We tend to complain or fall into negative thoughts when things go wrong for us. We may regret our work situation, our relationship, a failure, an illness or any other unwanted experience, but the complaint usually causes us to feel even worse. To avoid this vicious circle we have another more powerful alternative capable of positively transforming our state of mind and our way of seeing things: gratitude.
Various scientific works, promoted by Robert Emmons and Michael McCullogh, from the University of California and the University of Miami, respectively, relate gratitude with well-being. In one of their studies, they showed how people who train gratitude by thinking about what they are grateful for feel much better than those who focus on what bothers them . The reason is related to the effect that these sensations generate in our brain. Thanksgiving stimulates the hypothalamus, which regulates stress, and the ventral tegmental area, which plays an important role in the brain's reward system, producing feelings of pleasure. Therefore, gratitude helps us feel better about ourselves, increases our self-esteem and perception of health..
Gratitude is not a fixed emotion. We can develop it thanks to three simple exercises, as proposed by Juanjo Fraile in The Magic of Gratitude (Alienta, 2020). Fraile is a successful businessman and a happy father of a family who one day was diagnosed with cancer. That news fell on him like a slab and woke up an intense mental rumination that made the process that he was facing even more difficult. Then he discovered that the solution to what he lived was not about turning his head more, but about training gratitude. In this way, he began a process that helped him transform his way of seeing life and coping better with illness. Let's see some of the keys that he collects in his book:
1. Build your personal altar of gratitude. You must keep in mind that what we appreciate is one of the keys to begin to change our state of mind . For this, Fraile suggests that we select people, circumstances or important things that have happened to us in life and for which we are sincerely grateful. He proposes that we then make a collage with all of them, take a photo with the mobile phone and use it as our wallpaper. In this way, every time we turn on the phone we can see the image and appreciate what it represents. The author recommends including us in this selection. Gratitude must begin with oneself.
2. Your magic stone . Fraile suggests that we anchor with what we want to achieve. It would be about making a list of our dreams and getting a small, manageable object that can be carried in your pocket. It can be a stone, an amulet or any object that attracts us. Once we have the list of dreams, we choose one, we do a visualization exercise imagining ourselves once we have achieved it and giving thanks for it. This exercise is performed by pressing the stone. The purpose is to create a mental association between the dream achieved and the object. Fraile suggests that we always carry it with us, that way we can remember the dream we want to achieve several times a day.
3. Your gratitude journal . Fraile's proposal is inspired by Emmons and McCullogh's research. He maintains that, in order to achieve the objective, it is necessary to start working on it from the morning, that way we would start the day on the right foot. Every day we must get up five or ten minutes earlier than usual and remember in a specially selected notebook everything that we are grateful for from what happened the day before. In this way we are building a diary that helps us begin our task of keeping the pleasant part of the lived experiences.
Read more blogging topics and follow us on Flipboard.
