How many times have you been told to be grateful? If you’re anything like me, expressing gratitude was likely drilled into you at a very young age, especially this time of year. I was frankly sick and tired of being told to practice gratitude because it reminded me of the kind of advice people threw around but never explained to me. Expressing gratitude has turned into a cliche. And the meaning behind it has been watered down with each advertisement and greeting card that references it. But what if I told you that there are proven scientific benefits to daily gratitude practices? Gratitude is not just a cliche we throw around to make Thanksgiving more than a holiday about food. It’s actually a great way to strengthen the chemicals in our brains that keep us feeling motivated, connected, and content in life.
Gratitude Practices
Gratitude practices can literally shape your brain! Below is a brief summary of the findings, and then we will explore how to apply them. In 2015, researchers Fox, Kaplan, Hanna, & Antonio Damasio published the Neuro Correlates of Gratitude. This report showed neurological evidence pointing to the benefits of daily gratitude practices. Practices such as journaling, writing thank-you cards, and expressing thanks out loud. Participants in that study were connected to functional MRI (FMRI) machines and were engaged in gratitude practices while another control group was not. The results revealed some surprising findings! Gratitude practices activate regions of the brain that are responsible for feelings of accomplishment and reward, which are the ventral tegmental area and the nucleus accumbens. These regions are responsible for releasing both dopamine and serotonin, which promote feelings of accomplishment, pleasure, and well-being. Over time, consistent gratitude practices also increase activity and grey matter density in the medial prefrontal cortex. That’s the area of the brain responsible for healthy decision-making and regulating emotions. Research has also recently exposed a link between gratitude and connectivity between the prefrontal cortex and the limbic regions, which helps reduce stress and responses to fear and threat.
Putting Gratitude INTO Practice
Congratulations, you made it through your neuroscience lesson for the day! Practically, what does this mean? It means that even five minutes of choosing to be grateful every day can literally help your motivation, your stress management, and your ability to make sound decisions. This is great news, because unlike so many recommendations thrown at us by professionals, this one is completely free, quick, and accessible to everyone! All it requires is for us to very intentionally write down or speak our gratitudes out loud on a regular basis. As it is mentioned above, consistency is really the key! We will get more benefits from this if we do it regularly. This does NOT mean that if we skip a day, it is all over and we should give up, but we will get the most benefits if we make a habit of this.
Five Tips For Gratitude Practices
Below are five tips for making gratitude practices part of your daily life.
- Pair it with something you already do daily, such as brushing your teeth or eating a meal. If we pair a goal behavior with an already existing habit, we have a much better time achieving that behavior!
- Start with the senses. When we are bogged down by anxious or sad thoughts, it can be really hard to find things to think about that make us feel grateful, but it is easier to feel it through our senses. What is your favorite smell? Your favorite color? Start there!
- Recruit a gratitude buddy for accountability and support. Why not enlist someone else in the task of increasing positive brain activity? If you can find someone who will ask you how it’s going, that may give you that extra push to keep it going!
- Remember that it’s not a contest to be elaborate. Keep it simple. Maybe you appreciate your favorite pair of sweat pants, or a song you love to listen to over and over again. Your gratitude doesn’t need to be a perfect poem of the next Shakespearean sonnet. You just need to get it down, absolutely no perfection required!
- Finally, try to be gentle with yourself. There will be days when you may not be able to think of anything at all. On those days, try to just be grateful that you’re trying. Sometimes, that’s all we can do, and that’s okay!
I hope this gives you a starting point for you to take advantage of these free feel-good chemicals over time! Here’s to a November that isn’t just about platitudes, but is also about gratitude! Whether you are a seasoned gratitude master, or hearing about it for the first time, Happy Thanksgiving!