Verbally expressing gratitude can reduce stress levels: neuroscientist

Expressing gratitude helps lower stress Neuroscientist, Sarah Baldeo, explains why gratitude feels good and what happens in the human brain when you're expressing it.

Verbally expressing your gratitude can lower cortisol levels and enhance your rationality. Sarah Baldeo, neuroscientist and TED speaker, joined CTV Morning Live’s meteorologist Cory Edel, on why saying thanks is important.

This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

Cory Edel: Many of us are preparing for the Thanksgiving long weekend. It's already here in a few days, and it's a time of celebration with friends and family, giving thanks and showing gratitude.

But why does gratitude feel so good? The answer lies within the human brain. Sarah Baldeo, neuroscientist and TED speaker, joins us to explain the science behind it all. This is such a cool topic and perfect timing.

What happens to us physically when we express gratitude?

Sarah Baldeo: I would say the key is you need to express gratitude verbally.

When you're expressing it verbally to other people, you're reducing the stress hormone cortisol. So when you're anxious and when you're stressed out, and you verbally express gratitude to other people, you're actually going to drive down the cortisol in your body.

We all know stress is bad for us, but having that prolonged exposure to stress, it can permanently damage your emotion centre, which is your amygdala, and your memory centre, which is your hippocampus.

When we're looking at expressing gratitude, you want to verbalize it, because that's really going to help you with driving down that stress hormone and accessing the front part of your brain, which controls logic.

Cory: Does the brain actually change when we express thanks?

Sarah: It does. When you're expressing thanks verbally to someone else, and it needs to be genuine thanks, of course, you're going to see a spike in two neurotransmitters or chemicals in the brain.

The first one is dopamine and the second one is serotonin, and most of us know dopamine as that happiness hormone, but dopamine is all about short term happiness.

Serotonin is about long term happiness. When you express thanks, both of these actually spike in your body, and you get those positive experiences and positive emotion that happens to people when they express gratitude.

Cory: Almost like a euphoria, in a sense. What else happens inside the brain when we show gratitude?

Sarah: Gratitude pushes you to actually think. To think logically about, “what am I thankful for?” Right now, I am super thankful that I was able to leave Miami, FL and come to Austin, TX last month.

When I think about that, I'm actually accessing the frontal cortex, the part of my brain that controls logic. So it helps you to access that new part of your brain.

That is the newest part of your brain, and actually helps you to be more rational and logical when you're navigating life and when you're navigating your interactions with other people.

It forms those positive neural connections and it makes those memories stronger and encodes them stronger in your brain when you express that gratitude.

Cory: Fascinating. Thanksgiving is right around the corner and a lot of people will be having turkey. Is there a benefit to eating turkey?

Sarah: Apart from the fact that it tastes really good and it looks great on your Thanksgiving spread, tryptophan is something that is contained within turkey.

Tryptophan is an amino acid. The fascinating thing about it is it actually spikes the happiness hormone, serotonin. So when you eat turkey or when you eat anything that contains tryptophan, you're going to get a spike in that happiness hormone.

It's also going to make you sleepy, but that hormone, (serotonin), controls long term happiness. Key fact, you can get tryptophan from other things. You can eat quinoa, green peas, and even oatmeal. Although you might not want oatmeal on your Thanksgiving table.

Cory: I want to thank you so much for talking about gratitude today. It's something that we need to practice, not just this weekend, but in our daily lives. Thank you so much, Sarah. You can connect with Sarah by visiting sarahbaldeo.com.