As Thanksgiving approaches, we thought we’d take a moment to express our gratitude to our Institute guests and followers. We’re so grateful for your trust in us to treat your spinal condition and eliminate the chronic pain you, or a loved one, has been living with. We also thank everyone who follows our blog and social media channels, and helps to spread the word about our treatment options to others. It’s because of all of you that we are able to help others suffering from these debilitating issues get their lives back.
In addition to expressing our gratitude, we wanted to share a few more mental and physical health benefits of expressing gratitude — as excerpted from a TIME article, originally written by Jamie Ducharme on November 20, 2017.
Research supports making gratitude a year-round habit. All it takes to enjoy the benefits of gratitude is a little bit of introspection.
Gratitude can make you more patient
Research from Northeastern University has found that people who felt grateful for little, everyday things were more patient and better able to make sensible decisions, compared to those who didn’t feel very gracious on a day-to-day basis. When 105 undergraduate students were asked to choose between receiving a small amount of money immediately or a larger sum at some point in the future, for example, the students who had shown more gratitude in earlier experiments were able to hold out for more cash.
Gratitude improves self-care
In a study published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences, researchers asked people to rate their levels of gratitude, physical health and psychological health, as well as how likely they were to do well being-boosting behaviors like exercise, healthy eating and going to the doctor. They found positive correlations between gratitude and each of these behaviors, suggesting that giving thanks helps people appreciate and care for their bodies.
Gratitude can help you sleep
“Count blessings, not sheep,” says Emma Seppälä, a happiness researcher at Stanford and Yale Universities and author of The Happiness Track. Research in the Journal of Psychosomatic Research has found that feeling grateful helps people sleep better and longer. That’s likely because “you have more positive thoughts before you go to sleep,” says Seppälä (who wasn’t involved in the study), which may soothe the nervous system. If you’re going to make a daily gratitude list, Seppälä recommends writing it before bed.
Gratitude can help ease depression
Susan Peirce Thompson, a cognitive scientist, says experiments have shown that people whole partake in the “three good things” exercise — which, as the name suggests, prompts people to think of three good moments or things that happened that day — see considerable improvements in depression and overall happiness, sometimes in as little as a couple weeks. “If there were a drug that did that, whoever patented that drug would be rich,” Thompson says. “Gratitude is very powerful.”
Read the full TIME article here: https://time.com/5026174/health-benefits-of-gratitude/