Many Benefits of Giving Thanks

Hi everyone,

I hope you all had a great Thanksgiving and had a chance to reflect on what you can be grateful for. Let's consider what research has found are the many benefits of giving thanks:

1. Grateful people experience fewer aches and pains and they report feeling healthier than other people.

2. Gratitude reduces a multitude of toxic emotions, ranging from envy and resentment to frustration and regret.

3. Gratitude enhances empathy and reduces aggression.

4. Grateful people sleep better.

5. Gratitude improves self-esteem.

6. Gratitude reduces stress and may also help in overcoming trauma.

And it is good for your relationships!

In fact, in Spontaneous Happiness: A New Path to Emotional Well-Being, Dr. Andrew Weil writes that the easiest way to overcome depression, be happy, and improve one's health is through developing an attitude of gratitude.

So how do you develop an attitude of gratitude?

Here are two simple strategies:

1. From the moment you wake up keep giving thanks for whatever you have, see or feel. Keep saying thank you in your mind and your heart.

2. When you face a stressful situation ask yourself, "What can I be grateful for in this situation?" Then focus on what you are grateful for as best as you can, instead of what's bad about it.

These two simple strategies practiced daily, even hourly, can change the neuropathways in your brain and make being in a state of gratitude an effortless part of your mental and emotional habit.

You will see many wonderful physical, mental, and emotional benefits and hopefully a lot less TMS.

So, start today continue it for the rest of your life!

Stay informed. Stay well.

 

Thank you Fred for the kind reminder. It seems simple, but gratitude goes very deep. It helps us feel like we are more at home here, in our (short) lives on earth.

 

Nice one Fred... I like it!

 

In response to this post, one of my readers asked:

“Please elucidate. For example, I am experiencing job uncertainty or I am not making enough money to do what I want to. How do I be grateful in those situations? I am relieved about the fact that I am not homeless or on the streets but then that is not enough. I am at a level and need to look at things from that point.”

My answer:

“Let me begin by telling you about a wonderful practice that Oprah does at the end of each day: she writes down five things she is grateful for and feel grateful in her heart. She was doing it when she was not rich and famous, and she is doing now.

An attitude of gratitude goes beyond just saying thanks with our tongues and thinking it. It needs to be such a feeling of gratitude that when we give thanks for the air we breathe or the water we drink that tears come to our eyes.
It’s about immersing ourselves in the experience.

It is about abundant joy that we feel from wanting what we have.
It is to be content beyond measure for waking up on this side of the ground and for being alive one more day, despite TMS, financial challenges, relationship difficulties, and so on.
It’s not easy. It requires doing the two exercises I mentioned earlier and more hour after hour.

But once you do it for week after week, you develop new mental and emotional habits and will notice amazing changes in your attitude, thinking pattern, and life.

Does being grateful and content mean having no goals or ambitions?
Of course, not.

It means wanting what you have, seeing the good in every situation, and building on it for a better life.”

 

Another response from Andy:

The more clearly you see the inner and outer world, the more clearly you understand that the way we feel inside and out is conditioned by childhood experiences. For instance I had two younger brothers who got my mother's attention after I had her all to myself. Another example: Mommy's love comes and goes, for all children. There isn't perfect care or perfect attunement. We then project that on to all experience. No wonder we're not naturally grateful. We're "naturally anxious" and survival oriented.

So now we tend to feel like the world is not attuned to us, and that indeed what we have is not enough. And that we must change the inner experiences or outer experiences in order to relax, be taken care of, and live in love.

What I'm saying is that it could be that we live in a deeply generous world, but we're not aware of it~! Why? Because the way we're used to understanding the world ---and it is very "believable," is that there isn't enough for us.

So it may take some practice, as Fred suggests, in order to begin to contemplate the actual reality of our existence here.