Practicing gratitude with a 'feasible and fun' intervention may reduce physician burnout
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Key takeaways:
- A psychology intervention in which health care workers took note of three good things that happened in their day improved positive affect scores.
- However, the effects were not sustained in the long term.
A gratitude-focused intervention could improve the positive affect of health care workers, according to results of a randomized controlled trial published in Annals of Family Medicine.
One of the top concerns in health care today is burnout and researchers have long been searching for solutions to the ever-growing problem.
“Fixing burnout requires large structural changes in health care and institutions, and we need to continue to work on that,” Katherine J. Gold, MD, MSW, MS, a family physician, obstetrics and mental health researcher, and an associate professor at the University of Michigan, told Healio. “Positive psychology doesn’t reverse burnout. However, our daily interactions as clinicians can be challenging, sad or stressful, and positive psychology is a promising strategy to improve our ability to cope on a day-to-day basis.”
Gold and colleagues wanted to see if gratitude practice in the form of a digital version of a positive psychology intervention called Three Good Things would improve well-being among health care workers.
“The Three Good Things intervention is a positive psychology task which asks people to identify three good things in their life that day and write them down,” Gold said. “We made this program easier for health care staff by sending texts three times weekly for 3 weeks asking them to type in their ‘three good things.’”
For the randomized controlled trial, the researchers assigned 223 faculty, trainees and staff in the department of family medicine at the University of Michigan — 87% of whom identified as female — into two groups: an immediate intervention group that received texts right away and a delayed intervention group, which served as the control and did not start the texts for 4 months.
The researchers sent three text messages per week during the intervention asking for three good things that happened during that day and used linear mixed models to compare the groups and evaluate the effects of department role, sex, age and more. They surveyed everyone before the intervention and again at 1 and 3 months afterwards to assess gratitude, depression, positive affect and life satisfaction.
Gold and colleagues found that adhering to the positive psychology intervention created small, positive improvements for health care workers immediately after the intervention, but those effects were not sustained.
At 1 month, positive affect improved slightly for the intervention group then declined slightly, but, at 3 months, remained significantly improved. Gratitude, depression and life satisfaction scores were not statistically different between groups but displayed a similar trend.
“We were excited to see that a positive psychology intervention could be adapted for busy health care workers,” Gold said. “While I like quick fixes, I think we saw that this program probably needs to be more intensive or last longer to bring persistent benefits.”
Therefore, she added, future research should test ways to adjust the program to sustain positive feelings over time.
“To me, it’s remarkable that these positive psychology interventions can be programmed digitally so that they feel accessible for busy health care workers,” Gold said. “If we can figure out the right intensity, duration and text supports to make the benefits last, this is a feasible and fun intervention which can be offered for minimal cost.”