Many people underestimate the importance of gratitude in life. It is important for relatives, loved ones and close people to say “thank you” for everything: for support in difficult times, for understanding, for a fun evening, for a cooked dinner. And it is no less important to thank life itself, providence, yourself and your activity for what you have at the moment.
Being grateful is not just a rule of etiquette, but an essential element of self-care, health and well-being. Moreover, gratitude is a powerful tool to help you feel better.
Over the past few decades, many experiments and studies have been carried out that have made it possible to stop perceiving gratitude as an exclusive spiritual and ethical concept and to prove the real positive impact of this feeling on the mental and physical state of a person.
What is gratitude and how does it affect a person?
If I had to explain in simple terms what gratitude is, then I would define this feeling as a special energy, accompanied by a feeling of warmth and joy, gratitude and pleasure, inspiration and peace.
The positive impact of gratitude on the mental and physical well-being of a person is not a myth, but a scientifically proven truth. This is a powerful tool that allows you to more effectively get rid of negative thoughts, experience positive emotions more often, and take steps towards peace and inner harmony.
How does gratitude work?
It can create new neural connections.
Our neural connections are formed throughout life under the influence of experienced emotions and the body's reactions to them. Internal and external stimuli act on the sense organs, and they respond with impulses sent to the central nervous system.
The more gratitude a person experiences, the more positive they feel about life, as new neural connections of positive thinking, reactions and emotions are formed in the brain.
It strengthens interpersonal relationships.
Expressing gratitude to a friend, partner, relative allows you to show how important this person is to you, that you appreciate what he does, that you are sincerely grateful to him. Thus, the relationship becomes closer, filled with warmth and empathy.
It shifts the focus from the negative to the positive.
Gratitude allows us to appreciate what we have by paying attention to the positive aspects of life. If you start, for example, keeping a gratitude journal and remember every day what you can be grateful for to people or the world, then you will begin to focus on this, and the negative will fade into the background.
It affects physical well-being and overall health.
Gratitude brings people satisfaction, makes them more active. Those who know how to be grateful experience less stress and dissatisfaction, smoke and drink less, eat better, and exercise more. In moments of gratitude, pressure normalizes, immunity increases, the hormonal system works better. And all this, in turn, strengthens health and improves well-being.
It effectively helps to overcome stress and even depression.
Knowing how to feel gratitude even for some insignificant little things and filling yourself with positive emotions every day, you can more easily cope with illnesses, troubles, problems and crises.
By accustoming yourself to experience gratitude every day, you can even cope with depression. Of course, this does not eliminate the need to contact a specialist and select the appropriate therapy. But the practice of gratitude can support, improve the results of treatment, and help to get out of this state faster.
Depression is usually accompanied by insomnia, anxiety, and unwillingness to communicate. Gratitude, on the contrary, causes positive changes in the brain at the physical level, changes the hormonal background, improving the general condition, helping a person feel happier. Thus, sleep improves, anxieties and fears go away, “light at the end of the tunnel” appears.
It facilitates the maintenance of internal balance and self-control.
Feeling gratitude and being in a great mood, you better control your impulses and more easily pass by unpleasant events and people, not allowing them to invade your life and involve you in negative experiences.
It improves eating habits.
You all know that eating behavior is closely related to your emotional background – the habit of seizing stress is familiar to many people.
Scientists have found in a series of experiments that people who feel gratitude tend to eat more regularly and properly than those who do not. Practicing gratitude minimizes the intensity and frequency of experiencing negative emotions.
Each of us has the ability and opportunity to develop a sense of gratitude. Try to pay attention to everything that you are grateful for, instead of constantly complaining about your life. For example, right in the morning you can say “thank you” for the sunrise or for a cup of delicious coffee. You can even thank yourself for the best part of your character, for something beautiful in nature, for a good deed, or for a person you especially love.
After all, the more attentive you are to pleasant things and people, the more grateful you become, and therefore healthier, more successful and happier.