“Perhaps you should think about the good things about the world and what good you enjoy before going to sleep, have a list in your head mum that would work” my son helpfully offered.
That’s what I have started to actively do. I have previously done it when I have felt good about things, but not always when I feel wobbly.
So, if we are to give it a name, then it would be gratitude, but I can’t get with that term at all. Health gurus, wellness people, spiritual people have done gratitude to death. Like mindfulness they have hammered it into a commercial quick and easy tool box and cheapened the essence of it.
We can call it being grateful, felling glad, internally chuffed…I don’t know, for the purposes of this blog we will have to stick to gratitude.
For the past 20 years researchers have been looking into the biological roots of gratitude. Not just gratitude generated by others doing an act of kindness towards you, but a dispositional personal personality trait that is internal regardless of the interaction with another.
Some interesting science has come out of this field that I will outline below. The first one in truly amazing.
Researchers have found that cardiac patients who practised gratitude had lower levels of cellular inflammation in their bodies proving that it helps physical health directly on a cellular level. How amazing is that.
People who practise being more grateful have better physical and psychological well-being, they report being more satisfied with life and because of this they value life and quality of life more intensely leading them to adopt a healthier lifestyle and are less likely to suffer burnout.
When we are internally grateful for small and big things (we will cover this later in the blog) our brain releases dopamine and serotonin which are 2 crucial neurotransmitters responsible for mood and in turn emotions; helping us manage stress and anxiety. People who express and feel gratitude have a higher volume of grey matter in the right inferior temporal gyrus in the brain. It literally changes activity in certain parts of the brain.
Sleep is a major aspect of lifestyle that gratitude impacts. Gratitude activates the hypothalamus which controls body temperature, hunger, sleep and thirst. People who practise gratitude daily report a deeper and healthier sleep which allows them to feel refreshed on waking and ready to feel gratitude that day and so on. They also report feeling less stressed as gratitude effects the levels of cortisol pumped into the brain and body.
Don’t just take my word for it, you can go to google and put this in the URL and it will come up with lots of research papers on gratitude and sleep. https://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?q=gratitude+and+sleep&hl=en&as_sdt=0&as_vis=1&oi=scholart
This way of being combats negative emotions, motivates self-improvement and changes the way in which we think about stress allowing us to consider situations as opportunities for growth. It stops rumination, allows space for problem solving, builds resilience and allows greater capacity for forgiveness. It also fosters patience and humility.
People who found gratitude difficult to adopt were found to be envious, materialistic, cynical or narcissistic. That is not to say they couldn’t work on being more grateful but that they would need to look into their back story to see where those needs and wants went astray.
Adolescents who experienced intentional gratitude reported they were more satisfied with school lives, they presented as kind, helpful and socially integrated. Parents reported they were nicer to be around.
Parents influence their children’s gratitude by modelling gratitude but also by placing their children in situations that invoke feelings of gratitude i.e. volunteering, school projects etc. Interesting that mums influence this almost totally, with dads influencing it to a lesser degree regardless of effort.
I believe that gratitude has been commercialised over the years, you can go to amazon and find over 3 pages of gratitude products to buy and if that helps you to be thankful for things than I believe that is a positive step. To me that way seems a bit forced and clinical, also all of those products limit you to think of three things in a day which reduces this way of being into a rushed thing from your tool kit. I believe to feel the benefits of gratitude it needs to be included throughout the day. It is about getting into the habit of noticing what we are grateful for, why we are grateful, what sensation that generates.
If you want to know how grateful you are in daily life now then here is a quick quiz to give you a rough idea of where you are in terms of being ‘internally chuffed’ https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/quizzes/take_quiz/gratitude
Some exercises to help you integrate gratitude into your life would be mental subtraction
You would think about a positive life event and think about how life would be different if that event had not happened, e.g.. what you wouldn’t have gained. For example, I have swum from Alcatraz to San Francisco, if I hadn’t have done that, I wouldn’t feel that sense of achievement, I wouldn’t have met all the lovely people I have remained friends with. I wouldn’t have seen the golden gate bridge as I swam. I am grateful for those memories. Researchers call this the “George Bailey effect” after the protagonist in the movie It’s a wonderful life.
Other researchers have explored death reflection in a study of undergraduate students. The students were asked to imagine dying in a very specific and visceral manner instead of gratitude from a typical day. I THINK THIS APPROACH NEEDS CAUTION with younger and older people where mortality is a part of their thoughts more than any other time.
What I want to stress is that it this gratitude business is about being thankful for the little things to start with, such as
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Appreciating your favourite tea mug
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that you have birds in the garden where you live
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that your radio in the car is easy to tune
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that you have a car
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that it’s windy and that makes you feel more
refreshed
The above are examples, some of them may not apply to you. It is about noticing the very small things that make a difference.
Honestly try it and it will improve your sleep and your relationship with your world. If you really practice it and it becomes your personality trait you will be improving your physical health as well.
Why wouldn’t you try it? It is a worthwhile thing to do.
https://ggsc.berkeley.edu/images/uploads/GGSC-JTF_White_Paper-Gratitude-FINAL.pdf
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