GRATITUDE
“Gratitude turns what we have into enough.” - Anonymous
This time of year is a really busy time for so many families in the United States and our family is no exception. For us, by November, we have spent each month of the past 3 celebrating the birthdays of our three daughters. We’ve gone through the process of reflection on each year of each childs’ life, disbelief at how much time has passed so quickly, and gratitude for all the blessings that have been bestowed upon us from them, and family and friends (and strangers) who may still be with us on this earth, or who are already beyond this earth.
By this time, we are often thoroughly distracted by everything else that is going on - school conferences and performances, holiday preparation, sporting events and tournaments. But for this year, I decided I was going to make a conscious effort to take personal inventory and think about all the things that I am grateful for. Why? Good question:)
As an integrative medicine physician, my practice of medicine and philosophy of health and healing is based on the incorporation of regular habits that promote health and overall wellness and prevent disease, as well as the treatment of disease when this balance cannot be maintained. There is a significant body of research to support the fact that gratitude contributes significantly to our overall wellness. The Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence summarizes this research link between gratitude and improved mental health and life satisfaction. The benefits do not stop at mental health outcomes. Higher levels of gratitude have also been linked to “better immune function, more robust physical health, and lower blood pressure.”
With all the evidence-based benefits of gratitude, how can we make it part of our lives and reap the benefits too?
Bring Gratitude into Your Wellness Practice
Pay Attention - to your daily blessings, your luck, the kindness you experience in your daily life, the gifts of God, the gods, nature, and humans, the beauty of your surroundings - this process refocuses our frame of reference on the positive - gratitude research is part of the field of positive psychology which helps us retrain our brain
Write about it - through gratitude journaling, letters - this process helps us to reaffirm and accept the blessings we are grateful for, to understand the significance of it in our lives, and to actively bring this thought process to the forefront of our minds and focus
Express gratitude - this process can be done through writing a thank you or saying thank you. The writer, has benefits from writing a letter even if it is not sent to the person being thanked, and both receive positive benefits from the letter if it is written and sent
Don’t give up! We are all on a mission “to live our best lives” as Oprah would say and it is all a process. So we may as well start enjoying this constant process of learning how to do better for ourselves and our loved ones...and what better time to start, than this Thanksgiving.
Please check out our resources section for more articles and websites on gratitude, and consider taking the Gratitude Questionnaire both before and after incorporating gratitude journaling into your daily wellness practice.