Grateful for Gratitude

​Its Thanksgiving season and its all about food.  And since this is a site that is first of all about food, there must be something to say about it at Thanksgiving: how to make it healthy, how not to eat too much of it..... blah to that.  Just eat in the ways that the Nutrition Kitchen exemplifies most of the time and go enjoy your Thanksgiving meal.   Here I want to get beyond food and explore other aspects of life that effect our health and wellness.  Does practicing gratitude qualify? 

As it turns out, a gratitude practice can have a powerful effect on your health and well being.  Research is demonstrating that practicing gratitude can have real impact even on your physical well being via lower blood pressure, a stronger immune system (maybe we should be grateful that Thanksgiving comes just as the cold and flu season is coming on), less aches and pains, better sleep patterns, even better and more consistent exercise habits. 

Its no surprise that practicing gratitude has a significant impact on psychological health.  Grateful people demonstrate higher levels of positive emotions overall: joy, pleasure, optimisim, generally more alert and alive in the world they live in.  Gratitude is like an antibiotic for toxic emotions like envy, resentment and regret: the chicken soup of psychological health.  

Socially is where practicing gratitude can have some of the greatest positive effects on your life as you demonstrate more compassion and forgiveness and feel less lonely and isolated.  Grateful people are more outgoing and connected in life enhancing relationships generally.  I get that:  I much prefer to hang around people who see the good in things rather than complaining about them, and doing so adds more positive vitality to my own existence without a doubt. 

Given all the physical, mental and social benefits, why wouldn't we cultivate a gratitude practice?  Here are a few that seem to work for me.  

Count your blessings.   Training your mind and heart to be habitually grateful requires something concrete to focus on.  Just going for a fuzzy "I'm gonna be more thankful" attitude doesn't get you there.  Keeping a gratitude journal is a good way to do this, or just starting and ending your day making a list in your mind will help.  When I wake up at night and my "dark time brain" starts stressing out about the difficult things I'm working on, I have started to intentionally make lists of what I'm grateful for, saying prayers of thanksgiving.  It really is true that being grateful leads to a better night's sleep. 

Look for the good in the bad.  Having to pay the mechanic's bill sucks, but thank God for credit cards.  Or actual bank accounts, if you're not me.  Every challenge comes with an opportunity,  if you look for it.  Sometimes the only (or at least the easiest) one to find is simply the opportunity to reconnect  with what's really important in life, and that in itself will always have a long term transcendent benefit.  Which leads to...

Stay focused on the good stuff.  Its easy to zero in on what's wrong with our circumstances, that person, the world, whatever. But if that's where our gaze stays focused our stress hormones continue to deconstruct our wellness systems and life continues to disintegrate. We become what we contemplate.  Continuing to return to our lists of what we're truly grateful for does not deny or diminish the significance of the difficult things we need to deal with, but we need to allow them to stay on the periphery of our existence rather than become the core of who we are, if we want that core to be the foundation of a life that is well and lived well. 

Put some leather on your love.  That's the name of a song I wrote once: maybe I'll record that one some day.  The point is that doing something good for someone else increases your attitude of gratitude exponentially.  I'm not generally a big fan of making comparisons because I think they can lead to either envy or pride, two extremely toxic emotions.  But doing acts of compassion that cause you to prioritize what you have to give rather than what you haven't got is one of the healthiest ways to support a gratitude practice. 

These are just a few of my favorites.  The list could go on and on: for more resources and ideas I recommend Robert Emmen's work, such as Thanks! How Practicing Gratitude can Make you Happier.  He has a paperback called Little Book of Gratitude with a Kindle version that's only $1.99.  Now there's an investment in wellness.  

For now suffice it to say that practicing gratitude can have amazingly powerful effects on your ability to be well and live well: mind, body and spirit.  If this stuff could be bottled and sold all of our evening newscasts would be full of ads telling us to ask our doctor for a prescription.  But here it is: free for the taking if we just embrace it and embody it.  

I'm very grateful for that.