What are you grateful for today? Was it easy to name something or did you have to stop and think about it for awhile? If it took you a minute, I get it — 2020 has been a tough year. When life seems to have just thrown us one curveball after another, it can be difficult to feel grateful. Being grateful doesn’t always come naturally to us, but if we can cultivate an ‘attitude of gratitude’ it can have positive implications for our overall wellbeing.
So what is gratitude anyway? Harvard Health describes it as
…a thankful appreciation for what an individual receives, whether tangible or intangible. With gratitude, people acknowledge the goodness in their lives. In the process, people usually recognize that the source of that goodness lies at least partially outside themselves.Havard Health
How Does Gratitude Help Us?
According to Harvard Health, “Gratitude helps people feel more positive emotions, relish good experiences, improve their health, deal with adversity, and build strong relationships.” If you think about it, these are things that contribute to our overall wellness.
Let’s take a look at some of the ways gratitude can improve our lives, and our wellness.
Gratitude can improve our physical health.
How does gratitude improve our physical health? According to her article 7 Scientifically Proven Benefits of Gratitude in Psychology Today (2), Amy Morin reports that in a 2012 Study, Personality and Individual Differences, researchers found that grateful people reported feeling healthier overall and had fewer aches and pains.
Of course, this is more focused on the “normal” aches and pains we experience, not actual illness.
Grateful people also exercise more and are more likely to make and keep routine check-ups.
One more bonus — people who are grateful seem to sleep better. In her article Is Gratitude Good for Your Health? (4) for The Greater Good Science Center, Summer Allen says,
People with heart failure and chronic pain who are more grateful report sleeping better, despite their condition, than less grateful patients. In a study of 401 people, 40 percent of whom had clinically impaired sleep, more grateful people reported falling asleep more quickly, sleeping longer, having better sleep quality, and staying awake more easily during the day. This study also found evidence that more grateful people sleep better because they have fewer negative thoughts and more positive ones at bedtime.Summer Allen, Is Gratitude Good for Your Health?
And let’s face it — who couldn’t use a few more ZZZZs?
Being grateful improves our psychological health.
Gratitude can improve our psychological health in several different ways. It can increase feelings of happiness and reduce feelings of envy, resentment, and frustration.
Surprisingly, it can also help improve our self-esteem. This is because when we feel grateful, we don’t tend to compare ourselves to others as much. We’re also more able to appreciate and applaud the accomplishments of others.
Gratitude can help us make new friends.
Remember the other week when we talked about the importance of connection? One benefit of being grateful is that it helps us see and appreciate how those connections enrich our lives. This can help make us friendlier, more trusting, and perhaps, more sociable. (3) When we’re more open and friendly with new acquaintances, they’re more likely to want to form an ongoing relationship.
It can make us more resilient.
People who are more grateful tend to ‘bounce back’ more quickly from traumatic events. They are more likely to be proactive with coping mechanisms, seek support if they need it, and in the end, are more likely to become stronger through struggles.
Cultivating an ‘Attitude of Gratitude’
With all the benefits being grateful can bring us, it’s easy to see why we would want to cultivate an ‘attitude of gratitude’. Here are few things we can do to get started:
- Say thank you. This seems like a no-brainer, but have you ever held the door for someone at the mall and they walked right through without even acknowledging you were holding the door for them? Of course you and I would never do that, but what if we’re forgetting to say thank you for other ‘run of the mill’ things? Remembering to be grateful for the small things can help us to realize we may have more to be thankful for than we realize.
- Choose one thing to be thankful for each day. Even on our worst day, we can usually find one thing to be grateful for if we look for it. Being intentional about looking is the important part, and if we make it our mission to find that one thing each day, we may start to find more than one.
- Keep a gratitude journal. For many people, keeping a journal with all the things they’re grateful for helps them to feel more positive about their lives. For those of us who use bullet journals, having some gratitude pages or even listing our ‘one thing’ we’re grateful for each day can help keep those positive thoughts at the forefront of our minds.
- Count your blessings. So we already know a lot of people have trouble falling asleep. What if, instead of counting sheep, we count our blessings? Even if we’re not having trouble sleeping, reviewing our blessings at the end of each day can help us feel more grateful.
It’s not always easy to feel grateful, especially when we’re experiencing hard times, but if we can cultivate a general ‘attitude of gratitude’ it can impact our overall being in ways we may not even realize. Doesn’t that make it worth the effort?
How do you cultivate gratitude in your life? Please share!
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