The Practice of Gratitude

Gratitude - Great for your spiritual, mental, and physical well-being.

Too often, we focus on the negatives while showing little appreciation for the beauty that's all around us. It's what happens when you have a bad breakup, and all you can remember is how badly the person hurt you. We tend to forget all the amazing things that the relationship brought us. Cherish the good memories and hold them dear even if the unpleasant ones attempt to consume you. 

Show gratitude and appreciation for the little gifts in life. If you can adopt a gratitude mindset, you are on your way to achieving the highest level of self-care.

What does gratitude mean?

Gratitude is a warm feeling of thankfulness towards the world, or towards specific individuals. The person who feels gratitude is thankful for what they have, and ….does not constantly seek more.

An example of gratitude is how someone would feel if their friend did something exceptionally nice for them. The state of being grateful. ... A feeling of thankful appreciation for favours or benefits received; thankfulness.

Unfortunately, for many of us, gratitude is tied up with more complex feelings, perhaps as a result of having to write thank-you letters as a child, or to say thank you for things we didn’t want. This makes it harder to establish when gratitude should be felt or expressed, and also often makes us feel awkward rather than grateful.

The Right Time for Gratitude - When is it right to feel and to express gratitude?

This is a question, which has applications every single day and can be extremely difficult to resolve, especially if there is a clash between how you actually feel, and how you think you should feel, or how politeness dictates you should behave.

Feeling and expressing gratitude is graceful, or virtuous. In other words, gratitude shows that you do not take things for granted.

Although we are constantly urged by advertisers that ‘You deserve it’, actually being around people who are always saying that they deserve more is quite tiring. Self-esteem and feeling good about yourself is one thing but expressing gratitude for the good things that you have is a sign that you don’t expect the world to provide for you.

But you do have to sound like you mean it and, for most of us, that means that you actually have to mean it. Most people find it quite easy to detect hypocrisy and who likes that???.

The crucial aspect may be to consider what you are grateful for and why. For example, you may not like a gift from a family member at Christmas, but you are genuinely grateful that they have bothered to buy it, wrap it and give it to you. You can thank them warmly for the trouble they have taken, and both sound and be genuine. Try to thank them for the gift itself, and you may well find yourself sounding and feeling awkward and ‘fake’.

The Benefits of Gratitude

Someone who is grateful is the polar opposite of the person who feels that they are owed something by the world. They have the gift of enjoying and valuing what they have, which makes them rewarding friends and companions.

Gratitude also has more practical benefits.

Research shows that people who are grateful tend to show higher levels of well-being and happiness (in other words, they feel better about themselves and their lives), and improved mental health. They may even sleep better!

Expressing gratitude to those who have given us something, whether that is out of the goodness of their hearts or in the line of duty, also helps them to feel good, and improves their self-esteem.

Gratitude has been shown to improve social ties and promotes more social behaviour. It makes other people want to show gratitude too, a phenomenon known as ‘upstream reciprocity’. Grateful people tend to want to repay favours, and not just to the person who did them the favour but to other people as well….like paying it forward.

So feeling and expressing gratitude helps you and those around you to feel good, and that tends to result in the good feelings being spread even further.

Before I finish this week with a quote from my dear friend Gary Hardy in the UK, I also want you to consider something else that will make a huge difference in your life and that all important journey of self-care:

Start a Gratitude journal. Write down 3 to 5 things (more if you want to) that you are grateful for every single day, then read it often, especially when you feel down, or a little under the weather…It will do wonders for you.

“Tonight, when you get to bed, remind yourself of how important you are. Not only to society, but to your family, friends, and most of all to yourself” - A thank you for this quote to my amazing friend, Gary Hardy.  

Gratitude in it’s deepest form…is gratitude of self!

Here is the link to my self- care video of this article on Gratitude: https://youtu.be/rsivnJRWnxA

Jan Robberts