Gratitude for Brain Fitness

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Gratitude for Brain Fitness

This week is Thanksgiving in the U.S. It is not just a time of year for stuffing our faces full of as much food as our stomachs can possibly tolerate before passing out in front of the football game on TV. Thanksgiving is really a time when we can reflect on what we have and give thanks.

Gratitude is actually a central component of all major religions and has been part of the human culture for millennia. However, most of us probably don’t practice the act of gratitude frequently enough. As Sheryl Crow says in her song, Soak up the Sun, “It’s not having what you want, It’s wanting what you’ve got”. Hopefully, we can all find some time this week to really consider what we have and be thankful for that.

Related to this, I was sitting in a class a few weeks ago on complementary and alternative medicine. We were talking about pain management and the speaker made a statement that will stick with me for a long time. She said “Suffering is wanting things to be different than they are”. I think she was right. It’s only when you are wanting things to somehow be different that you feel in the dumps.

It seems that this applies to physical and psychological pain. It seems then, that one way to alleviate suffering is to be grateful. When you focus on how good things are in certain areas of your life, it’s difficult to feel bad about other areas.

Everyone has certain problems that they would like to have resolved. But at the same time, everyone has certain blessings that they can count.

In the field of psychology, there’s a theory about how gratitude can actually help you build your arsenal of brain resources. This argument was laid out nicely by Barbara Frederickson in the book, The Psychology of Gratitude. Without going into the whole volume, she essentially says that positive emotions, including gratitude, can build and expand your mental resources to create a reserve that you can draw from when needed.

Negative emotions have easily measured intentions. Fear leads to the urge to escape, anger leads to the urge to attack, disgust leads to the urge to expel, etc. Positive emotions are a less easily measured. They don’t arise from survival situations, but in situations when things are going well, so the immediacy of reactions is not as cleanly linked to positive emotions.

Still, Dr. Fredrickson points out that gratitude, and other positive emotions, over time, lead to increased creativity, knowledge, resiliency, social integration and health. Plus, when you focus on positive emotions, it’s nearly impossible to experience negative emotions at the same time. If you make this a regular practice eventually your ‘default’ mood gets better and better - and this is one of the cruxes of brain fitness that we have focused on in the past.

So go ahead and indulge yourself this holiday season. But take some time to stop, reflect, and be thankful for what you have. It’s good for your brain.

Article Source: http://articlenexus.com

Dr. Simon Evans is a brain scientist at the University of Michigan interested in lifestyle approaches to brain health and fitness. He is the author of BrainFit for Life: A User's Guide to Life-Long Brain Health and Fitness. Visit his website at www.brainfitforlife.com

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