Do you want to be happy? It’s a silly question. But happiness can be hard to come by, though. Given our stressful, busy, difficult lives and everything going on in the world, it’s often difficult to find things to be happy about. So today we’re going to share a simple yet incredibly powerful technique that is absolutely guaranteed to make you happier.
Want to know what it is? Simple: it’s gratitude.
How Gratitude Makes You Happier
As experts will tell you, “Gratitude supports happiness.” It promotes “feeling purposeful and connected and cultivating satisfaction and self-worth, as well as simply feeling pleasure.” When you take the time to be grateful, there are both physical and emotional benefits.
Gratitude can:
- Reduce pain
- Decrease stress
- Improve immune function
- Lower blood pressure
- Enhance heart health
- Decrease anxiety and stress
- Reduce depression risk
That’s on top of the positive impact it has on our psychological wellbeing! You’ll find your self-esteem is lifted, your emotions become overall more positive, and you develop a more optimistic view of the world around you. Your body produces a lot of feel-good chemicals, like oxytocin, dopamine, and serotonin that improve your mood, induce feelings of generosity and trust, increase pleasure sensations, and even help you feel connected to those around you.
Practicing gratitude is easy:
- Actively be thankful out loud for one small thing every day
- Notice small acts of kindness from others and show appreciation
- Pay attention to people who are friendly, polite, and kind to you
- Acknowledge the good things in your life
Being more grateful will improve your health on every level.
But to highlight a different—and perhaps more important—form of gratitude.
Self-gratitude, or gratitude toward yourself.
It’s often easy to be grateful for someone else who does nice things for you, or some external factor that makes you happy. But it’s much more difficult to praise and be grateful for ourselves.
Most of us feel like we’re being narcissistic or vain when we practice self-gratitude. Or we have a hard time seeing the truth about just how much we’re accomplishing or how much progress we’ve made.
Which, in many ways, is why it’s even more important to practice self-gratitude!
You don’t have to say it out loud or share it with anyone else. But you do need to take some time every day to sit, pay attention to the things you do and bring into your life, and acknowledge it—even in just a thought. Acknowledging how far you have reached and what a wonderful person you are can actually re-program your mind to make you feel happier.
To be continued…
Ref: https://zonia.com/the-powerful-technique-guaranteed-to-make-you-happier
