Rewire Your Brain with Gratitude and Hope

Your mind believes whatever you tell yourself. Your thought patterns form habits and they become ingrained within you. These mental frameworks are either helping you to flourish or causing you to suffer. Rumination about the past and worrying about the future cause suffering while nostalgia about the past and hope for the future lead to wellbeing. 

Transforming Your Thought Patterns

People have the power to reshape how they think. A simple yet effective strategy is to practice gratitude. Gratitude is acknowledging the good things in life and realizing that this goodness is derived from outside of oneself (Emmons & McCullough, 2003). Research confirms that consistent engagement in gratitude can literally rewire one’s brain (Emmons & McCullough, 2003). This shifts one’s perspective toward positivity, resulting in improved mood, enhanced outlook, and increased hope. 

Gratitude and hope are intertwined, each reinforcing one another. Gratitude enables individuals to focus on the positive aspects of life that have already occurred, and hope empowers individuals to have positive anticipation of the future–equipped with a plan and the motivation to meet their goals. Gratitude forces an individual to focus on what they have rather than what they don’t have. It turns what a person has and multiplies it. Simultaneously, hope propels people forward into the future with the belief that better days lie ahead, challenges can be overcome, and dreams can be realized with a plan of action and determination. Hope and gratitude collaborate to cultivate a mindset of abundance of blessings and opportunities. By embracing gratitude for the past and hope for the future, one can build a flourishing life. 

Now Make it Personal

Gratitude can be expressed in many ways. Here are some strategies you can use to practice gratitude today:

1. Show appreciation to others: Verbalize gratitude to others with thank you notes, compliments, and acts of kindness.
2. Keep a gratitude journal: Spend a few minutes each day to jot down things you are thankful for and reflect on positive experiences and people that bring you joy. 
3. Begin each day with gratitude: Upon waking or on the commute to work, dedicate five minutes to acknowledge blessings and your appreciation for the positive aspects of life.

References

Emmons, R. A., & McCullough, M. E. (2003). Counting blessings versus burdens: An experimental investigation of gratitude and subjective well-being in daily life. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 84(2), 377–389. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.84.2.377

Photo by Andrea Piacquadio