The Reason to Practice Gratitudes
Date: November 11. 2024
Written by: Michael & Marc
Gratitude has been practiced as long as humans have existed. In traditional societies, it’s stressed as important that the young be grateful when they receive something from the elderly. But the impact of gratitude on the self is easily underestimated. Research shows that mindfulness practices contribute to longer, healthier, more meaningful lives, and gratitude practices are among the most effective.
By deliberately writing three things you are grateful for each day while making sure that you don't repeat any gratitudes across a month, you end up with 90 items as a list of why your life is great. You can in principle run these 90 items in a loop since 90 pieces of evidence that your life is amazing might be considered enough. But it’s wonderful to add new ones to maximize the impact of the practice on your life.
Your brain when practicing gratitudes
I recommend implementing a gratitude practice, as a feeling of deep emotional satisfaction is not always something that comes automatically. However, just by doing the practice for many days in a row, you will activate your Reticular Activation System, or RAS.
The RAS is a portion of the brain that sifts through the tens of millions of inputs you receive every second of your life to filter out the top 20 - 40 items that might actually be of interest and then float those into your conscious thoughts. Think of a brand of car you only just learned about. You start seeing that car everywhere. You learn a new vocabulary word, and you start seeing and hearing that word everywhere. Those are examples of your RAS working to take something you focused on recently, and then pointing your attention at those things now that you have, essentially, told your brain you are interested in knowing more about.
By practicing gratitudes daily, you are programming your RAS to look for things to be grateful for. It makes you more likely to believe that there are things to be grateful for, thus many people experience a shift toward optimism.
By the end of that month after you’ve started, you could begin to feel more encouraged, happier, and generally more engaged in life just by doing this simple practice.
Focus on sincerety
But are you actually grateful for the things that you are listing? I recommend that you reflect on what you feel grateful for before writing it down to avoid listing things just for the sake of listing them. Because feeling deep gratitude for holding a purring cat, tasting fresh berries, or feeling the breeze as you walk through the forest, reliving those uplifting moments…that's the most critical part of the exercise.
If instead of attempting to dwell in the feelings you simply list gratitudes for the sake of listing them and claiming to be a grateful person, you'll find that it may not sink in and transform your life. On the other hand, really investing in the practice as a strategy for feeling grateful can lead to a much happier life, so that you can put your best foot forward in life and bring kindness with you wherever you go.
By truly engaging in the practice of reliving and recording your gratitudes, it recharges your emotional and mental state. This kindness to yourself is worth doing in and of itself. The benefit to everyone around you, however is very real and can improve your workplace and your community. By taking care of yourself, you are better able to draw on your superpower of kindness and help others.
When you fully engage in a gratitude practice as described above, you will build the future we will all want to live in, starting from the inside out!