Are you looking to make the mental and emotional load of your day a little bit easier? Well, gratitude is your answer. It’s a powerful, scientifically backed tool that can dramatically improve your quality of mind. That is, it helps you to better cope with stress, makes you happier, and generally improves your overall attitude day by day.
Maintaining happiness can be a struggle, given how stressful life can be. The responsibilities of life wear on you each day, just a little at a time. But you can make that stress much lighter if you choose to, and gratitude is the way to do that. Without it, you’re likely to experience these 9 things.
1. You’ll have worse sleep quality.
Psychology Today details how gratitude helps you sleep better by improving pre-sleep cognition and reducing stress.
Pre-sleep cognition refers to any mental activity, such as thoughts and worries, that happens before you fall asleep. All of the unhealthy thoughts and feelings that you have before lying down will keep you from falling into the deepest stages of sleep. Furthermore, since you aren’t sleeping as deeply, you are more prone to waking up throughout the night.
On the other hand, gratitude plays a direct role in reducing stress and rumination, allowing you to sleep more deeply and with more consistency. In turn, that also helps reduce the stress and anxiety that you experience throughout the day and makes it harder for you to sleep at night.
2. You have a higher risk of depression.
The thoughts and emotions we dwell on can create a self-perpetuating cycle. Life can be hard, challenging, and stressful. The more you dwell on life being hard, challenging, and stressful, the more unhappy you make yourself, which, of course, causes you to dwell more on the negative.
Personally, I’ve lived with Bipolar-Depression for decades now, and I used to hate this line of thinking. You can’t just think your way out of depression! No, you often can’t. However, I know from personal experience and recovery that if you dwell on the negative, it just makes you worse.
Gratitude became a powerful tool for my recovery because it gave me something tangible to look at and be thankful for when my brain was telling me that everything was terrible. Granted, life isn’t all sunshine and rainbows. There were plenty of times when I couldn’t shove back the negative thoughts and feelings, but the overall benefit could not be denied.
3. Your physical health will be worse.
It’s no secret that gratitude is tied to better physical health. Harvard Health informs us that gratitude reduces stress, improves sleep, reduces depression, and provides many other benefits that improve your happiness, physical health, and well-being.
There’s a saying – “healthy mind, healthy body.” The more you improve the quality of your mind, the more you will improve your physical health because you’ll feel more inclined to do the work that will help your body.
People who are miserable tend to neglect their physical health, because what’s the point of taking care of it, anyway? The mental negativity is insidious and will taint the other areas of your life if you let it.
4. You’ll be less emotionally resilient.
Stress and unhappiness erode your emotional resilience, making it harder for you to bounce back when things go wrong. Gratitude, on the other hand, improves your emotional resilience because you’re not trapping yourself in the negativity when things go wrong.
No one wants to go through breakups, tragedies, or the other hard times of life. Unfortunately, we don’t have a choice in the matter. Even if you try to isolate yourself, tragedy is going to visit you, sooner or later. That’s why we have to be able to handle it when it finally arrives.
Gratitude can help us redirect our attention to the positive. Rather than focus on the pain of loss, you can focus on the gratefulness for the experience and what may be in store for your future.
5. You’ll experience more stress and anxiety.
Negativity is bigger and heavier than positivity. It’s also easier to find if you aren’t a positive person who’s used to looking for the good in things. Naturally, the more you focus on negativity, the worse you’re going to feel. You’re going to feel more stressed and anxious the more you focus on the stresses and anxieties in your life.
Gratitude shifts your focus away from these circumstances and situations, improving the overall quality of your thoughts and coping. It takes some work to get used to looking for the bright side of a situation, the silver linings in the stormy clouds of life.
6. You’ll be less satisfied with life.
You’ll never be satisfied and happy in life if you can’t appreciate what you have. The active practice of gratitude helps you appreciate what you have because it causes you to focus on that which is good in your life. That improves your peace of mind and ability to be satisfied.
Grateful people tend to be more proactive and engaged in life, leading to more positive experiences that help them feel whole and fulfilled. They tend to be more generous, productive, and helpful, which leads to more positive life outcomes and experiences.
7. Your relationships will be worse off.
Gratitude is such a powerful tool for fostering deep connections and healthy relationships because it encourages you to be more vocal about your appreciation. So much of what we do in life is unappreciated or overlooked. The smallest bit of recognition and appreciation can mean the world to other people while also fostering positivity in yourself.
A little appreciation and gratitude, something as simple as “thank you,” can go such a long way. People naturally want to be around other people who make them feel good about themselves and appreciated.
8. You’ll experience more envy and jealousy.
It’s natural to want to compare yourself to others to gauge how you’re doing in life, but it’s not healthy. Gratitude steers you away from this unhealthy behavior because it causes you to focus on and appreciate what you have instead. If you’re comparing yourself to others, you’re robbing yourself of joy and happiness because someone will always have it better than you.
It’s a negative mindset to look at what someone else has and either want it or think that they don’t deserve it because you’re jealous of their success. In either case, it shouldn’t matter to you at all because you’re not living their life. They have an entirely different set of circumstances that they are living with, which have little relevance to your happiness.
9. You’ll lack purpose and clarity.
Gratitude can fuel your sense of purpose. Most people will feel inclined to do more when they appreciate the full scope of what they have in their lives. They may be grateful to other people, organizations, or systems that have benefited them in a significant way. In turn, they are more likely to feel compelled to want to contribute similarly.
Clarity can be a struggle because you can’t always be certain that you’re walking the right path. Gratitude points you in the right direction because it directly shows you what was good and beneficial. If you are grateful for a particular thing, then it’s reasonable that the thing is good and you can do that thing, too.
The power of gratitude…
There are few things that can transform your life into a force of good and happiness more than gratitude. It is so powerful when you lean fully into it and embrace it lovingly. Gratitude can shift your whole perspective and attitude while lifting up so many other areas of your life.
It’s not a cure-all. It doesn’t mean that you won’t experience pain and hardship in your life.
What it does do is make it easier to accept and love all of the difficult experiences that will inevitably come your way. The faster you can welcome the bad, knowing that there is inherent goodness with it, the easier it is to accept it and move forward to something better.
