Discover how gratitude transforms, heals, and enriches our lives!
Gratitude is not just a word, attitude, or practice. It's a powerful energy that influences our neurobiology and can change our lives for the better.
We inherited a negativity bias from our ancestors to help us survive. This hardwired our brain to focus on what's not going right, find solutions, then move on to the next problem. This pattern is exhausting and can burn out our nervous system.
We can use gratitude to retrain our brain and biochemistry as well as bring balance to the challenges we face in life.
Brain
Gratitude literally changes our brain. When thinking grateful thoughts it activates the hippocampus and amygdala connected to memory and emotions. These thoughts trigger the release of hormones serotonin and dopamine reducing anxiety, depression, and stress while increasing pleasure and satisfaction. Incorporating habitual gratitude practices cause a chain reaction where positive neurotransmitters fire together more often eventually wiring together and becoming a new pattern of thinking. Gratitude is also found to strengthen the prefrontal cortex helping to control responses to stressful situations. It conditions the brain to filter negative ruminations, focus on positive thoughts, and shift from negative bias to natural optimism over time.
Emotions
Gratitude and appreciation highlight the good things in life stimulating positive emotional responses including enhanced mood and self-esteem (Killen & Macaskill, 2015). It enhances feelings of satisfaction, contentment, encouragement, enthusiasm, happiness, pleasure, trust, loyalty, empathy and more with the release of dopamine, serotonin, and oxytocin. These feel-good hormones are natural anti-depressants that can motivate us to incorporate more things in life that make us feel better like exercise and social interactions. Gratitude enhances our emotional resilience and builds our inner strength to combat stress (Gloria & Steinhardt, 2016).
"Gratitude is the healthiest of all human emotions." – Zig Ziglar
Physical Well being
Gratitude is another way to regulate the nervous system and even reduce subjective feelings of pain. (Emmons & McCullough, 2003) Studies have measured levels of stress hormones and tracked heart rate variability while people practiced gratitude-themed meditations showing a significant reduction in cortisol and improved cardiac function when reacting to negative experiences or setbacks. (cited in McCraty & Childre, 2004). Our body responds without question whatever we're thinking or feeling, even if it's not true, therefore shifting into states of gratitude signals to the body that it's safe to function normally and regenerate efficiently.
Gratitude Practices
Guided meditations, gratitude journaling, and thank you notes are a few ways to effectively incorporate gratitude in your life and create this healthy habit. Meditation slows down brainwaves in order to reprogram the subconscious helping new neural pathways to develop. Keeping a gratitude journal uses physical actions to ingrain new ways of being and is a great bedtime routine setting a relaxed tone of happy memories to inform the sleep state. Thank you notes share the healing power of gratitude not only making you feel good but sharing positivity with others strengthening social connections which releases oxytocin.
A study conducted on individuals seeking mental health guidance revealed that participants of the group who wrote letters of gratitude besides their regular counseling sessions, felt better and recovered sooner (Wong et al., 2018). The other group in the study that were asked to journal their negative experiences instead of writing gratitude letters reported feelings of anxiety and depression. Furthermore, the more detail about what you're grateful for the more the body and mind registers the information.
Gratitude is the best attitude
Life has its inevitable challenges and we all have days that don't feel good. DO NOT use gratitude to ignore or escape negative emotions. Take time to process the energy you're feeling. It's there for a reason. Then use gratitude and appreciation as a tool to recover from pain, stress, and overwhelm. It reminds us hard times are temporary and there's plenty of proof that good stuff is real too. Gratitude as an intervention for treating mental and emotional health is convenient, less time-consuming, less expensive, and useful for the long-term (Mills et al., 2015). Quantum physics even posits the more we focus on what we have and what's working well, we attract more to be grateful for. Try it! You might like it!
What are you grateful for today?
Write one thing and list 5 reasons why.
Try this daily for 2-12 months.
Share how gratitude practices have helped you!
Comments