Welcome to 10 minute Bible Talks.

Where we connect the Bible to your life and the time it takes to get to work.

I'm Tanya Wilmoth. Money may not buy you happiness, but maybe

gratefulness can. A recent study shows the impact of gratefulness on our brains.

See there was an increased demand for mental health services,

as you're probably aware.

And so health care workers wanted to figure out

if they were something they could offer clients to do at home

to improve their mental health between clinic visits.

But they needed it to be a low-hanging fruit. They needed it to be easy to do without a lot of guidance.

So they enlisted a group of 300 college students who were seeking mental health services, and they divided them into three groups.

The first group was assigned to write a letter of gratitude to someone every week. The second group was tasked with keeping a list of

negative thoughts and emotions. The third group they had no assignment that's

called the control group. Now when the study compared the letter writers with

those who kept a list of negative emotions they found that the group of

gratitude reported increased mental health at four weeks and 12 weeks after their riding exercises ended.

This showed them that focusing on gratitude was not just a good practice, but actually

reduced levels of depression and anxiety. As they dug

deeper they found more about how gratitude works. They noticed that students who

wrote letters of gratitude use more plural pronouns like we and us and less singular pronouns and negative emotional words.

Something about their practice of gratitude made less room for negative thoughts and emotions to surface in the

brain. Those who practice gratitude also had more healthy activity in their frontal

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