Gratitude Fuels Hope

When hope replaces pessimism, all aspects of our attitudes change, like the sun rising and flooding a landscape with color. One of those changes comes in the area of thankfulness.

Pessimists are almost always ungrateful people. Gratitude and hopefulness go together because gratitude takes us deeper into the love walk where hope and optimism reside in fullness. I like how Robert Emmons and his coauthor, Robin Stern, put it in a paper titled “Gratitude as a Psychotherapeutic Intervention”:

A number of rigorous, controlled experimental trials have examined the benefits of gratitude. Gratitude has one of the strongest links to mental health and satisfaction with life of any personality trait – more so than even optimism, hope, or compassion. Grateful people experience higher levels of positive emotions such as joy, enthusiasm, love, happiness, and optimism, and gratitude as a discipline protects us from the destructive impulses of envy, resentment, greed, and bitterness. People who experience gratitude can cope more effectively with everyday stress, show increased resilience in the face of trauma-induced stress, recover more quickly from illness, and enjoy more robust physical health. Taken together, these results indicate that gratitude is incompatible with negative emotions and pathological conditions and that it may even offer protection against psychiatric disorders.

One way researchers scientifically examine the effects of thankfulness is by asking people to keep weekly gratitude journals. Those who did this in one study “exercised more regularly, reported fewer physical symptoms, felt better about their lives as a whole, and were more optimistic about the upcoming week compared with those who recorded hassles or neutral life events.” Other benefits included longer sleep and improved sleep quality, and the study participants who kept gratitude journals spent more time exercising.

Even the families and friends of these thankful scribes noted the change in demeanor and reported that “people who practice gratitude seem measurably happier and are more pleasant to be around. Grateful people are rated by others as more helpful, outgoing, optimistic, and trustworthy.”

Thanksgiving activates hope. It clears away the mists of self-centeredness and negativity, giving us an elevated and accurate view of the way things are and of the future ahead. So Paul instructed us, “In everything give thanks; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you” (1 Thess. 5:18).

Watch Dr. Don Colbert this week and at lifetoday.org. Excerpted from Dr. Colbert’s Spiritual Health Zone by Don Colbert, MD. Copyright ©2025 by Don Colbert, MD. Published by Siloam, an imprint of Charisma Media. Used by permission.