Gratitude - and how it impacts your brain health

“This is a wonderful day. I have never seen this one before.”

-Maya Angelou

In our last newsletter we talked about optimism and the health benefits positive thinking has on your brain and body.

This week I’ll give you an exercise to increase your happiness levels just a bit more, by focussing on…

GRATITUDE

When digging into the science of gratitude, we see there are more dimensions to this emotion than meet the eye. In the scientific literature, gratitude is studied in different ways:

• Trait gratitude: people who have a naturally grateful personality. Gratitude as a mood, which tracks daily fluctuations in gratitude.
  

• Gratitude as an emotion: passing feeling of gratitude (when receiving a thank-you letter, for example).
  

Grateful people (those who have “trait gratitude”) have fewer common health complaints, such as

• headaches

• digestion issues

• respiratory infections

• runny noses

• dizziness

• sleep problems

It appears that practising gratitude could also help to alleviate those health problems.

In the end it’s a muscle like any other and we can train it.

So let’s do a very simple exercise. You will need a pen and paper, write it into your phone or do an audio memo if you prefer.

THREE BLESSINGS

• Before going to bed, write down three good things that happened during the day.

• Focus on being grateful for these events as you replay each one in your mind.
  

It's that easy and extremely effective. Notice the change after doing this exercise a couple of times per week or even daily.

If you want to know more about gratitude, click the button below.

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