Gratitude for better mental health:
This is the transcript page to my hypnotherapy video about how gratitude can improve your mental health. Gratitude has been linked to many positive mental health benefits.
People who practice gratitude tend to be more optimistic, happier and more positive. It also leads to better self-esteem and reduced anxiety and depression symptoms. In this video I cover three research supported ways to practice gratitude so you can easily start reaping all of these mental health benefits.
Gratitude For Better Mental Health:
Hi, Dan here and, in my last video, I talked about gratitude and some of the many benefits of being grateful, appreciating, noticing all the good things, the positive things in life. In this video I’m going to talk about a few ways that you can achieve that because being grateful, appreciating stuff other people do, the little acts people do, the things we can appreciate and notice from other people, but also it’s much wider than that in terms of recognising all the good stuff in our world, in our lives, the positive things and noticing and appreciating those things.
Because there’s a whole wealth of research out there that shows that people who express gratitude, who notice these things, who appreciate these things, and who are grateful in their lives tend to feel happier, more optimistic, there’s greater well-being, there are many mental health benefits from gratitude, greater life satisfaction is being shown, and a whole host of things.
Increasing self-esteem comes from expressing gratitude and implementing these kind of practices and it also means that people who express gratitude are much less likely to experience depression and anxiety symptoms. Because if you think about it, gratitude is almost turning some of this stuff on its head and noticing what is going right, and it also tends to mean that, when the self-esteem stuff comes in, we tend to be nicer to ourselves and to recognise our qualities and what we can achieve and to encourage ourselves and support ourselves, rather than criticising ourselves.
So there really is a whole wealth of reasons to implement gratitude practices into your life and the good news is that it doesn’t really have to take more than a few minutes a day to achieve those results.
Generally in research there are three main ways that this can be achieved. The first is gratitude lists and that’s where you take time to list all the things, the people, the places, the events, other aspects of life that you appreciate, that are positive in your life, the good stuff and expressing gratitude for those things. And it really can be as simple as, you don’t have to write a whole list every single time, it can be as simple as taking a few minutes, even a couple of minutes each night, to recognise three things that you’re grateful for in your life, perhaps from that day or the past few days, or again even on a more global level. And research has shown it improves where people have severe body dissatisfaction, it’s helped and benefited those people, people with excessive worry and generalised anxiety disorder, again have benefited from just those few minutes of noticing those things for which they’re grateful. And in other areas of life leads to more satisfaction, more self-esteem, so really you can get all those benefits, being more happy and more optimistic, more positive, less anxiety symptoms, less depression symptoms, better self-esteem, feeling better in yourself, just from a couple of minutes each night noticing three things that you’re grateful for in your life. Pretty awesome stuff.
The second method is more behavioural stuff. Often in research they get you to write a letter to someone for some act that they’re grateful for and where they haven’t expressed that kind of gratitude yet. But I think you can take behavioural stuff a lot wider. Just those little interactions every day, someone holds a door, someone gives way to you, all those moments where we can just smile and nod and appreciate and say thank-you. And I think we can get a lot of those benefits from just doing that stuff which we probably should be doing anyway.
The third way is grateful contemplation where you spend maybe five minutes, even a couple of times a week in the research has led to all these benefits. You spend maybe five minutes thinking of the people, the places, the things, just thinking about noticing all the things that you’re grateful for, all the positive things, all the good stuff, all the people, the items, the things, the events, and just spending a few minutes contemplating, thinking and noticing and appreciating those things, and then a lot of the research then they will have a journal and write down on one of those specific things, spending some time thinking about that and writing about that, and things they’re grateful with that thing. So really just thinking about those things, making a few notes about those things. Again even doing that a couple of times a week, ten minutes twice a week, twenty minutes a week to benefit from all these positive things. And to be honest the research also shows it doesn’t actually matter too much what it is you contemplate in that grateful contemplation, whether it’s people, or things, or events, are probably less important than actually just contemplating those things and being grateful, and appreciating, and noticing all those positive aspects.
So there you have it, three ways that you can benefit, your mental health can benefit, tend to then improve. Self-esteem, optimism, happiness, positivity tend to either reduce or protect against anxiety depression symptoms and increase self-esteem so you feel better in yourself. So, all in all, pretty good stuff, it’s pretty powerful stuff, and it can be implemented really easily, really simply, to benefit from those things. You can list those things, you can have those kind of behaviours, and you can contemplate those things. Simple stuff with massive results so I would really encourage you to practise these things and see how you get on with them and enjoy the results of doing those things, and you take care now.
Dan Regan
06 March 2019
Hypnotherapy in Ely & Newmarket
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