People who smoke often desire to quit. Yet smoking can be a hard habit to break, even knowing the clear link between smoking and cancer. While there are smoking cessation programs that can help, many smokers don’t sign up for them, leaving them vulnerable to increased health problems due to tobacco.
Now, findings from a new study suggest an unusual tool for encouraging people to quit smoking: practicing gratitude.
In this study, researchers analyzed large-scale surveys given at different points in time to over 30,000 Americans and others around the world. Whether looking at American teens, American adults, or people living elsewhere, those who reported feeling more gratitude had better outcomes around smoking.
For example, grateful teens were less likely to smoke or become smokers later on, even taking into account how sad they were (a known risk factor for smoking). The same was true of grateful American adults. Or, if they were already smokers, the adults were more likely to quit five to 10 years later.
Adults from 87 countries around the world who reported feeling more grateful had lower intentions to use drugs overall (including tobacco), no matter their age, gender, education, or the negative or other positive feelings they typically experienced—like love, hope, inspiration, and serenity. The higher average gratitude of people in a particular country, the lower the country-wide tobacco use, too.
Lead researcher Ke Wang of Harvard University says this suggests that something about feeling gratitude makes people want to smoke less, perhaps its more positive, other-oriented focus.
“If you feel negative and focus on yourself, you want to seek reward to compensate for that sense of loss and negativity. That’s one driver for smoking,” says Wang. “The opposite is true of gratitude: Feeling positive, having your attention on other people, and having already benefitted from other people, you don’t feel a strong desire to reward yourself by smoking.”
Gratitude reduces craving and encourages quitting
While these survey results were promising, Wang and his team wanted to go further and see if making smokers feel grateful might change their smoking behavior.
So, he and his colleagues recruited adult smokers and first asked them how much they were craving a cigarette. The participants then watched a video inducing them to feel either sadness, compassion, gratitude, or neutral (no particular feeling). For example, the gratitude video involved a scene from the movie Awakening in which the protagonist doctor receives unexpected help from his colleagues. Then, the participants wrote about a time something similar happened to them—when they received unexpected help. (The neutral group watched a furniture-making video and wrote about their day.)
Afterward, the smokers again reported how much they were craving a cigarette. Those in the gratitude group experienced significantly decreased cravings, while those feeling sad had increased cravings and those feeling compassion (or neutral) experienced no changes in cravings.
“This shows experimentally there’s a causal relationship between gratitude and smoking,” says Wang. “And the more gratitude participants felt, the more reduction in craving they experienced. So, that further confirms the role of gratitude.”
To further their findings, Wang and his team induced a different group of smokers to either feel grateful or neutral, and then gave them an opportunity to report on their intentions to quit, encourage other smokers to quit, and actually sign up for a smoking cessation program (offered by the Mayo Clinic). Interestingly, the grateful group were more likely to sign up for the program than the neutral group, even though they didn’t have stronger intentions to quit. There seemed to be no impact on the advice they gave to others, though.
This interests Wang, because often smokers have an intention to quit but don’t actually follow through. There’s always tension between what someone desires to do (for example, smoke) and what someone thinks they should do (stop smoking). The fact that the grateful participants were literally signing up for a program to quit was encouraging—and unexpected, he says.
“That was a super interesting pattern that we found; we did not originally expect that,” he says. “But it suggests [that] one way for gratitude to change behavior is not necessarily by changing intentions, but changing [people’s] follow-through of their intentions, which is a fascinating finding.”
He thinks that the reduced craving that gratitude brings may be very helpful for smokers who are on the fence.
“With gratitude, competing forces shift in balance, especially when craving decreases. Finally, [someone’s] intention to quit can manifest in their behavior,” he says.
To reduce smoking, increase people’s gratitude?
Does this mean we should encourage smokers to practice more gratitude in their lives? Wang thinks so.
“There are definitely lots of gratitude exercises for smokers to incorporate in their daily lives—writing gratitude journals, expressing gratitude more, or sharing gratitude with others—and those types of practice can be incorporated into their journey of quitting,” he says. “Many people set goals (like in New Year’s resolutions) to quit smoking, but they cannot follow through on their intentions. With more gratitude and better emotion regulation, they can achieve their goals better.”
In addition, the last part of Wang’s study looked at public service announcements that aim to encourage people to stop smoking. When smokers rated how these ads made them feel, they felt sadness and sympathy more strongly than gratitude. Wang sees this as a missed opportunity—especially given how little money is available for these types of ads in comparison to the ad budgets of tobacco companies.
“We know sadness could backfire and compassion doesn’t seem to make any difference among smokers. So, we think to make the campaigns more effective, the CDC and others should consider using more gratitude, which could maximize the impact,” says Wang.
Wang hopes to do more research on gratitude, both to better understand why it affects smoking behavior and craving and how it might be useful for other unhealthy behaviors involving craving, such as overeating. He’d also like to study other positive emotions, alone and in combination, to see if there may be synergistic effects when we practice more positivity, in general.
Meanwhile, he sees practicing gratitude as having the potential to improve people’s lives significantly and has been in touch with the CDC about his findings, hoping they will take note.
“Gratitude is an underappreciated tool in reducing harmful health behavior,” he says. “Hopefully, the CDC will consider [promoting it] more now that we know the impact of this positive emotion on smoking.”
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