection. A term I’ve coined and elaborated on herein, the MGH connection has actually been studied (with the focus being on “gratitude” and its “benefits”) for the past two decades to improve life satisfaction, well-being, happiness levels, sleep quality, overeating habits, and to help minimize stress . The MGH connection is a window into the future of psychiatry, I argue, and its unfolding landscape, which I believe involves a large scale of pluses and minuses or "elements" adding to stress or well-being. In other words, what’s unhelpful is a minus or "stress element"; what’s helpful is a plus or "well-being element."
Why should this matter? Is it actually worth thinking about? If you seek happiness and well-being, I argue yes.
In a 2011 study on gratitude and well-being in Applied Psychology , Canadian researchers described the procedures that looked into the benefits of a four-week long gratitude “contemplation” intervention . The researchers asked participants to begin by thinking “about items, people or events for which you are particularly grateful.” Next, the researchers asked participants “to experience and maintain the sincere heart-felt feelings of gratitude associated with that thought.” While the study’s finding that gratitude promotes long-term well-being is important, what’s more significant is the wording used by researchers of how gratitude is felt and “experienced” by study participants.
The notion that one can experience and maintain the “sincere heart-felt feelings of gratitude” associated with a “thought” is what forms the basis of the MGH connection.
True, feeling gratitude is not easily done. It takes practice and concentration. Yet, it can be incredibly rewarding. The 2011 study above by Rash et al. highlights, even that in the long-term, that feeling gratitude can be rewarding for our well-being. The MGH connection is one of the many pluses or well-being elements that anyone can do—and do regularly with practice—regardless of whether they feel innately grateful or not.
Similar to feeling gratitude, there are other pluses to well-being that anyone can do: meditation, prayer, trying and learning new skills, exercise, keeping hydrated, and nurturing friendships.
There are minuses to well-being (i.e., stress elements) that people may also engage in: smoking and a sedentary lifestyle are a few examples; circumstantial stressors may include: natural disasters, diseases, and poverty, for example.
With the spectrum of well-being elongated to include everything that’s good for us—and which makes us happier—the focus of the future of medicine doesn’t have to be on what is wrong, but rather can be to harness unlimited potential, i.e., how good living can become with these tools for well-being that are at our disposal.
A new approach to reframe mental health and wellness requires a better understanding, description, and research into the impact of stress elements on our lives. Ranging from the possible negative impact of multitasking to not sleeping properly to unexpected hormonal changes, stress elements need to be classified and studied. Each set of stress elements can then carry its own value or set of points that might affect our “stress score.” This overall “stress and well-being score” can be a value that we all seek to improve, with the tools at our disposal to do so.
While at this crossroads, there is much to still be studied and discovered. Yet, the MGH connection and its impact on well-being is beginning to be better understood than before. With a “stress and well-being score,” we have the ability to eliminate fear of the unknown in the field of psychiatry and its associated stigma. The tools of well-being for the mind, which include Eastern medicine’s tools of yoga and meditation, can begin to be rectified with Western medicine’s conventional treatment of “symptoms” and “diseases.” The MGH connection can be our window into the future of harnessing the potential of the mind.