Gee, Thanks: Gratitude As A Driver For Change
If you're looking for a simple way to enhance your life and really help yourself out, take a good look at the gratitude movement. This has been a buzzword in the self-help community for quite some time, but now even scientific experiments are finding that gratitude can have some significant benefits for both your health. While there are many theories and procedures for improving your life, gratitude may turn out to be one of the easiest. Here's a look at how gratitude can shape your life and how to start using this strategy to make a change.
Better Health
Being grateful, or showing and feeling a sense of appreciation for events, people, or things in your life, can calm you down, change your mood, and even soothe physical manifestations of health issues. A 2015 study by the American Psychological Association found that for asymptomatic heart failure patients, gratitude helped the patients sleep better, have better moods, and lowered inflammation, which is a physical condition that can worsen heart health. The study went on to try to account for the role of spirituality in general in the patients' lives, and it found that gratitude was really responsible for the main effects experienced by the participants.
Focusing on the Positive
If you want to get a quick preview of how gratitude can help you, spend a few minutes thinking of the bad things that happened in the past week and how you wish they'd never happened. Note how your mood dips down; maybe you feel sluggish, and maybe you don't feel a lot of interest in taking care of daily tasks.
Now switch it up and start looking for the positive in the past week, the things you were happy to see (even if you just saw a cute cat in your neighbor's yard). Appreciate the fact that you got to see that cat or experience whatever positive event happened. Think about the happiness you felt for each positive thing. You might feel lighter, more relaxed, and better able to get on with your day.
This is the main effect of gratitude. You're focusing on the positive, and as you focus more and more on the positive, you'll find more positive things in your day. That happy feeling you got from thinking of the cat or whatever you saw is multiplied over and over, and that makes it easier for you to brush off negative feelings.
Note that gratitude doesn't mean you have to ignore negative events and feelings -- those may still happen in your life. But a regular gratitude practice makes it easier for you to immediately find something positive and makes it easier to handle a bout of negativity. You get a better sense that there are solutions that will lead the situation in a more positive direction.
What to Do
How to feel gratitude is personal; some people can call up the feeling by just saying thanks, while others feel a more wide-reaching, peaceful appreciation for whatever happened. If you're not sure what your style is, the gratitude journal is an easy step. At the end of the day, all you do is write down the things you're grateful for. They can be events that day, even as small as having hot water for your shower. Or, they can be events in your life or even just the things in your life that you really like.
Many gratitude journal exercises ask you to write down a set number of items, and this can be helpful in making you look for the good. Even if you've had a bad day, maybe the leaves were a nice shade of red or your lunch was good. The point is, you can always find something.
If you'd like more exercises for experiencing gratitude, finding a coach or some of the best self help gurus can help, too. Take your time and investigate different styles and writings, and find paths you feel very comfortable with.