New studies and research claim that gratitude can have a huge impact on health. A recent study, titled The Role of Gratitude in People with Asymptomatic Heart Failure, has found that this attitude toward life plays an important role in overall well-being.
The study showed that being grateful contributes to improving the health of patients suffering from heart disease. The power of gratitude was associated with an improvement in sleep quality, reducing fatigue, decreasing depression, and improving mood and self-efficacy in maintaining heart function.
This has broader implications, and the researchers believe it can help anyone. Therefore, you don’t need to be a person with heart disease to show gratitude to others. This must be a positive attitude to improve our quality of life.
Using gratitude to benefit your health
Here are some tips by which you can use gratitude for your health and emotional well-being.
1. Gratitude as a conscious act
Being grateful is an important part of staying healthy in the long run, and not only that, but it will also open doors for you instead of closing and limiting your life.
You can show gratitude in different ways, do your loved ones know how much you value them and how grateful you are for spending time together? Being grateful can take a conscious effort. It is important to begin to notice the thought processes and how we react to different situations.
2. Show gratitude to loved ones
The people who are closest to us need to know how much we appreciate them. You can start as follows:
- Show gratitude for a specific action.
- You can also show it by doing something for them and to make their life easier.
- Spend time with them, showing that you enjoy the company, this will show that you are present and that you pay attention to others.
- Simply give thanks looking in the eyes, and being sincere, because the important thing is that you are aware of everything for which you should be grateful.
- The same applies to work colleagues, neighbors, friends and even some stranger with whom we have found affinity and empathy.
- Sometimes a simple list of all the positive and good things in your life can be the best way to start the path of gratitude.
The importance of being grateful
We cannot pretend that we will be giving thanks all day long, even that would not be entirely sincere nor is it a goal, the ideal is to start with the immediate, and we must also allow ourselves the natural ups and downs of every human being. There are things for which we can be grateful without any effort: A good taste that reaches our palate, a congratulation received, an achievement or a good result, however, there are some other things for which we can also be grateful, although we take more effort.
Many times the difficulties, that which moves us out of our comfort zone, seems to us something unbearable and very heavy, and perhaps it is, but somehow, if we are able to face it, we will be able to take advantage of it, and it is not about being grateful , or be grateful that it has come our way, but we must be grateful for our best decisions that allow us to move forward despite everything, and get out of what affects us.
It is about learning to be grateful, to let go a little and start to stop demanding so much from ourselves, to pretend so many unattainable things, not because we give up, but because many times when we look very far we lose sight of what we have close to us , and perhaps what we have close to today will not last forever, and we must appreciate it today.
It does not have to be a challenge to begin to be grateful, try to see it as a solution that you have at your fingertips, and start using it in the small things, which can be many times, the most difficult to appreciate and the greatest in meaning.