How can i feel grateful

To have and to hold: Gratitude promotes relationship maintenance in intimate bonds. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology; 2 , Heubeck, E.

Boost your health with a dose of gratitude. Lambert, N. Gratitude and depressive symptoms: The role of positive reframing and positive emotion. O'Leary, K. The effects of two novel gratitude and mindfulness interventions on well-being. The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine; 21 4. Ruini, C. The role of gratitude in breast cancer: Its relationships with post-traumatic growth, psychological well-being and distress.

Journal of Happiness Studies;14 1. Gratitude and health Feeling thankful can improve your health in both direct and indirect ways. Gratitude and joy Robert Emmons, an internationally renowned scientific expert on gratitude, has found that acknowledging the good in life has a tendency to amplify positive emotions , such as joy and contentment, because it helps us slow down.

Gratitude and resilience Practicing gratitude can also make you better equipped to handle the difficulties of life that inevitably arise. Here are ten ways to become a more thankful person. Establish a daily practice in which you remind yourself of the gifts, grace, benefits, and good things you enjoy.

Setting aside time on a daily basis to recall moments of gratitude associated with ordinary events, your personal attributes, or valued people in your life gives you the potential to interweave a sustainable life theme of gratefulness. Remember the Bad. To be grateful in your current state, it is helpful to remember the hard times that you once experienced.

When you remember how difficult life used to be and how far you have come, you set up an explicit contrast in your mind, and this contrast is fertile ground for gratefulness.

Ask Yourself Three Questions. Learn Prayers of Gratitude. In many spiritual traditions, prayers of gratitude are considered to be the most powerful form of prayer, because through these prayers people recognize the ultimate source of all they are and all they will ever be.

What if we didn't take good things for granted? Learn how gratitude can lead to a better life—and a better world—in this new GGSC book. Come to Your Senses. Through our senses—the ability to touch, see, smell, taste, and hear—we gain an appreciation of what it means to be human and of what an incredible miracle it is to be alive.

Seen through the lens of gratitude, the human body is not only a miraculous construction, but also a gift. Rather than feeling shame about your complex emotions, try to see if you can look at them in parts. For example, one part of you may feel so grateful for the sacrifices your parents made to give you a good life. Another part of you, however, might very reasonably feel hurt or angry when you receive criticism from them.

Neither part invalidates the other. They are both allowed to exist, side-by-side. Start by validating your feelings. It makes sense. For example, you can take some time to let yourself experience the gratitude for one minute and the anger for another. As you engage with your emotions, you might even start to realize that you feel compelled to express certain things within a relationship to deepen or repair it. Try to think of someone in your life who can safely hold your emotional parts with you.

At first, you might experience feelings of guilt or shame as you start to offer yourself this kind of emotional space. But remember: no feeling can cancel out your gratitude. In fact, by providing enough room for all of your various feelings, you might start to experience a different kind of authenticity to your gratitude. As you deepen your ability to feel all of your emotions, you will deepen your capacity for gratitude and all of the benefits that come with it.

What are some ways in which you practice gratitude? Join the conversation in the comments below! This is great insight, Christy! Making space for sadness, anger, fear, etc.

Great post, Christy! It is so helpful to know that gratitude can reduce anxiety and depression. In Figure 1 , we show a real-life example of how a positive interpretation bias leads to more happiness after getting a bad grade on a test. Another positive thinking habit has to do with how much attention you pay to the things around you. For example, someone who is scared of dogs will pay much closer attention when there is a dog on the other side of the street, while someone who is not scared of dogs may not even notice that there is a dog there.

The person who plays close attention to the dog has a negative attention bias. If you are a more grateful person overall, you might pay more attention to the good things that happen around you, which would be a positive attention bias. Studies have also shown that people who are more grateful remember more good memories than bad ones.

This can happen for a couple of reasons. One reason is that grateful people might be better than less grateful people at encoding or storing in memory happy events when they happen. If one person is more grateful than the other, the more grateful person will encode the memory of the birthday in a more positive way maybe because of the positive attention bias and positive interpretation bias we mentioned earlier.

If they encode more positive memories of other situations they are in, too, then grateful people will end up having more positive memories than less grateful people. The other reason why grateful people might have this positive memory bias is that people are more likely to remember past happy things when they are currently feeling happy, and more likely to remember past sad things when they are currently feeling sad.

So if grateful people are happier in general, they will find it easier to think of happy memories. All of this might explain why grateful people are happier, but why are they also healthier, why do they sleep better, and why are they sick less often?

We think that the cognitive pathway can also explain this. If you have fewer negative thoughts about the world, it is easier to fall asleep because you are not lying awake worrying about everything that went wrong that day. You might have also noticed that when you worry a lot, you can experience negative feelings in your body, such as headaches or stomach pains. In addition, both not getting enough sleep and having a lot of negative emotions feeling worried, stressed, sad, and angry are bad for your immune system, which makes it difficult for your body to fight off diseases [ 3 ].

You see, the immune system normally increases inflammation when we get hurt or sick. Inflammation is the redness you can see around a cut on your skin, and the reason why you get a fever when you are sick, for example. Because inflammation kills bacteria, it is a good way for your body to heal. But researchers have now found that when we experience a lot of negative emotions for a long time, or when we do not get enough sleep, the body often responds in the same way—with inflammation.

But because we are not sick or injured, and the inflammation keeps happening over a long period of time, the inflammation actually starts to hurt healthy cells.

This cell damage makes the body weaker and makes it more likely that we get sick. Because gratitude helps us to feel less negative emotion, it also helps to stop these immune system problems, and this helps to keep us healthy.

We also came up with a second story model that may explain why grateful people are happier. This second story involves a psychosocial pathway, which means it is about how our relationships with other people influence our happiness. Studies have shown that people who say that they are more grateful have better friendships.