Gratitude can reduce stress and lift your mood but are you doing it right?

In today’s society, stress can come from multiple directions (work overload, home demands, being in a transitional phase, losing your job, living in uncertain times, the list goes on). The body’s stress response is the body's reaction to feeling under pressure. It's was originally designed to keep you alive under threat, so technically it is a survival response. It is very common, can be motivating and help us achieve things in our daily life, and can help us meet the demands of home, work, family and personal commitments.

But too much stress is very damaging…..your stress response is only meant to be activated for short periods. After that, it can be exceptionally damaging. It can make us anxious, irritable, trigger bouts of low mood, affect our physical health, self-esteem, relationships and productivity.

Luckily researchers have discovered that an effective way to reduce stress and low mood is to practice cultivating gratitude.

One way is to write down the things you are grateful for on a regular basis, known as a gratitude list. Gratitude is a positive emotion in itself and experiencing it can generate even more positive emotions like joy, connectedness, a sense of security, tranquillity and many more (Emmons and McCullogh, 2002, McCullogh et.al. 2004 ; Komase et.al. 2021). Gratitude lists have been shown to decrease stress, improve resilience and counteract low mood. In addition, taking the time to express our gratitude on paper helps us to slow down and focus on the present so it also takes us from a place of doing (top down control / heavily cognitive) to a place of being and feeling (presence in and awareness of your body).

✍🏻 The trick to making it work: The key thing to remember when writing down the things you are grateful for is to feel in to the emotions that are attached to them.

The exercise won’t work if you treat it in the same way as say writing a shopping list. What you really need to do is remember and savour the moment, person or situation that you grateful for. Feel fully into the wonderful positive feelings you have about them and hold the vibration of gratitude in your heart for as long as possible. The positive emotions that you feel create the shift not the listing and simply cognitively knowing they exist.

So power up by embracing, feeling fully, and savouring the gratitude, joy and sense of connectedness and watch those stress levels come down! 💚