Thankful

 Welcome back Natural Health Family. The weather is starting to get cooler as we are heading more into the holiday season. Thanksgiving is coming up soon and we know that we will be getting to celebrate our time with good food and good family. Many times we tend to get busy with all of life’s situations. However, thanksgiving can be a time for us to slow down, reflect, and acknowledge what we can truly be grateful for. A time to celebrate the time we have with others and share our gratitude toward what we have in our lives. Let’s reflect on how gratitude can be a valuable asset to our health and well being. 

When you think of gratitude, what do you think of? Do you think of times when you receive a gift from someone during the holidays such as presents during Christmas? Do you think of times when you are about to wipe out or you fall and realize the fall could have been much worse. Perhaps when a relative gets into an accident that could have been fatal but only gets some minor cuts and bruises. These situations don’t happen too often so we don’t think about gratitude as much if we only base it on those happenings. However, have you thought about all the many things that you have that others do not. Imagine the many people that as of now don’t have necessary food, water, and shelter that we may take for granted. So if we can be grateful for many of the things in life, what about our bodies, what they do, and how can gratitude help. 

When you picture your body you probably imagine what you look like in a mirror or what you are able to see now. Now imagine what your body does for you every second of every minute of every hour of every day. Your body and all the cells of it perform a vast amount of processes and activities. It is constantly reading the environment through your five senses (sight, smell, taste, hearing, touch) providing you a way to navigate the world around you. Your body digests and assimilates all of the food you eat on a daily basis. Your body is keeping an optimal fluid balance keeping your blood at a consistency that helps you function it’s best. Your body is replacing older cells with new healthy cells at a million cells per second. The human body is self healing and self regulating all of the time. Gratitude has been shown to help your body function more optimally so that it can run all the processes it does in a more optimal way. Gratitude helps to balance the brain which allows the nervous system to activate glands which further allows a cascade of hormones to be released for proper functioning of the body. When we are able to feel grateful we are allowing the body to balance and become better at what it does on it’s own naturally. 

We can not only observe how gratitude can be of help to our health through research but we can also feel it for ourselves. Thanksgiving is a great reminder to acknowledge, even when there are many things going on, that there is always something to be grateful for. As we practice gratitude more we start to allow ourselves to see just how powerful we really are. This is a reminder to find gratitude not only during the holidays but throughout our lives. Thanks for reading and Happy Thanksgiving!