The evidence is convergent. Multiple independent sources reach the same conclusion, the underlying mechanism is well-characterized, and even the field's most cautious voices treat it as worth doing.
Now, if you happen to have listened to the episode that I did on activating your immune system and immune function, you heard about TNF-alpha and IL-6. TNF-alpha and IL six are inflammatory cytokines.
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Native comments, Twitter mentions, and Reddit threads about this claim — surfaced together so the conversation isn't fragmented across platforms.
Bookmarking — the dossier-vs-overview split is the right call. Most of the time I want overview; sometimes I want receipts.
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So, with that in mind, I'd like to describe the results of a really interesting recent study that was published in the journal "Brain, Behavior, and Immunity." This was published in 2021. The title of the study is "Exploring neural mechanisms of the health benefits of gratitude in women: A randomized controlled trial." The first author is Hazlett. And basically, what this paper showed was that women who had a regular gratitude practice of the sort that we've been talking about up until now, showed reductions in amygdala activity, a brain area associated with threat detection, an intimate part of the fear network in the brain. So, reductions in amygdala activation, and large reductions in the production of something called "TNF-alpha," tumor necrosis factor-alpha, and "IL-6," interleukin-6.
And even though that study was performed exclusively on female subjects, based on the biology and circuitry of the amygdala, and the biology of TNF-alpha and IL-6 performing this inflammatory role in both men and women, I don't see any reason why the results of that study wouldn't pertain to both men and women.
And another interesting aspect of this study is that the reductions in amygdala activation, and the reductions in TNF-alpha and IL-6, were very rapid. They occurred almost immediately after the gratitude practice was completed.