Researchers have looked at how expressing gratitude affects your psychological and physical well-being, and the results, thankfully, are positive.
Helping others can make you feel better about yourself. This isn’t just advice from your grandmother anymore, but a clinically proven fact.
A new article published in the National Communication Association’s Review of Communication by Stephen M. Yoshimura and Kassandra Berzins, describes how it works.
Expressing gratitude can benefit your mind and also your body. When it comes to your head, it can make you more optimistic, full of vitality, satisfied with life, and hopeful about the future.
Gratitude also contributes to decreased levels of depression, anxiety, envy, and job-related stress and burnout.
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And as for your physical body, expressing gratitude can actually make you report fewer symptoms of being sick, get more exercise and a better quality of sleep. Talk about a pretty powerful force.
As Melodie Beatty is quoted as saying on psychologytoday.com, “Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough.”
How can you work more feelings of gratitude into your life? Experts recommend starting a diary.
As cheesy as it may sound, it’s been shown to work. Two or three consecutive weeks of filling in gratitude diaries at the end of the day is said to do the trick.
Take 5 or 10 minutes to record what you are grateful for, and you’ll be re-orienting what’s been labeled your mental compass, towards the positive. Check out these 5 ways to be more grateful, (scroll down), to get started.
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