The Importance of Gratitude

As the weather turns colder, many begin to make plans for upcoming holiday travel and seeing family. While autumn is an exciting season for many, ensuring Q4 has a strong finish and preparing for a healthy start to 2022, employees and employers have a lot on their minds. Expressing gratitude is a way to see the light at the end of the tunnel. Evidence suggests that grateful people are more resilient to both large and small stressors in their life. 

Various environmental factors like stress, depression, and anxiety contribute to one’s sense of self and can affect their emotional equilibrium. While everyone has ups and downs in their day-to-day life, extended periods of emotional unrest can seriously affect your emotional baseline. Up as much as 30% from January 2019 to January 2021, people are experiencing more stress, anxiety, and depression within the last year. Stress affects many aspects of your life – sleep, appetite, substance use, and overall health. Poor physical well-being is just one of the contributing factors to these environmental factors. 

It’s no surprise that many experience feelings of isolation, loneliness, and helplessness during times of uncertainty. Never fret. Luckily, there are simple adjustments one can make to their day-to-day routine to help shake these feelings and change their perspective. 

Expressing your gratitude and thankfulness can change your outlook, and with enough consistency and practice, eventually your resulting emotions. Not only will focusing on the positive give a needed change in perspective, but it will also start to radiate throughout other aspects of your life. Gratitude plays a unique role for us as a core emotion outside of being happy, sad, or angry. Gratitude is not just about helping people feel good, it has the unique potential of allowing people to see positive changes in themselves. Expressing happiness and optimism are secondary predictors of growth, whereas gratitude is the primary driver for many. 

The first step in expressing gratitude is recognizing your emotions and how they impact yourself and others. Gratefulness can look as simple as a quick thank you to a colleague, to reinforce specific actions done. If one of your colleagues or peers discloses to you that they are experiencing emotional strain, there are many ways you can handle these conversations without adding to your own stresses. While it may be tempting to exert extra efforts to help out a colleague, always keep your own well-being top of mind. 

Expressing gratitude to your peers day-to-day will also help lift some of these burdens. By representing yourself as a grateful and mindful person, regardless of the many negative influences surrounding you today, sets everyone up for success. For you, expressing gratitude will increase your emotional durability and overall health. Practicing gratitude can lead to lower blood pressure, more sleep, better cholesterol, better heart health, a more robust immune system, and even lessen the symptoms of depression. 

Now that we have established that expressing gratitude can have myriad positive effects on our lives and the lives of individuals around us, let’s talk about how to apply this lesson through our daily actions.