Gratitude May Be The Tool You Need To Navigate Holiday Stress

ACROSS AMERICA — Thanksgiving is next week. Many Americans will sit around a table and tell the people closest to them how thankful and how grateful they are to be in their lives.

There’s no question that’s important.

But as important, according to those who have made the practice of gratitude as natural in their lives as breathing, is to show gratitude for the people you don’t know well, but are people you would miss if they weren’t around.

Dan Knight, whose story kicked off Patch’s 30 Days Of Gratitude series, says practicing gratitude is a critical life skill.

“It’s the single building block for everything we have to build our humanity, our spirituality, our nature, our lives," Knight told Patch earlier this year.

A child prodigy with a voice he’d been told his entire life could take him to the famed Metropolitan Opera in New York City, Knight was 18 when a motorcycle crash forced him to rewrite his life’s score. He nearly died — or did clinically die for a few seconds — and the experience left him determined to live in gratitude every day thereafter.

Patch's "30 Days Of Gratitude" is a series of articles exploring the intentionality of gratitude and featuring bits of wisdom from Patch readers. Come back to Across America Patch every day through November and read more.

“If we don't have gratitude, we don't have thankfulness. We can't have gratitude and still have anger. We can't have gratitude and still cry hatred,” said Knight, now 68 and an accomplished pianist and composer. “It is the building block of thankfulness for who we are, what we have, and how we deal with it.”

One way to begin living with gratitude is to share it with people who provide services. Knight said he has the wherewithal to shop for himself, but when he started using delivery services to bring groceries to his door during the pandemic, he made it a point to say, “Thank you, I’m so grateful to you for doing this.”

“They look at me like I’m some kind of weirdo,” he continued, “and I’m like, ‘No, you don’t see what you have done.’ ”

Practicing gratitude in that way contributes to better emotional health and less depression, according to a growing body of published research. Some research points to it as a low-cost intervention.

“With the ever-escalating cost of health care, it’s important to maintain wellness any time, but especially during these high-anxiety times,” Dr. Michele Nealon, president of The Chicago School of Professional Psychology, said in a news release. “Acknowledging and appreciating the good things in our lives can have tangible benefits for our mental health and long-term well-being.”

Brain scans record brain activity when a person experiences gratitude, but “even more impressive,” Nealon said, “is that studies show that simply expressing gratitude may have lasting effects on the brain, training it to be more sensitive and contributing to improved mental health over time.”

Nealon offered three quick tips to get started on practicing gratitude through the holidays:

1. Write a letter of gratitude every day to someone you care about.
2. Jot down what you’re grateful for in a journal (and then go back and read it so you’ll remember when and why you were thankful).
3. Be consistent and patient with yourself. It may take several weeks before the benefits are noticeable.

“Even if you don’t ‘feel it,’ in the beginning,” Nealon said in the release, “the positive mental state you create will eventually get stronger as you practice it.”

Read More

• Opera Singer 'Died,' Lives As Pianist
• Gratitude For A Bear With A Jar Stuck On Her Head 28 Days
• Teach Kids To Be Grateful By Example
• Pay It Forward By Volunteering
• GivingTuesday A Chance To Show Gratitude

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