By Andrea Seydel, author of Saving You Is Killing Me: Loving Someone with an Addiction.
Gratitude is such a powerful emotion, one that can make your life better. It is difficult to feel stressed, overwhelmed, and sorry for yourself while simultaneously feeling grateful. Sometimes when your world feels chaotic and out of control, it becomes easy to feel defeated and deflated. Gratitude is a beautiful emotion that can shift you to a better place. As it turns out, expressing gratitude is not only excellent for the person receiving your gratitude, it also does the same thing for us. It is good for our brain and mental well-being. According to gratitude researchers Emmon and McCullough, gratitude can:
Help to make friends.
Improve your physical health.
Improve your psychological health.
Enhance empathy.
Reduce aggression.
Improve your sleep.
Improve your self-esteem.
Increase mental strength.
The purpose of gratitude exercises is to allow us to realize and appreciate the good in our lives, even when our world seems out of control and full of turmoil. Gratitude becomes an essential tool to help you take your power back. It can make you realize that every day may not be helpful, but there is something good in every day.
Thanks- How Practicing Gratitude Can Make You Happier:
A sense of wonder, thankfulness, and appreciation is likely to elevate happiness for several reasons:
1. Grateful thinking fosters the savouring of positive life experiences and situations.
2. People extract the maximum possible satisfaction and enjoyment from their circumstances.
3. Counting blessings may directly counteract the effects of hedonic adaptation - the process by which our happiness level returns again and again to its set point. Counting your blessings prevents people from taking their lives for granted.
4. The very act of seeing things as a gift is itself likely to be beneficial for mood.
5. Gratitude strengthens social ties.
6. Good for relationships and marriage.
7. Gratitude affects our heart rhythms.
8. Gratitude enhances our human spirit. It adds to meaning and purpose.
Here is some food for thought and some gratitude prompts:
I am grateful for my courage because
Three good things that happened to me this week were
I am grateful for my friendships because
Something else I am grateful for is
I am grateful for my family because
I am grateful for who I am because
How can I rewrite the story that my negativity bias might be telling me
What opportunity might be in this difficulty
What would it look like if I overestimated my ability to overcome challenges?
The next time you find yourself in the grip of negative emotions, try generating some positive feelings to go alongside them. You can use gratitude as a means to help shift your emotions. We can try as we may, but we can’t control how life goes. The unexpected and undesired do happen every day. Yet when we wrap our suffering in the cocoon of compassion, something new emerges—something excellent, exquisite, and beautiful, much like a butterfly.
For further support: Do not hesitate to listen to the SYKM podcast or purchase the book
You can also reach out to Andrea Seydel herself at www.andreaseydel.com
Here is the SYKM Podcast link: http://apple.co/38p1OMU