Lower Cortisol By Giving Thanks

I — and everybody — seems to enjoy it when neurochemical research links the seemingly distant mysteries of the brain to real everyday behavior, to feel-good acts, and such.

I am not sure that it is the stuff people should spend their whole careers on.  But a single association  between neurochemistry and holding hands has been enough for a previous posting.

Now the association between feelings of gratitude and lowered cortisol has delighted me so there is a smile on my face. I guess this is because it validates some of the pure observation from life kind of anecdotal advice that my grandmother of blessed memory would come up with.  Things like “Roughage is good for you,” which later became “eat
fiber.”

The idea that gratitude is good for brain chemistry is so delightful and potentially validating for otherwise not too tough to validate behavior, that it has been joyously co-opted by coaches.  They are an entrepreneurial lot who never bother with footnotes, not any more than they do with credentials.  I mean, there is no regulation known to me about using the nomenclature “coach.”  But on the other hand, they build careers and get paid with the results of their ministrations, a situation which I believe would send a fair amount of physicians to the poorhouse.

The only literature I have located so far that looks more like science than hearsay is nicely summarized by someone delightfully named “The Positivity Company.”

There is a questionnaire study, the kind people get to do and publish when they don’t have the required credentials to check bodily fluids a lot.

(They seem to know statistics a lot and do a pretty good job with experimental designs and such.)

One checks salivary cortisol and DHEA (dehydroepiandrosterone) and the salivary cortisol levels (which are well known to be excellently correlated with serum levels) are definited decreased, although the DHEA levels are more significantly increased.  The method that differed between the groups studied was heart rate variability management, which has been shown solidly to lower stress.  Gratitude correlation is not wildly evident to me, as it seems to have been to the person who wrote this page.

The third one talks about positive emotions undoing negative.

There is something good here, and there seem to be ways to use the “heartmath” paradigm to lower serum cortisol.

This seemingly knowledgeable social worker traces it through the “core heart rhythms” or “heartmath” paradigm.

Here is what looks like serious research, but a little bit too commercial for me to take without some salt.

Nevertheless this thing makes cosmic sense.  That which relaxes you must at some point bring down your stress markers.  I remember the Hans Selye original definition of the circumstance some years ago, when it was a cornerstone of basic medical school courses.

We were steeped in the “general adaptation” theory, which led to the cortisol-rise-associated “Fight or flight”syndrome. Some how or other, at some point in my career, I started telling patients how when Fred Flintstone met a sabre-tooth tiger, he either had to fight and destroy or run for the cave.  It was definitely the cortisol that got him physiologically ready to do either.

If Fred Flintstone were, say, in downtown Oklahoma City, he might have a panic attack if he saw someone who seemed threatening.  Enter the Rx drugs.  Enter now, new forms of relaxation treatment.

Enter corporate coach, telling people to thank and appreciate employees, presumably lowering cortisol.  This link opens up a PDF file.

This one becomes an encouragement of “active appreciation,” a method of increasing positive thought, and a sales piece for the “biodot,” a sort of miniature hassle-free mood ring.  Not the worst technology, but a bit dated.

This one sounds a little more like science and it tells people to hold the gratitude for 15-20 seconds.   Positive thoughts to get rid of negative ones; quantified here at three.  In The Secret, it says one positive thought is as strong as seven negatives.  Go figure.  No footnotes, no links, anywhere, anymore.

I have a great visual memory, but I can’t usually tell people where I read things.  Finally it is trust.  This is admittedly a realm of science where small samples and contradictory results are definitely part of the landscape.

All right, so I mentioned “the secret," which nobody has accused of being excessively scientific.  But I can tell you that the Secret, like many emotional texts, insists on “gratitude” as part of the plan.
 
Lack of gratitude has been accused of many a self-sabotaged success plan.  From Claude Bristol, WWI veteran to the present, it is a factor.  To his credit, Bristol makes a concerted effort to steer clear of religion, and to report findings that are as scientific as possible; something you would certainly expect from a “hard boiled” reporter.

I will certainly admit that gratitude feels good.  It does raise the self-esteem of the person to whom it is expressed, and that sort of interchange doubtless feels darn good both for the person doing the thanks and the person being thanked.

This is a good practice by any measure, as long as it is sincere and real.  I remember wonderful feelings when I found a school teacher who had ignited some feelings about art or science some years later. Teachers being generally underpaid and under acknowledged, this is a good place to start.

It is harder to do with closer or more complex relationships, because there is always a sort of constellation of both good and bad feelings involved.  But it is worth it, once this “thank you” saying is good for you mentality returns to consciousness, to do it.  There is a sense of joy and peace, what has been, for me, a sort of “whoops, there slides the cortisol” feeling.  For instance, my husband is a man talented in many spheres.  When I thank him for his knowledge and/or actions, realizing what I am doing.  I see him happy and know I have made him happy.  It can only be good.

No matter what the numerical ration between positive feelings and negative ones, or even positive statements and negative ones, there is something to be said about dragging the tone of a conversation positively.

I suspect we will not and cannot and maybe even should not finance great gobs of research for the correlation between neuroscience and everyday life.  I usually decry the application of common sense to neuroscience, which is neither common nor makes much sense, but here the small bit of biochemical correlation we have is plenty here. Mainly because it goes with one of those magnificent if common grand feelings that validates.

We must be careful about letting religion co-opt this one.  Prayers of thanks are present in any religion known to me. Religion has a way of using any concept to validate itself. As I age, I become increasingly suspicious of any hierarchy that spends a lot of energy in self-validation.  My husband (although sometimes I suspect Mr. Right of being Mr. Always Right) is certainly not God.  But the warm glow I feel when I am grateful to him, for existing, for acting kindly towards me, does not seem to be, to me, more or less correlated with whatever secretory events are happening in my life than a prayer of thanks to any kind of external intelligence that may be a little harder to visualize than the man sitting at the computer.

This gratitude thing is good.  Like most feelings, I have a feeling it needs to be real.  I certainly cannot imagine how it could be even minimally harmful, unless it were incorporated into a stress reaction.

I remember being “forced” to write thank you letters, as a child, to a grandparent whom I considered such a pain in the neck that the pain he caused was far greater than my gratitude for any gift.

I know my grandfather meant well.  He was a character, thought himself a bit superior, and certainly relished any authority that came with his age.  He recounted the same anecdotes so many times I knew them all by heart.  My mother told me to shut up instead of finishing the ones my grandfather started.

I mean, apologies to the memory of my blessed grandfather, my mother’s mother who liked to drive a road without traffic so he drove to visit us, starting his two hour drive across the state at 4am and waking us at 6am on a Sunday morning and of course, nobody even thought then of going out for breakfast, as it was too expensive.  Not only did I have to dress before coming downstairs to see him, but I had to listen to him berate my mother for being overweight, diminish my father any way he could think of, and telling me (I was somewhere between sentiency and age 7 when he got too tired to visit) that it was never too early to comtemplate a secure future in marriage. 

When he brought me a radio, even though it was a lovely short wave one and I could hear faraway countries and distant lands, I put off writing him the requisite “Thank you” letter until my mother’s anger was no longer tolerable for me.  When I did write it, I am quite certain it raised my cortisol.  I actually felt relieved when my grandfather of blessed memory was institutionalized for his Alzheimer’s.  Since then, I have taken special joy in going back to bed after breakfast on Sunday mornings.

Emotions are a gauge of feelings, and a fairly reliable one in the honest and (relatively) fearless.  They are, at best, a fairly reliable compass to help someone get their thoughts back on track.  We are all ruled by emotions more than we want to believe, but with awareness of them, I have no doubt that we can adjust a legion of brain chemicals. Certainly more of them than anyone can study directly.

So it is nice to know that something that feels good can actually be good for you. Raised cortisol has been correlated with a seemingly infinite list of both medical and psychiatric problems.

My advice — say “thanks” in any way you can think of, but use yourself as your own emotional measure.  This is one place where the gesture is harmless enough that I think it possible to say, with our current level of feeble if amusing biochemical knowledge, if it feels good, just do it.

And if it does not, just don’t —  and keep moving.