“Drop and give me 50 push-ups and 25 thank-you’s!”
If you’re looking for a new exercise routine, try gratitude.
Melinda Beck offers a wonderful peek at research demonstrating the health benefits of expressing appreciation and gratitude in the Wall Street Journal. (Click here for the full article.)
From her article, “Philosophers as far back as the ancient Greeks and Romans cited gratitude as an indispensable human virtue, but social scientists are just beginning to study how it develops and the effects it can have.”
She even suggests seven ideas for incorporating thanks into your lifestyle if regular gratitude feels like a stretch.
In our culture we experience much moral reasoning as a negative, coercive force to be resisted. To hear that we “should” be grateful or we “ought to” count our blessings like the imposition of someone else’s values upon our own instead of the wise experience of those who have gone before.
So we ignore the ancients whenever their advice annoys us. Until, that is, science corroborates their “knowledge.”
And so it is now with gratitude. Thankfully (pun unavoidably appropriate) science demonstrates specific and concrete health benefits to being thankful.
Read the full article. Begin your gratitude work-out today.
