Turkey dinner feasts, parade watching, and family trips are worth the hustle and bustle during Thanksgiving, but celebrating with a heart full of gratitude is the best way to go. Although the upcoming holiday focuses on expressing gratefulness for every good thing that passed, gratitude shouldn’t be a trait for Thanksgiving alone! Here’s a bold guide to being thankful all year round.
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Recognizing Gratitude: Understanding its Forms and Benefits
Gratitude takes form in numerous ways, and practicing it has endless benefits. Although most people have an innate understanding of what the trait means and represents, it’s also essential to understand and recognize how people express it. Sharing gratitude and feeling it from others could keep the body and mind healthy, and there’s a science behind it.
Throughout history, many philosophers and leaders have focused on the virtue of gratitude and how it acts as a social glue that strengthens all types of relationships. In some texts, they also noted it as a backbone of human society. In science, gratitude is the state and trait of a sense of happiness and thankfulness for any happy event or gift. Gratitude is also an experience during several joyous periods in one’s life.
People often express gratitude in seven forms: humility, optimism, indulgence, abundance, devotion, affirmation, and amazement. Although they look different, being thankful for fortunate occurrences or gifts is at the core of every experience. In addition to how gratitude manifests, psychologists say that people go through the three stages: feeling grateful, expressing gratitude, and adopting new behaviors.
These forms and stages of gratitude offer several benefits to each person, but the more you practice them, the effects they’ll have on your life are more long-lasting and fulfilling. Always practicing gratitude through different means gives you a shift of focus and changes your way of thinking. These changes would lead to several releases of serotonin and dopamine, the chemicals in the brain relating to happiness and pleasure. Due to this, cortisol or the stress hormone production decreases, which results in lower anxiety levels and stable mood.
In addition, practicing gratitude allows you better sleep, improved focus, emotional resiliency, higher self-esteem, and a healthier cardiovascular system.
“We affirm that there are good things in the world, gifts and benefits we’ve received. This doesn’t mean that life is perfect; it doesn’t ignore complaints, burdens, and hassles. But when we look at life as a whole, gratitude encourages us to identify some amount of goodness in our life.” – Robert Emmons, Ph.D., Psychologist, Professor, University of California, Davis
How to Practice Gratitude Year-Round
Having gratitude all year round can change your life and everyone around you. Besides its far-reaching effects on your physical and mental health, it also boosts your relationship with others. Although practicing gratitude seems easy, what makes it difficult is consistency. It takes determination and effort to align your focus and adjust your thinking. When you do, it sorts everything in place. Here are some practices people can start to celebrate Thanksgiving every day.
Gratitude Journal
Keeping a gratitude journal helps you recall all the moments you’re thankful for and the good things you enjoy. It also establishes a daily practice of reminding yourself of each day’s gifts, graces, and benefits. Remembering these events and having little keepsakes from each moment allows you to incorporate gratitude into your daily tasks.
Remember the Bad and Visualize the Good
Being grateful means understanding that life is full of highs and lows. Practicing gratitude means allowing yourself to remember all the difficult experiences. Reminding yourself of the tough times may look unhelpful, but that only happens if you focus on them.
When remembering the bad, you should also visualize the good. Forgetfulness and lack of mindful awareness of good but small memories block your gratitude practice, making difficult situations in life more memorable. You can avoid this by having visual reminders of your blessings and fortunes, like the people around you, keepsakes, and other knick-knacks that could remind you of these happy events.
Think of Three Good Things You’re Thankful for Before Breakfast
Make a daily morning habit of finding things you’re grateful about and say them out loud. Keeping up with this routine can impact your mood for the day and improve your overall energy. Therapists also recommend repeating this practice before bed as it helps you get better, high-quality sleep.
Meditate
Meditation can help you dig deep within yourself, which is crucial to the long-term gratitude practice. Different guided meditations widen one’s outlook in life and reconnect you to your soul and other beings. In addition, meditating promotes acceptance and forgiveness- two essential factors in feeling grateful.
Thank Someone New Every Week
One of the best ways of practicing gratitude all year round is by thanking someone new at least once a week. Relationships are one of the greatest determinants of lifelong happiness, and being grateful for everyone around you helps with that.
Thanking someone new every week, even for the slightest act of kindness, like someone offering a seat on a crowded train, helps strengthen your vow to practice gratitude. Giving your thanks for these things makes the people around you recognized and appreciated.
Practicing gratitude takes time, patience, and consistency. Finding things to be thankful for every day is the true embodiment of Thanksgiving, and it costs less than turkey feast laid out on the table.
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