How Gratitude Rewires Your Brain for Happiness

Welcome back to the Daily Mastermind. My name is George Wright III with your daily dose of inspiration, motivation, and education. I hope you're off to a great start to your week. I want to start today with the quote of the day from the Daily Mastermind mobile app. And the quote of the day is by Les Brown, and it's, Keep watering your dreams. Keep watering your dreams. And today I want to talk to you a little bit about gratitude and happiness. Because I'm sure you've probably heard and seen lately that there's a huge rise in the number of people that are depressed or anxiety, stress, these kinds of things in the world. And this is obviously due in part to the pandemic, but I think it's also magnifying the stress and anxiety that people have been feeling for quite some time now. the rise in use of social media and the frequency that people are on their phones, you know, and the fact that we live in a comparison type world, it makes it really difficult for people to find happiness and gratitude regardless of their situation that they have. And I know that's a struggle for most people right now just to, you know, find positive reasons to push forward and see kind of the light at the end of the tunnel of a lot of things happening in their life. But that's why it's so important right now to train your mind for gratitude. You know, we have to create a daily practice of gratitude if we're going to combat the daily battle in our minds and the growing negativity in the world. And I truly believe that we can train ourselves. We can train our minds and our brains to be more grateful and it'll bring more happiness into our life. I've learned, I've been studying a lot of things lately on the brain and neuroplasticity and, you know, the neuropathways that we engage when we practice gratitude. And I've learned that gratitude is a practice and a strategy that you can actually use for happiness in your life, but also to deal with emotions and things that you might be working with or dealing with in your life. And so, first thing I want to do is I want to run through a list of just all of the different things that gratitude can do. And I want to do this to not only make you more aware, but help to remind you of some of the benefits of gratitude in your life. And there five key areas that I want to kind of go through that gratitude help you with Emotionally socially personality career and even with your health And we start with emotional Gratitude definitely helps you to become happier. It helps you with your psychological well-being overall. It'll help you to create more positive emotions, and it'll help with your self-esteem, and most certainly it helps to reduce depression and anxiety. And we're talking about scientific proof, and I'll kind of talk with you about that in a second here. But these are all areas that can be affected in your emotional health. Socially, gratitude will definitely help you to widen your social network. It'll help you in your personal and romantic relationships. It's going to help improve the strength of your friendships. and it will help to increase your social support and even better your family relationships and teaching if you have kids or family members. So there's a lot of social benefits that gratitude can bring for you. On a personal level, I believe that gratitude will help you to increase your optimism and it'll maybe even help you to be more giving and less materialistic. It'll also help you with your spirituality and your sense of being. And it will also increase your gratitude. You know, the more you're grateful for, the more gratitude you're going to feel. And those are some great benefits for you personally. On a career level, make no mistake, you know, gratitude will help you to become a much more effective leader. It'll reduce your ability or your feelings of impatience. It'll help give you more meaning at your work. And having a culture of gratitude will help to reduce turnover overall. But most importantly for many of you, gratitude can help to reduce your stress and just give you a better mental outlook on the tasks and the challenges and things that you have every day. And then the final area of benefits that I think are so important is that gratitude can literally physically help you with your health. It'll help through reduced depression. It'll lower your blood pressure. It's proven to help improve sleep quality and it'll increase your frequency and desire to exercise. So your overall health will definitely benefit from a gratitude practice. Now I not a scientist but I been intrigued by a ton of science that been coming out lately regarding the practice of gratitude And you know when we express gratitude and receive gratitude you know, the science has shown that our brain releases more dopamine and serotonin. And these are the two, you know, critical neurotransmitters responsible for our overall emotions and our basic feeling of feeling good. And I believe that we can train our brains to actually experience more gratitude. This whole concept of neuroplasticity is the process by which our brains are being trained to express and receive certain emotional responses. We talk about neurons that fire together, wire together. And it's not, I guess one way to put it is it's not happiness that's going to bring us gratitude. it's the practice of gratitude that's going to bring us more happiness. It's kind of this cause and effect relationship. You've got to use gratitude to trigger more happiness in your life. And, you know, we won't get into a lot of details here, but in order to help you sort of understand why this happens, the limbic system is part of our brain that's responsible for our overall emotional experiences. and studies have shown that two main areas of our brain that regulate emotions and memory, the hippocampus and the amygdala, they are activated when there are feelings of gratitude and these positive emotions can help to drive our day-to-day life. So people that practice gratitude are basically training their brain to induce more positive emotions and therefore they benefit from all the stuff that I listed earlier. I like how Oprah Winfrey said, and it's a common thing you've got to understand, and that's be thankful for what you have. You'll end up having more. If you concentrate on what you don't have, you'll just never have enough. And this goal to practice more gratitude in order to have more of what you want is something that I believe you've just got to put into your life. So what are some ways that you can practice more gratitude? Well, you can learn to appreciate yourself more through positive self-talk and acknowledging the wins that you have. You can practice or use a gratitude journal, which is a way to structure a daily routine for gratitude to show appreciation. You can have more mindfulness practice or meditation because this helps you to become more aware and present in the present moment That will help you to be more grateful You can volunteer your service in order to show gratitude to others and keep yourself in a state of gratefulness. You can also express gratitude to people around you every day. You know, the family members and friends and colleagues that you're around, expressing your gratitude will bring you more gratitude. You know, also you could spend quality time with people that you care about. spending quality time is a great way to show gratitude. Another thing you can do is to embrace the challenges and problems that you have, whether it's your career or relationship, and view them as opportunities to grow and learn. That's kind of changing the filter you have to more of a grateful for the opportunities rather than avoiding the challenges when it comes to gratitude. Another thing is to reward yourself and others for the small wins that you accomplish every day. Learn to be grateful for all the little things because that's going to help you to train yourself to be happier. And small acts of kindness. When you show appreciation or kindness, it's going to help you to be more in a state of showing your gratitude rather than expecting and needing things yourself. So ultimately, I know that if you'll find more ways to be grateful and practice gratitude, I believe you'll be able to reduce your stress, your anxiety, depression, whatever it is that you may have. And it's going to help to increase your overall happiness in life. So I definitely challenge you to put a gratitude practice into your daily rituals and into your daily life. If you do this consistently, I believe that you'll train your brain and you'll have a more powerful ally in helping you to defeat that inner critic that works against all of us in our day-to-day life. So I hope you'll join me in practicing more gratitude. I hope this is something that will, this message is something that can help you to be more successful in your life with bringing happiness into your life. And, you know, share this message with other people that you feel needed because a lot of times you can't really sense what struggles people may be going through, but having gratitude and happiness as a positive influence for others is a way that you can help them in a real indirect way. and I hope you'll do this more often in your life. So have an amazing day. Let me know how you're doing this week and I will talk with you soon. This is George Wright III and this has been The Daily Mastermind.