How an age-old practice rewires our brains to favor good memories over bad. 

When I feel myself spiraling into anxiety or despair, I frequently deploy the silent, internal question: “What are three good things in my life I can name, right this second?” Thoughts of my healthy children, my dog’s antics and a good book waiting on my nightstand can do wonders to stop negative emotions in their tracks.  

It’s a practice I started a decade ago, on the cusp of my 50th birthday. I had decided to mark my semicentennial year by writing a weekly thank-you letter to someone who had contributed to making my life better. It didn’t feel like a particularly lofty or life-changing endeavor. Nearing the end of five decades of life experience and perspective, I simply wanted to acknowledge the people whom I had likely not thanked sufficiently in the moment, by putting ink to paper. 

As I honed the practice over a year, I knew I had become a more resilient and positive person. Later, when I wrote a book about my “thank-you project,” I delved into the science of gratitude to understand why writing those letters changed the way I see the world.  

I learned we can rewire our brains to focus on the good rather than the bad by strengthening our “positive recall bias,” an ability to conjure up more pleasant memories than unpleasant ones. By cogitating all week on reasons I had to be thankful to someone in my life so that I could document those in their letter, I unwittingly trained my brain to stay more alert to positive than to negative forces in my life.   

“I unwittingly trained my brain to stay more alert to positive than to negative forces in my life.”   

But that’s just the start of the quantifiable physical and psychological benefits that accrue to an attitude of gratitude. For instance, gratitude improves sleep, partly by quieting negative pre-sleep rumination. Expressing gratitude strengthens relationships because it signals “I see you and your responsiveness,” which predicts better relationship quality, even months later. Overall, making a deliberate effort to express gratitude has been shown to lead to greater life satisfaction, improved mental health, and lower rates of anxiety and depression. The power of these practices seems to run through better sleep, steadier self-control, and tighter social bonds. 

Most recently, research from Harvard University’s Department of Epidemiology has established a clear link between having “grateful affect” and increased longevity among older adults. The study, leveraging data from the Nurses’ Health Study of nearly 50,000 women whose average age was 79, started by asking participants to what degree they agreed with statements like, “I have so much in life to be thankful for” or “If I had to list everything that I felt grateful for, it would be a very long list.” 

Three years later, the researchers followed up with study participants and learned that respondents who scored themselves as more grateful had a 9 percent lower risk of all-cause mortality than those who scored at the lower end of the gratitude scale. It appears that having an “attitude of gratitude” can provide meaningful protection against every cause of mortality as we age, and particularly cardiovascular disease. 

How should one access these healthspan-extending, life-enriching gratitude benefits? I’m obviously a fan of the written letter, because it’s a two-fer conferring blessings on both the writer and the lucky recipient. Letters don’t just feel nice; as gratitude theory characterizes it, they “find, remind, and bind” us to responsive others — one reason they can help build strong relationships. 

I used a simple formula, repeatedly: Start with a short explanation of why I was writing the letter (I didn’t want people to think I was breaking up with them or dying); then share my earliest memory — for instance, my best friend was the first person I spoke to after setting foot on our college campus freshman year.  

After that, I would list unique ways in which the person had helped, shaped, or inspired me. For instance, my friend Dawn is a gifted physical therapist who always spots when something is physically “off” with me, and lovingly but persistently nags me to address it. My AP English teacher drilled grammar rules into my head so thoroughly back in the ’80s that most editors tell me I’m one of the cleanest writers they work with. My older siblings trained my parents such that my childhood was a breeze, and then let me test–drive my nieces and nephews until I was ready to be a parent myself. Specific details are where the magic of relationship- and gratitude-building lie.  

If letters aren’t your thing, there are still so many creative ways to weave thankfulness into your every day, from depositing written observations into a gratitude jar, jotting a few lines into a daily gratitude journal, or making the day’s gifts part of every night’s dinner conversation. And, of course, posing this question to yourself whenever needed: “What are three good things in my life I can name, right this second?” 

After all, my goal isn’t just to live a long life. It’s to live a life filled with reasons to be grateful.  

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Nancy Davis Kho is author of The Thank-You Project: Cultivating Happiness One Letter of Gratitude at a Time (Running Press) and a monthly newsletter  Hope as a Verb. Nancy covered “the years between being hip and breaking one” on the Midlife Mixtape podcast.