Gratitude and the feeling of appreciation when felt, cultivated, shared and acknowledged has many benefits.
Emotional Benefits of Gratitude:
It helps you focus on the positive and lowers levels of anxiety and depression.
Physical benefits of Gratitude:
Gratitude stimulates a certain part of the brain which decreases stress and improves sleep.
Social Benefits of Gratitude:
Gratitude improves relationships. It enhances social interactions creating more compassion and more sense of community.
So how can you cultivate more gratitude in your life. Here are three things that you can do on a consistent basis that cultivates gratitude:
1.) At the end of your day, reflect on your day. Think about those things that you are grateful for and appreciate; people, places and things.
2.) Keep a gratitude journal. Consistently add things to your journal that you're grateful for in your life.
3.) Say Thank you. As you know when you say thank you to someone you feel good and when you are the recipient of a thank you, you feel good also.
In Dr. Masaru Emoto research he demonstrated the effect of certain emotions and thoughts on water. He exposed water to loving, benevolent, and compassionate human intentions as well as fearful and discordant human intentions and immediately froze the water. He then took photographs of the water crystals. The water exposed to loving, benevolent, and compassionate human intentions resulted in aesthetically pleasing physical molecular formations while water exposed to fearful and discordant human intentions results in disconnected, disfigured, and “unpleasant” physical molecular formations. Humans are made up of 70% water so there is a correlation. Therefore, the influences of emotions like gratitude on water are similar to the effects of emotions on humans. It's important to choose the words that you use and the thoughts that you think.
You can see how feeling gratitude and appreciation, which is the highest vibration of emotion, positively influences your physical, emotional and social health. It’s most important to start by practicing gratitude with yourself. Be good to yourself by being mindful of the thoughts you have about yourself. Your health and happiness depends on it.