What is the one question every Reiki student should ask their teacher?
October 8, 2026
Kansha shite · Be grateful
The Reiki Precept That Helps You Sleep Better
A short, everyday gratitude practice improved sleep and lowered blood pressure in a randomised trial. It also left one stress marker completely untouched, which is worth knowing too.
Kansha shite, be grateful, is the third of the five precepts. It sits at the heart of Reiki self-practice.
The study
Three groups, one of which wrote about ordinary days instead
The clever part of this design is the middle group. It is easy to show that doing something beats doing nothing. It is harder to show that gratitude specifically is the thing that matters. So the researchers gave one group a task that looked almost identical: write each day, but about the ordinary events of the day rather than what you were grateful for.
Before and after the two weeks, everyone had their blood pressure and heart rate taken, gave saliva samples for the stress hormone cortisol, and filled in standard questionnaires on sleep quality, mood and wellbeing.
- Design
- Single-blind randomised controlled experiment
- Participants
- 119 women, roughly 40 per group
- Measured
- Sleep, blood pressure, heart rate, cortisol, wellbeing
- Where
- University College London
What they found
What changed, and what did not
Both halves of this matter. A study that only reports what worked is not telling you the whole story.
Changed in the gratitude group
- Sleep qualityImproved, on a standard sleep questionnaire
- Diastolic blood pressureFell, the lower of the two blood pressure numbers
- Hedonic wellbeingRose, meaning day-to-day positive feeling
- OptimismRose
Did not change
- CortisolThe stress hormone did not shift at all
- Life satisfactionNo difference between the groups
- Systolic blood pressureThe upper number was not reported as changing
Within the gratitude group, the women whose wellbeing rose most were also the ones who slept best and whose blood pressure dropped furthest. The feeling and the body moved together.
Read this part too
Limitations
A neat design, but a narrow one.
- Young women only. Every participant was female and young. Whether men, older people, or anyone under real strain would respond the same way is not tested here.
- Two weeks, then it stopped. There was no follow-up. The effects on sleep and blood pressure may have faded the week after.
- Sleep was self-reported. The sleep questionnaire is well validated, but it asks people how they slept. No one was wired up overnight.
- Around forty people per group is small enough that results can shift with a handful of participants.
- Cortisol did not move. If gratitude were working through the classic stress hormone pathway, you would expect it to. It did not.
- Life satisfaction did not move either. Two weeks changed how people felt day to day, not how they rated their life overall.
- Only single-blind. The participants knew what they were writing about, even if the people measuring them did not.
The research
Jackowska, M., Brown, J., Ronaldson, A., & Steptoe, A. (2016). The impact of a brief gratitude intervention on subjective well-being, biology and sleep. Journal of Health Psychology, 21(10), 2207–2217.
This is research into gratitude, not into Reiki, Reiki treatments or Reiki training. It is included here because gratitude is one of the five precepts.
For today only, be grateful.
Then sleep, and let the body take it from there.
