This is episode 2,157 of the Daily Meditation Podcast.

I'm Mary Meckley and I welcome you back.

We are on day six of our series we're exploring this week.

We're exploring the theme of gratitude and you have a challenge this week.

Your challenge is to express gratitude to someone each day.

You might even express gratitude simply mentally and there's a lot of

research that shows that when you express gratitude to someone, especially if you write down in a letter or an

email or text message, and let someone know you're grateful for them.

The process of doing this provides significant benefits. In fact, there was a study where there were 300 college students

who were seeking mental health counseling services for anxiety and depression.

And this group of 300 participants was divided up into three groups. They all received

mental health counseling. One group was requested to write down their thoughts and reflections to journal about their experiences.

Another group was not requested to journal. They simply received mental health

counseling services. The third group was requested to keep a journal, a gratitude journal, and they were also asked

to write a letter of gratitude each week for three weeks to someone.

The good majority of the participants didn't actually send their letters, but what they discovered was that after 12 weeks the group who had written the three letters of gratitude,

regardless of whether or not they sent these letters of gratitude, received more benefits than the other groups

in their prefrontal cortex region of their brain, the part that is also activated when you meditate,

and they experienced less depression and less anxiety

by a significant amount

as compared to the other two groups.

So when you express gratitude, even if you just feel it within yourself, this helps to decrease depression and to manage anxiety.

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