Middlefield Post Thanksgiving Section
Nov. 16, 2011
Healing Powers of Gratitude
By Christina Porter
The mind is powerful. We’ve all heard tales of how we can talk ourselves into illness, and there are literally millions of stories about people healing themselves through positive thinking. Many bestselling books have been written on the subject, and there is one point on which they all agree. The first step to thinking positive and bettering your circumstances is to be grateful for what you already have. It’s so easy to only see the negative and concentrate on everything that’s wrong in your life, but if you back up just one or two steps, you may be able to see all that’s right with it. Gratitude is appreciating what you
have and making the most from the people and things around you. We tend to take for granted everything that’s good in our lives. One example is how we don’t notice when we’re healthy, but we clearly realize when we’re ill. When we can find as much joy in the small things as we can in big achievements, we taste success constantly. There is a large body of research showing how our thoughts and emotions directly impact our physical and mental health and well-being (called the mind/ body connection) and gratitude may be one of the most important and impactful of our emotions. Gratitude research is beginning to suggest that feelings of thankfulness help people cope with daily problems, especially stress, and to achieve a positive sense of the self. Recent academic studies have shown that people who describe themselves as feeling grateful tend to have higher vitality and more optimism, suffer less stress, and experience fewer episodes of clinical
depression than the population as a whole. These results hold even when researchers factor out such things as age, health, and income. Grateful people tend to be less materialistic than the population as a whole and to suffer less anxiety about status or the accumulation of possessions. Partly because of this, they are more likely to describe themselves as happy or satisfied in life. Grateful people are more spiritually aware and more likely to appreciate the interconnectedness of all life, regardless of whether they belong to specific religions. This is the time of year when we recognize gratitude and extend our thankfulness to God and to those around us. But to increase your energy, health, and well-being, maintain a sense of gratitude all year. Take a few minutes at the end of each day to express gratitude for the blessings in your life: your healthy body, your spouse, your children, your job, your home, and for all the lessons you learned that day.