12 Dec An Attitude of Gratitude
Christmas or Xmas. The Festive Season. New Year.
Whichever way you look at this time of the year there really should just be one central theme … gratitude.
Well, to be honest, gratitude and appreciation should be front of mind at all times of the year. Why? Because it’s such a simple thing to do with so many immense and positive benefits (including, but not limited to, happiness and health, wellbeing and hope) …
via Psychology Today by Samantha Stein
KEY POINTS
- With practice, gratitude is a quality that individuals can successfully cultivate.
- Feeling grateful can positively affect our lives, health, and psychological and emotional well-being.
- With practice, our negative habits change into positive ones, and our life follows.
It’s our human nature to dwell on the negative. This tendency–called the “negativity bias“–is the propensity to focus on problems, annoyances, and injustices in our lives rather than focusing on being grateful for the events or people that are working and we feel good about. But with effort, we can change that propensity, and research shows that effort is well worth it: feeling grateful can have a powerfully positive effect on our lives, health, and psychological and emotional well-being.
Cultivating gratitude is not about ignoring painful feelings or dismissing challenges. It is not about encouraging anyone to be pollyanna, “new agey,” or to use a spiritual bypass or toxic positivity. Those routes only lead to an increase in psychological problems. Cultivating gratitude is about the simple act of focusing daily on what you’re grateful for, which can have a tremendously positive psychological impact.
Death Valley
Source: Samantha Stein
Research by Jeffrey J. Froh, an assistant professor of psychology at Hofstra University in Hempstead, N.Y., has found that adults who feel grateful are more optimistic, report more social satisfaction, experience less envy, less depression, and fewer physical complaints. They also sleep better and get more exercise. Kids who experience more gratitude do better in school, set higher goals for themselves, derive more satisfaction from life, friends, family, and school, are generally less materialistic, and have more desire to give back.
Gratitude can also have a social benefit. In other research by Robert Emmons, a professor of psychology at the University of California-Davis and a pioneer in gratitude research, people who were assigned the task of making a daily gratitude list were more likely to report having helped someone with a personal problem or having offered emotional support to another, relative to those who focused on the hassles of life or comparing themselves to others.
In other research, gratitude helped couples feel more positive about the other person and the relationship, and employees felt more motivated to work harder for their manager when their manager was grateful.
So how do we change from our negative habits to that of feeling more regular gratitude? People feel and express gratitude in multiple ways. They can apply it to the past (retrieving positive memories and being thankful for elements of childhood or past blessings), the present (not taking good fortune for granted as it comes), and the future (maintaining a hopeful and optimistic attitude). Regardless of the inherent or current level of someone’s gratitude, it’s a quality that individuals can successfully cultivate further.
Here are some suggestions about how to actively cultivate gratitude …
… keep reading the full & original article HERE