For A Longer Happier Life

Wisdom Nugget: "I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought, and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder."
                                                                                                   - Gilbert K. Chesterton

Ageless Bloom
Credit: Photo Pin

Gratitude can be beneficial and enriching to life.  In order to bloom like the ageless rose (above), ensure that your heart is constantly filled with gratitude.
Like Meister Eckhart once said, "If the only prayer you said in your whole life was, "thank you," that would suffice."

A large body of recent work has suggested that people who are more grateful have higher levels of subjective well-being. Grateful people are happier, less depressed, less stressed, and more satisfied with their lives and social relationships.

Grateful people also have higher levels of control of their environments, personal growth, purpose in life, and self acceptance.

Grateful people have more positive ways of coping with the difficulties they experience in life, being more likely to seek support from other people, reinterpret and grow from the experience, and spend more time planning how to deal with the problem.

Grateful people also have less negative coping strategies, being less likely to try to avoid the problem, deny there is a problem, blame themselves, or cope through substance use.

Grateful people sleep better, and this seems to be because they think less negative and more positive thoughts just before going to sleep.

Gratitude has been said to have one of the strongest links with mental health of any character trait.

Numerous studies suggest that grateful people are more likely to have higher levels of happiness and lower levels of stress and depression. Hear this, "Saying thank you is more than good manners.  It is good spirituality." - Alfred Painter

In one study concerning gratitude, participants were randomly assigned to one of six therapeutic intervention conditions designed to improve the participant's overall quality of life (Seligman et. all., 2005).[25] Out of these conditions, it was found that the biggest short-term effects came from a "gratitude visit" where participants wrote and delivered a letter of gratitude to someone in their life. This condition showed a rise in happiness scores by 10 percent and a significant fall in depression scores, results which lasted up to one month after the visit. Out of the six conditions, the longest lasting effects were caused by the act of writing "gratitude journals" where participants were asked to write down three things they were grateful for every day. These participants' happiness scores also increased and continued to increase each time they were tested periodically after the experiment.

In fact, the greatest benefits were usually found to occur around six months after treatment began. This exercise was so successful that although participants were only asked to continue the journal for a week, many participants continued to keep the journal long after the study was over.

Listen to this quote by Alfred Painter "Saying thank you is more than good manners.  It is good spirituality." As clearly pointed out by the quote above, we should also realize that (Acoordin to G. Stern), "Silent gratitude isn't much use to anyone." We shouldn't allow showing gratitude to only be because we expect to receive more acts of kindness from that person who showed us kindness, or because we want that person to realize we appreciate their benevolence towards us, it also should also be because we want to live more fulfilling and healthier lives.

Beloved, Robert Brault puts it thus, "There is no such thing as gratitude unexpressed. If it is unexpressed, it is plain, old-fashioned ingratitude." Learn to be grateful today and always.
Have a fantastic day ahead!