Gratitude connects us, but how we express it might matter more than we think.

Baylor professor of psychology and neuroscience Sarah Schnitker explores how practicing gratitude can lead to stronger relationships and greater well-being. Her lab found that gratitude expressed through prayer may offer even more benefits than journaling or speaking it aloud, and that feeling connected to something larger may help combat today’s growing loneliness.

SARAH SCHNITKER: So gratitude is an incredibly potent virtue. What gratitude does is tells us we are valued in relationship. And we see that when people feel genuine gratitude, they indeed help others. And it binds us to each other.

But when we practice gratitude, the devil might be in the details. It's not just what are you grateful for? It's to whom are you grateful? We often express it to other humans, but we can also be grateful to other entities, and in particular, many people around the world express gratitude to God.

Our research team was interested in whether gratitude, expressed in the form of prayer to a deity, would differ from gratitude practiced kind of as a self-help exercise, or expressing that gratitude to another person. And so we randomly assigned participants to one of these three conditions.

And what we found is that when people prayed, we see more health and well-being benefits than the journaling the gratitude, or journaling and reading it aloud to a person. We know this from other research that when people imbue their goals or relationships with sacred meaning, that they exert more effort and they benefit more from those relationships.

Some people might be wondering, well, what if I don't believe in God? Well, you might also think about the fact of existence. Or I'm grateful for the things that are transcendent in my life. For a lot of people, being connected to nature is very effective in this way.

If I see a beautiful sunset, who do I thank? There's not a human who made that sunset for me, but I can thank something beyond the self.

Gratitude is especially important at this moment in history. In the United States, we have a loneliness epidemic as declared by the Surgeon General. But expressing and feeling gratitude allows us to recognize we're part of something bigger. And that feels a lot less lonely. It expands and can transform a relationship or a community.

And so gratitude, especially when practiced in relation to God, is really a potent force for good. It really helps you take a step back and see the bigger picture.