Grateful People Report Better Health, and Feeling Supported May Be Part of Why

People who feel more grateful tend to report better physical health and life satisfaction, and feeling supported by others explains part of that link, according to a study of more than 148,000 people in 57 countries. Psychologists Carley Vornlocher of Arizona State University and Alexandra Wormley of the University of Michigan published it Oct. 20 in the Journal of Happiness Studies.¹

The idea that thankful people are healthier is not new. This study asks how that might work, and it checks the pattern across dozens of countries instead of one. The answer points to the people around us. One limit comes first, though. The study is correlational and based on what people said about themselves, so it cannot show that gratitude causes better health.¹²

Two big surveys, two slightly different answers

The first survey was originally run to study emotions during the COVID-19 pandemic. It later turned out to be useful for a gratitude study. According to StudyFinds, it covered 24,221 people in 51 countries, with an average age of 37. Participants rated their gratitude, the support they received, how many helpful acts they had done in the past week, and their physical and mental health.²

More grateful people reported getting more support and doing more helping. Only the support tracked with their physical and mental health. The number of good deeds showed no clear relationship to either, and the overall effect was small.²

The second analysis used the Global Flourishing Study: 124,324 people in 22 countries who answered surveys in both 2023 and 2024, with an average age of about 50. People who were more grateful in 2023 reported more confidence that others would help them, and more caring behavior, in 2024. That held even after the researchers accounted for how people had rated themselves the year before.²

Related: 13 Happiness Pioneers Held a 3-Hour Video Call and Put Other People First

Here the picture widened. Both receiving support and giving it (measured as showing love or care) went with better physical health and higher life satisfaction. The effects were modest, and the statistical model in this analysis fit the data poorly on most measures.²

Taken together, the authors write that social support, especially the support people feel they have, partly “mediates” the gratitude and well-being link. That means it carries some of the connection, not all of it. In one model, giving support went with gratitude but not with well-being.¹

Where you live changes the pattern

The link from gratitude to support varied more from country to country than any other part of the chain.¹ StudyFinds reports that gratitude was strongly tied to helping in Vietnam but showed no clear link in Greece. The tie between gratitude and feeling supported was barely detectable in Turkey but strong in the US, the UK and Japan.²

The researchers also scored countries on the Global Collectivism Index, a measure of how much a culture centers the group over the individual. In more collectivist countries, gratitude was less tied to helping others. That was the only cultural result that showed up in both surveys.²

In the larger survey, gratitude was also less tied to feeling supported in those countries. Yet giving and receiving support there were more strongly tied to physical health.² The authors suggest gratitude’s effects on support, and what that means for well-being, may depend on local norms about community.¹

What the findings suggest, and what they don’t

The study did not test whether practicing gratitude or leaning on friends improves anyone’s health. With that in mind, here is what the data do show:

• Feeling supported was the steadier piece. Support people received or counted on went with better health in both surveys, though it explained only part of the gratitude link.¹²
• Giving care may matter too. Helpful acts didn’t track with health in the first survey, but showing love or care did in the larger, two-year one.²
• Culture shapes the connection. How gratitude turns into support and helping looked quite different from one country to the next.¹

The researchers’ measurements were simple, which is part of the caution. The data were self-reported and often relied on a single survey question per idea, and the two surveys measured key concepts differently. Other possible routes from gratitude to health, such as mood, stress and connection, were not tested.²

The authors declared no competing interests, and data from the first survey are publicly available on OSF.² Testing whether gratitude actually causes any of this would take an experiment, which neither survey was.