According to positive psychology research, gratitude is tightly linked to happiness.
By being grateful, people can open up their hearts for more positive feelings, remember the good moments, better their health, make strong connections, and deal with challenges.
Gratitude is a word derived from Gratia, the Latin word for graciousness, grace, or gratefulness. Gratitude is in a way an umbrella term for all of these.
When a person is grateful, they’re thankful and appreciate the good things they have or feel in their lives. By showing gratitude, people recognize that goodness is outside themselves.
When people are grateful, they can connect to a bigger force than their individual selves, whether it’s other people, nature, or some higher power.
The Effects of Gratitude on the Brain & Body
Gratitude encourages feelings of deep appreciation while the gratitude emotion causes lovely physical effects, on a short- and long-term scale.
People who practice gratitude say that it’s a calm and warm feeling that spreads from the heart throughout the whole body.
According to medical studies, practicing gratitude on a regular basis can have a long-term and visible influence on stress reduction, deep breathing, and reduced tension in the muscles.
Here are the best benefits of gratitude for the brain and body:
- It helps us release toxic feelings
The limbic system is a brain part responsible for our emotional experiences.
According to studies, the hippocampus and amygdala that comprise this brain part activate when we express gratitude.
- It lowers pain
In one study from 2003, 16 percent of patients who had gratitude journals reported a reduction in their pain symptoms and higher motivation to exercise and keep up the treatment procedure.
What’s more, gratitude fills us up with vitality and lowers our subjective feeling of pain.
- It betters the quality of sleep
According to studies, receiving and giving kindness activates our hypothalamus and regulates the mechanisms managed by it, including sleep.
By practicing gratitude, we can enjoy deeper and healthier sleep naturally. A brain full of kindness and gratitude is likelier to sleep better and wake up energized.
- Helps in stress management
In a study, it was discovered that the people who felt gratitude had a reduction in their cortisol levels or the stress hormone.
Their cardiac functioning was also better and they were more resilient to negative experiences and emotional struggles.
When we appreciate the small things in life, we actually rewire the brain to address current situations with deeper perception and higher awareness.
- Alleviates anxiety and depression
By lowering stress and improving the functioning of the autonomic nervous system functions, gratitude is also beneficial for lowering anxiety and depression.
From a neurochemical point of view, gratitude is associated with better management of negative feelings like violence, shame, and guilt in the brain.
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