Gratitude -the new meditation?

One of my resolutions over the next year or so is to investigate further the literature on meditation , spiritual practices and wellbeing. And this caught my attention.

 The body of scientific research supporting the positive impact of gratitude on physical, psychological, and social health is quite large. Not only does it feel good, this simple practice protects and boosts your immune system, reduces stress and anxiety, buffers against depression, improves sleep, and supports healthy proactive behaviors such as exercise. On top of all that, it may even make you smarter.
The psychological benefits of gratitude closely mirror those of meditation - Quartz:

 This is interesting to me because most of those things are not just associated in research results with "meditation" but more specifically mindfulness. The next dimension of interest is that gratitude is much more straightforwardly linkable with core Christian spiritual practices. That's not saying mindfulness is not found within the Christian traditions, just that you have to look more carefully to find it and think around the topic a little.

Gratitude is certainly already noted to correlate with measures of happiness. All of which suggests to me that including gratitude exercises in meditative/spiritual practice is a good thing for health etc, and is one area where drawing on specifically Christian traditions is much more obvious.