The team at Game Changer Products loves Thanksgiving. A big meal, plenty of drinks, and football on television is our recipe for a great day. Plus, there are no gifts to buy or lights to string! It’s easy, fun, and delicious. What’s not to like? Like all national holidays, there is a reason for the celebration. For Thanksgiving, the reason to celebrate is gratitude. So no matter how you celebrate Thanksgiving, whether it’s with a turkey dinner or a couple of pizzas, take a little time to think about the many things for which you are grateful. If you struggle with this, here is a little help to get you started. After all, it’s Thanksgiving, be grateful!
What’s in it for You
Let’s be honest, before we put forth the effort to do anything, we want to know the expected payoff. As it turns out, practicing gratitude has a treasure trove of benefits. These include:
- Emotional
- Social
- Personality
- Career
- Health
These benefits are not just feel-good sentiments. They are documented by professional researchers and PhDs and published in respected journals and websites. The site positivepsychology.com lists 28 benefits of gratitude. Here are just a sample.
Increases Your Self-Esteem
Gratitude can help you feel better about your circumstances, which can lead to feeling better about yourself. Self-esteem increases your confidence, and the more confidence you have, the more successful you will be. This goes for every aspect of your life. This is so important to us at Game Changer Products that we wrote a blog about it earlier this year, What a Man Can Do to Be More Attractive.
Improves Your Relationships
Showing gratitude to the important people in your life makes them happy, makes you happy, and makes relationships better overall. And having close relationships is the single greatest predictor of long term happiness.
Makes You More Optimistic
The more we focus on what we are grateful for, the more we find to be grateful for! It’s a positive cycle that constantly feeds us happy thoughts and creates positive people who attract other positive people. Everyone is drawn to happy, positive people who fill our lives with joy.
Helps You to be Happier at Work
Gratitude can help people who are effective in their job to be happier. Having strong job skills and positive emotions combine to create a flow that creates opportunities for advancement.
Improves Your Health
In a 2016 study, a two-week gratitude intervention increased sleep quality and lowered blood pressure in participants. Sleep is vitally important to good health and mental wellbeing. Gratitude journaling before bedtime can prevent negative thoughts and worry from stealing your snooze-time.
The Most Effective Ways to Practice Gratitude
Practicing gratitude is easy. According to lifehack.org, it’s more about being mindful and acknowledging little positive things that happen for you each day. The most popular thing to do is write them down in a journal every day. It doesn’t matter if you journal in the morning when you get up or in the evening before you go to bed. The point is to write down three or more things you are grateful for today.
The key is not to repeat them. So if write that you are grateful to live in a nice house, you cannot use that again another day. Pretty soon, you’ll run out of the big stuff like good health, a loving partner, respectful children, etc. That forces you to find small, positive things that made you happy. For instance, a barista may have given you a nice smile before handing over your latte. Perhaps a neighbor pulled up your empty garbage cans, or the sunshine felt warm on your face when you went for a walk. If you can’t find something positive happening to you, do something for someone else. Their gratitude will make you happy, and the feeling of gratitude will come back to you.
Practicing gratitude forces you to live in the moment, to acknowledge the positive things that happen as we go about our daily lives, and to appreciate the ways they make life better. The more you practice gratitude, the more often you notice these positive little things, and life gets better and better.
Something to be Grateful For. . .
Gratitude is directly related to happiness. Although the Thanksgiving holiday reminds us to be grateful, the best time to start practicing gratitude is now. The Game Changer Team is grateful for many things, including our wonderful customers and our role in making them happy. We have introduced several new products recently to enhance your performance and keep you in the game longer. Now that’s something to be grateful for! Click on this link to see them all in one place. If you need to stock up for the holidays, just fill a cart and select from discreet free same-day and priority shipping options. Life demands performance, practicing gratitude, and Game Changer Products LLC deliver it. Happy Thanksgiving. Be Grateful.