Expressing gratitude nourishes the mind and body, making it a form of self-care. Additionally, the benefits of feeling grateful more often can include lowering stress, improving sleep, help you make healthier choices, boost immunity and more. If you build in a gratitude outlook in your daily lens towards others, your environment, your food, for example, you reap rewards like satisfaction, contentment, joyfulness, and more gratitude. How often do you spend time feeling grateful? The skill, if developed as a habit, is a gamechanger. First, let’s examine how gratitude and self-care intertwine.
Self-care is not selfish at all. Self-care is an attempt to build up quality around you in terms of the food you put in the body, the quality of sleep you get, the movement you push your body to make, etc. Quality inputs into living reveal quality outputs in life such as higher achievement, more financial income with continued effort, greater critical thinking and less biasness, reaching for rewarding experiences and others. With quality output, life feels very valuable and mental resilience is strengthened. A gratitude lens helps build roots of self-care discipline and actions laying the foundation to a life highly well spent.
A gratitude lens does not limit our outlook just to appreciation of our immediate environment. The lens can mend past hurts through strengthening the emotional regulatory parts to the brain. When we feel capable emotionally, mentally and spiritually, healing becomes secondary to both attitude and actions that we choose. Healing can mean higher quality of living letting go of difficult emotions such as grief, trauma, sadness, anger, and frustration. With gratitude to help heal, we become more alive in the present and recall life as the gift one hopes for.
Together, gratitude and self-care can shape an individual’s trajectory toward peace, inspiration, and more grateful living. The benefit of both ingredients are that they compliment one another greatly. At the same time, there is no downside when practiced mindfully. How many people do you know that have lived gratefully and practice purposeful self-care? Wouldn’t you consider yourself lucky to be among those who live this by these philosophies? Prayer and reflection included, reaching out to a higher power often helps compliment such a lifestyle strengthening feelings of inner peace and harmony. Self-care and gratitude however are concepts that do not impose boundaries or differences thereby making the concepts unifiers as well.
Implementing self-care and gratitude-rooted strategies via wellbeing packages can mean a great deal for individuals in need of a lens and toolkit. When introduced over time, the benefits could extend to establishing preventative care from a public health standpoint. Strengthening and building lives to enjoy living from the inside out can help more people live gratefully and satisfactorily. In turn, joy develops bringing harmony and contentment to a good swathe of society.
Writer Najma Khorrami has written for Psychology Today, Entrepreneur Magazine, and HuffPost among other publications. She is the Founder of Gratitude Circle®, an award-winning positive lifestyle business with a free gratitude messaging board and weekly gratitude motivational updates.