Grow a Gratitude Garden

The above audio track is from a long time ago, when things were - at the very least -tense. It was during the initial panic as COVID-19 struck the United States, back in May of 2020. The confusion around COVID-19 was my impetus for starting the Garden Basics with Farmer Fred podcast. At that time, there were a lot of people developing a sudden interest in gardening, thinking they might be stuck at home for who knows how long? And, people were stressed. That was my reason for recording the segment (above) for Episode 9 of the Garden Basics podcast. It was all about calming down, and embracing gardening and gratitude.

Maybe we are in another era of high stress now? If you have 5 million people gathering for protests against the government across America in towns and cities large and small - like what happened last week - that answer is fairly obvious.

Participating in last week’s protests did help calm a lot of people across the country. And that’s no outlier. The isolation and stress of the COVID pandemic in 2020 inspired a lot of university research into ways to reduce that stress. One of those studies, recently released, was mentioned in Mike McPhate’s excellent California Sun newsletter recently:

11.

Admiring a flower does a surprising amount of good. (Timothy L Brock)

“A new UC San Francisco study found that so-called micro-acts of joy can have an outsize effect on people’s moods. Researchers had study participants practice seven tasks over seven days, then answer questions about their emotional and physical health. They included: doing a nice thing for a friend, sharing a moment of celebration with someone else, and making a gratitude list. The results were surprisingly robust, said Elissa Epel, a study author. “We were quite taken aback by the size of the improvements to people’s emotional well-being.” S.F. Chronicle”

That study released by the National Institute of Health, has the wonky title: “Scaling a Brief Digital Well-Being Intervention (the Big Joy Project) and Sociodemographic Moderators: Single-Group Pre-Post Study”

We’ll call it the “Big Joy Project” for short. From that study:

Background: Emotional well-being interventions lead to better mental and physical health. However, most of these interventions have been tested on relatively homogeneous samples, with few interventions large enough to examine whether key sociodemographic factors impact outcomes. In addition, barriers to engagement include access and high participant burden. We developed a brief web-based intervention to address these barriers and tested the effects across sociodemographic groups.

Objective: The study aims to examine the effectiveness of a brief, low-burden digital well-being intervention in improving emotional well-being and health-related outcomes across a diverse global sample.

Results: …participants who engaged in more daily practices showed greater improvements. There was a strong pattern of social disadvantage moderating these effects, with groups experiencing greater social disadvantage showing larger benefits across most outcomes. For example, those with lower education, greater financial strain, or lower subjective social status and those identifying as individuals from racial or ethnic minority groups (Black or Hispanic) all showed larger improvements across well-being outcomes. Furthermore, younger people had greater increases in emotional well-being and greater decreases in perceived stress compared to older people.

Conclusions: A brief, low-intensity intervention showed meaningful improvements in well-being and stress, comparable to those seen in longer, more intensive digital well-being interventions.

To quote my long gone Mother: “What does that have to do with the price of tea in China?” Thanks, Mom, for the reminder (I am the king of the scenic bypass, after all). I’ll circle back to gardening…and gratitude.

The Garden Basics podcast began at the same time the ramifications of the Coronavirus epidemic started to hit home. April of 2020. Back then, we were coming to grips with phrases such as “Quarantine in Place” or “Shelter at Home”.

What could you do around the house to keep from going stir crazy? Many of you began gardening for the first time. And that was a good thing for many reasons. You were getting outside. You were moving your body. You were creating beauty. And, you were cultivating gratitude for your new, living creations. You were planting flowers, shrubs, trees, and growing food. You liked it.

Brown Eyes, the feral cat, guards the garden burial location of Argus, the Wonder Dog

Grow Some Gratitude

Since that pandemic five years ago, many of you are continuing to garden. Good for you, you’re cultivating gratitude!

Psychiatrists across the country now are dealing with a lot of disappointment, fear, and burnout. There are steps you can take to help your own mental health.

By working in your garden, you’re cultivating gratitude. And gratitude is good for you. The Harvard Medical School newsletter wrote in 2021: “Gratitude is strongly and consistently associated with greater happiness. Gratitude helps people feel more positive emotions, relish good experiences, improve their health, deal with adve