The Healing Power of Gratitude

How often are you intentionally grateful? Sure, every November at Thanksgiving, here in the USA, we are reminded to be appreciative of things in our life. But how routinely do we prioritize a few moments and genuinely contemplate all the things in life to be thankful for? How often do we cultivate that gratefulness and allow it to grow and blossom into a consistent source of happiness?

Gratitude is powerful and healing on many levels. On the flip side, negativity, especially festering negativity, can be very harmful.

We have all been there…

Something bad has happened. Maybe we had an argument with our spouse, or we messed up a project at work, or we were just diagnosed with a chronic disease.

We just can’t let it go. We keep replaying the scenario in our minds. We focus on it obsessively. Not surprisingly, the longer we do this, the unhappier we become.

That’s exactly what a new study published in the Journal of Neuroscience found. The researchers set out to learn how people’s responses to negative events in their life affected their happiness and well-being over time.

Those who had developed robust methods to diffuse and dissipate negative stimuli, experienced more positive and fewer negative emotions in their daily lives, while those who continued to focus on the negative stimuli had the opposite experience.

This study focused more on how our response to a negative event changes how it impacts us.

The good news is that while we don’t always have control over what happens to us, we do have control over how we respond to what happens.

The lesson from this study is that the sooner we can process and let go of the negative stimulus, the less those experiences will affect our happiness over time.

This is NOT accomplished by suppressing, denying, or avoiding negative emotions. In fact, other research has shown that doing this can prolong, rather than shorten, the period of unhappiness that such experiences can lead to.

It is important to realize that there is a difference between allowing ourselves to fully experience negative emotions and dwelling on them. The former is healthy; the latter is not.

If you have a habit of dwelling or fixating on negative events, here are a few things you can do to shift that pattern:

• Give yourself full permission to experience the emotions that arise from negative stimuli. Sometimes, when we’re mentally fixated on something, it’s because we’re not allowing ourselves to feel what’s underneath those thoughts.
• BE GRATEFUL! Put things in perspective. A gratitude practice can help us to shift at least some of our attention to what’s working and what is positive in our lives.
• Move the energy that is stuck. Intense exercise, dance, music, play, and other forms of movement and creative expression can help us to shift our energy and move through the negativity. Additionally, research shows that just 20 minutes of exercise is more effective than Zoloft and other antidepressants when it comes to busting depression and other negative moods.

I am grateful for all of you! I sincerely hope that you are grateful for this information and can put it to good use!

Dr. Alter