Turkish Proverb:
For the grateful, the gnats make music;
for the ungrateful harps and flutes make only noise.
Alex Kolb, UCLA neuroscience researcher, is hip on happiness. According to Dr. Travis Bradberry’s blog, 5 Things That Will Make You Much Happier, Kolb’s research highlights just how amazing the brain is. He says the good news is that you don’t actually have to feel spontaneous gratitude in order to produce chemical changes in your brain; you just have to force yourself to think about something in your life that you appreciate.
Everything is interconnected. Gratitude improves sleep. Sleep reduces pain. Reduced pain improves your mood. Improved mood reduces anxiety, which improves focus and planning. Focus and planning help with decision-making. Decision-making further reduces anxiety and improves enjoyment. Enjoyment gives you more to be grateful for, which keeps that loop of the upward spiral going. Enjoyment makes it more likely you’ll exercise and be social, which, in turn, makes you happier.
Bradberry says gratitude creates happiness. Of course, he is not the first to say that. In Thank You Power, Deborah Norville also says gratitude is the key. Someday when you have nothing better to do than pursue happiness, Google “book +happiness” to see how many title show up. Google will offer you millions of options.
Gratitude is the result of our focus being on how much we’ve been given. We do not need to wait until things are perfect in order to be grateful; in fact, it may be just the opposite. It could be that the act of bring grateful, in itself, makes us more receptive to life’s blessings.
Gratitude is not a wish or a hope for the future, it is the result of our focus being in the NOW. Gratitude is not an insurance policy—it is a feeling of fullness, a recognition of the heart of what we are receiving in this moment.
“Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos to order, confusion to clarity, a house into a home, a stranger into a friend. Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today, and creates a vision for tomorrow.” – Melody Beatty
This week, let gratitude sweep you off your feet and into the flow of even greater good. Just as grief is the natural response to loss and death, gratitude it the natural response to love and life. There is a paradoxical aspect to gratitude: the more grateful we are, the more reasons we have to be grateful.
Tips from 5 April 2010 to 6 August 2012 are here: Archived Tips
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Rev. Debra Basham
Voice or text: (269) 921-2217 Email: debra@scs-matters.com http://DebraBasham.com http://ImagineHealing.info http://SurgicalSupport.info Small Changes … Infinite Results™
“If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other.” ~ Mother Teresa |