Be Grateful and Strengthen Your Mental Health
This week I’m starting a new series to look at happiness, joy, gratitude, and thankfulness. As we’ve all been going through a very difficult year, I’ve found myself dealing with the feeling of sadness, and I simply need to take action. So to help myself and hopefully others too, I want to look at how we can focus on subjects like; thankfulness, joy and gratitude to recalibrate our lives, and live again with joy in our lives.
I’m also going to be looking at how “journaling” can help us to focus on what’s important, and affirm what we are learning, so If you’d like a free digital copy of my “Happiness Journal” that I’ve created to help us, as we go through this subject, you can get it from here.
Gratitude has been shown to have a number of very specific mental health benefits, including reducing toxic emotions such as envy and regret, as well as minimizing depression.
It has also been shown to decrease stress.
When we’re grateful we don’t have much room for toxic emotions. You could say that gratefulness detoxes us from things like jealousy, regret, and anger.
Amy Collette says, “Gratitude is a powerful catalyst for happiness. It’s the spark that lights a fire of joy in your soul.”
Do you want the spark of joy in your soul? Of course, you do.
If you want to get a better hold on your emotions and start living a mentally healthy life, start practising gratitude.
You Enhance Your Personality
There are significant amounts of evidence that gratefulness can significantly change your personality for the better. How?
Here are just some of the ways. When you’re grateful, you…
● Become more optimistic
● Are less focused on material things
● Are more spiritually connected
● Become less self-centred
● Have more self-esteem
● Are more emotionally resilient
● Feel better on a consistent basis
● Deal with fewer toxic emotions
● Are more relaxed
Bottom line: Your level of gratefulness has a direct and major impact on your overall personality.
The more grateful you are, the better person you become. Eileen Caddy put it this way:
Gratitude helps you to grow and expand; gratitude brings joy and laughter into your life and into the lives of all those around you.
Do you want to grow and expand? Do you want to bring joy and laughter into the lives of those around you? Do you want to become the absolute best version of yourself that you can possibly be?
If you want to have a positive, attractive personality, you would be wise to focus on being grateful.
You Become Less Materialistic
It’s not necessarily wrong to want more. But if you’re constantly focused on what you don’t have, you’ll end up feeling unhappy, ungrateful, and discontent.
When you’re ungrateful, you lose much of your ability to enjoy life, and you feel more negative emotions.
On the flip side, when you’re grateful, you feel a deep sense of well-being:
● You’re content with what you have.
● You don’t constantly compare yourself to others.
● You are more inclined to be generous.
To be clear, being grateful doesn’t mean that you don’t work hard or seek to make money. It simply means that you’re extremely thankful for what you have.
And here’s the paradox…
The more grateful you are, the more likely you are to work harder and produce more good things in your life.
Why?
Because you’re already optimistic about what your efforts will produce.
It’s really a win-win situation. You become less preoccupied with material things while also still working hard to achieve your dreams and goals.
James E. Faust says it this way:
As with all commandments, gratitude is a description of a successful mode of living. The thankful heart opens our eyes to a multitude of blessings that continually surround us.
Do you want to have a thankful heart that is constantly seeing all your blessings? Begin practising gratefulness today.
You Become More Spiritual
Being grateful connects you to something bigger and greater than you. When you’re grateful, you’re saying, “Thank you,” to something that is bigger than you. You’re receiving blessings with open hands from the One who gave them to you.
When you’re more spiritual, you raise your overall energy levels so that you receive even more good things as you reap what you sow, which in turn, gives you even more reasons to be grateful.
Spirituality and gratefulness go hand-in-hand. If you want to be more spiritual, start practising gratefulness today.
The Power of Gratitude
Are you starting to see the incredible power of gratitude? It has the power to completely change your life.
Gratitude can:
● Strengthen your health
● Enhance your personality
● Deepen your relationships
● Increase your overall levels of happiness
● And much more
Gratefulness has the potential to be a complete game-changer in your life. Of course, that raises the question: how can you cultivate gratefulness? So I plan to look at this in our next session, so hope you can join me.
Roy Clayton
PS If you’d like a free digital copy of my “Happiness Journal” that I’ve created to help us, as we go through this subject, you can get it from here.
