The Healing Power of Gratitude: Change Your Brain

The Healing Power of Gratitude: Change Your Brain



Discover how practicing gratitude can rewire your brain, boost happiness, and reduce anxiety in this Therapy in a Nutshell video.
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In this video I’m going to teach you how gratitude changes the brain, as well as some really simple ways to practice gratitude to be happier and healthier.

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Therapy in a Nutshell, LLC, and the information provided by Emma McAdam are solely intended for informational and entertainment purposes and are not a substitute for advice, diagnosis, or treatment regarding medical or mental health conditions. Although Emma McAdam is a licensed marriage and family therapist, the views expressed on this site or any related content should not be taken for medical or psychiatric advice. Always consult your physician before making any decisions related to your physical or mental health.

About Me:
I’m Emma McAdam. I’m a licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, and I have worked in various settings of change and growth since 2004. My experience includes juvenile corrections, adventure therapy programs, wilderness therapy programs, an eating disorder treatment center, a residential treatment center, and I currently work in an outpatient therapy clinic.

In therapy I use a combination of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, Systems Theory, positive psychology, and a bio-psycho-social approach to treating mental illness and other challenges we all face in life. The ideas from my videos are frequently adapted from multiple sources. Many of them come from Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, especially the work of Steven Hayes, Jason Luoma, and Russ Harris. The sections on stress and the mind-body connection derive from the work of Stephen Porges (the Polyvagal theory), Peter Levine (Somatic Experiencing) Francine Shapiro (EMDR), and Bessel Van Der Kolk. I also rely heavily on the work of the Arbinger institute for my overall understanding of our ability to choose our life's direction.
And deeper than all of that, the Gospel of Jesus Christ orients my personal worldview and sense of security, peace, hope, and love https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/comeuntochrist/believe

If you are in crisis, please contact the National Suicide Prevention Hotline at https://suicidepreventionlifeline.org/ or 1-800-273-TALK (8255) or your local emergency services.
Copyright Therapy in a Nutshell, LLC
—-
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I recently heard an interesting study that 
examined the lives of two groups of people, those who had won the lottery and those who 
had become paralyzed. Now you might assume that the group of people who broke their backs 
would be less happy than the group of instant millionaires, but that's not what the study showed.  
One year after their supposed “life-changing” event, both groups expressed the same levels of happiness.  
We often assume that our happiness or misery is directly connected to the things outside of us, 
our job, the people around us, the things we have or don't have, but that's simply not true. Abundance 
does not come from things, abundance comes from a mindset, feeling rich or poor has very little 
to do with what we actually have, but rather from how we think about what we have. 
Fortunately, we can counteract the scarcity mindset by developing an abundance 
mindset through simple practice, gratitude. Even as I wrote this video I felt a little 
bit of doubt about what I was saying because I live in relative ease compared to the lives 
of many. I have food, I have health, I have a home, I have a family and I can't tell you that I would 
find happiness even in a concentration camp, but I can tell you the story of someone who has. 
Corey ten Boom was a Dutch watchmaker and one of my heroes, she and her family hid Jews during 
the holocaust, but eventually they were caught and her family was arrested and sent to prison and 
this led to the death of her father. In her book, The Hiding Place, she tells the incredible 
story of being transferred to Ravensbrook, this is an infamous death camp in Germany and 
as they walked into their barracks, where they slept on filthy straw crammed onto wooden 
planks with hundreds of other prisoners, they discovered that the place was crawling with 
fleas. Now I personally haven't lived with fleas, so I had to look up what these are like, but 
they're basically like mosquitoes that live in your bed, these are tiny biting insects that 
chewed on them day and night. Cory's sister Betsy in that moment decided to follow a verse from the 
bible which said ‘be grateful in all things' and Betsy encouraged her and Corey to say a prayer 
of gratitude in that moment even for the fleas. Now because of their attitude, their experience 
in the camp was one of service and of doing good, they lifted up others through group meetings every 
evening and later they even learned that the fleas protected them from the guards who wouldn't come 
into their barracks so because of the fleas they were able to hold these group meetings where they 
were lifting each other up and building positivity even in the middle of a concentration camp.  
Now eventually Betsy died while in Ravensbrook and 12 days later Corey was released due to 
a clerical error and after she was released Corey continued to do good, housing and 
protecting the disabled who were afraid of extermination during this time and after the 
war she continued to teach love and forgiveness and she even found a way to forgive two of 
the guards at Ravensbrook, one of whom had been especially cruel to her sister Betsy. So you really 
should read the whole book, it's a pretty incredible story. Now Brené Brown said “Without exception, every 
person I interviewed who described living a joyful life or who described themselves as joyful, 
actively practiced gratitude and attributed their joyfulness to their gratitude practice. And 
both joy and gratitude were described as spiritual practices that were bound to a belief in human 
interconnectedness and a power greater than us.” In my opinion gratitude is one of the most 
powerful ways to shift into a state of peace and connect with your inner joy and the research 
backs this up, the active practice of gratitude is pretty easy to do but it actually changes brain 
chemistry and structure. In this video I'm going to teach you how gratitude changes the brain and 
some really simple ways to practice gratitude to be happier and healthier. Now I'm grateful for 
the sponsor of this video Better Help, they make it So first, let's talk about how gratitude makes you 
happier. Research shows that people who practice gratitude feel happier and more positive, 
more awake and aware and more self-satisfied. gratitude has been shown to help improve mood and 
combat anxiety and depression. Research shows that gratitude releases serotonin and dopamine, these 
are the happiness and reward chemicals in your brain. When we practice gratitude, we're essentially 
strengthening the neural pathways of contentment and happiness and these can build lasting 
characteristics, lasting structures in your brain. Gratitude helps with anxiety by interrupting 
the cycle of constantly scanning for dangers. When we're in fear or scarcity mode our brain 
turns on that fight-flight-freeze response, but when we think of gratitude, research shows that 
the hippocampus and the amygdala are activated, these parts of the brain can aid in emotional 
regulation and they can help turn on that feeling of safety and contentment and calm, 
it's that that feeling of abundance. Basically, gratitude practice is a way to regulate the 
autonomic nervous system. Gratitude can turn on that parasympathetic response and it can reduce 
stress hormones like cortisol. When we regulate the nervous system, that has a big impact on reducing 
the symptoms of depression and anxiety. Thanks to modern imaging, researchers can see other parts of 
the brain that get activated by gratitude and this includes the prefrontal cortex which is partially 
responsible for managing negative emotions like guilt, shame, and violence. Gratitude can help 
you be more emotionally stable and resilient. In general, more grateful people are happier, more 
satisfied with their lives, less materialistic, and less likely to suffer from burnout. Gratitude 
practice is also good for your physical health, it's connected to better immune health, less aches 
and pains, better blood pressure, and heart health. Gratitude's also a painkiller. A 2003 study showed 
that when a patients in pain thought of gratitude, they experienced less pain, and a deeper dig into 
the outcomes found that by regulating the level of dopamine, gratitude fills us with more vitality and 
that helps reduce those feelings of pain. Gratitude can also help you sleep better. Gratitude activates 
the hypothalamus, which helps regulate sleep and the simple practice of gratitude can 
help people get deeper and more restful sleep. Gratitude also improves relationships. 
Grateful people have better communication, more empathy, stronger interpersonal relationships, 
and they're more likeable. Gratitude practice fires up the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, this is 
basically the area of your brain associated with pure altruism. Your brain craves the experience of 
giving and people who practice gratitude tend to feel more and more joy in doing good for others, 
so basically gratitude makes people nicer and makes them feel even better about being nicer and 
studies of couples found that those who expressed more thanks to each other had more trust, more 
loyalty, and longer lasting happy relationships. There is so much good research on the benefits of 
gratitude practice that I could just go on and on, it's one of the exercises that I recommend the 
most and it's one that consistently comes back with good results. So, how do you do it? It's not 
that hard and it doesn't take that much time. One of the easiest ways to practice gratitude is 
to keep a gratitude journal, so you just choose a regular time each day to write down a couple of 
things you're grateful for, you could even use social media as a way to express gratitude. So 
I'm going to encourage you to try this little experiment right now. For seven days, write down or 
post what you're grateful for on social media, and then see how that changes how you feel. There's 
some other ways too, you could write a letter of gratitude to someone, you could tell a co-worker 
or a friend something you appreciate about them, another thing you can do is just sit in a quiet 
place and think about when something went well, bring to mind how that felt. If you practice that 
feeling every day for a week, that helps strengthen that feeling of gratitude and contentment and 
that's going to help you foster an abundant mindset in the long run. Anything you can do to 
reinforce that feeling of gratitude is helpful, so that includes you know writing it down, 
talking about it, reliving it, or meditating on it. A regular practice of gratitude can change 
your brain structure by thickening neural pathways. Hebb's law says that neurons that fire together 
wire together. So that means that the more you practice gratitude, the better you get at it and 
your brain gets better and better at looking for more of what makes you happy and then it gets 
easier to feel grateful and to feel happy. So for example if you consciously notice how beautiful 
the sky is, you'll be more likely to notice the beautiful sky again and feel gratitude 
again, so even though the sky is always there the focus on gratitude is like a signal to your 
brain to notice it. You really can change your brain. Small and simple changes like this add 
up over time to rewire your brain and make you healthier and happier. So choose one way today 
that you're going to start practicing gratitude and tell me about it in the comments. What are 
you going to do to start feeling happier today? I hope you found this video helpful. Thank you 
for watching. Just wanted to let you know that this week, the week of Thanksgiving, we're going 
to be offering some huge black Friday sales on my six online courses. So if you aren't 
signed up for my mailing list, hop on over to therapynutshell.com, fill out that contact 
form and you'll see an email in your inbox this week with a bunch of coupons for big savings on 
my online mental health courses. Again, thank you for watching and take care. River come sit in my 
lap. River, what's something you're grateful for? (River) Candy. (Emma) Anything else you're 
grateful for? (River) Our tents. (Emma) Our tents?(River) Uh-huh. (Emma) I like tents too! Can you tell me anything 
you're grateful for? (Aliya) I'm grateful for my family. (Emma) Oh we're grateful for you. What else? (Aliya) and I'm 
grateful for my friends. (Emma) Yeah, you have some good friends huh. Gracie what are 
you grateful for? tissues, and beads? I'm grateful for you too.

#Healing #Power #Gratitude #Change #Brain

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