November is upon us and our focus turns to Thanksgiving, a time when we focus on giving thanks for all of the blessings in our lives.  It turns out that there is a scientific benefit for gratitude as well.  According to Harvard Medical School, gratitude can not only increase emotional and social well-being, improve sleep quality, and lower risks for depression, but the research is also discovering that it can lengthen your life!  These are not insignificant benefits, so how can feeling grateful improve your quality of life?

It goes back to mental load.  In my e-book, Putting on Your Own MASK First, I discuss mental load as the invisible tasks, worries, and emotional feelings we carry with us every day.  According to the University of Melbourne, mental load takes on the following characteristics: 

• Invisible-taking place internally but resulting in added physical labor
• Without boundaries-existing at work, during leisure time and interrupting sleep time
• Never-ending-it’s typically tied to the constant care of loved ones (such as children) 

If you have children, your mental load often includes emotional work-whether it’s helping your children to manage emotions of not understanding homework or managing your own emotions while working with your children, this is a constant task that is an integral part of parenting.

How does gratitude fit into this?  If we are carrying around a significant amount of negative feelings, it’s hard to feel like we are successful in life.  However, if we are able to find one thing each day that we are grateful for, it improves our mental load and helps change our perspective on our environment.  This can lower our daily stress response and improve the physiological health markers, such as heart rate or blood pressure!

The easiest way to incorporate more gratitude into your life is to reflect each day on something you are grateful for.  You do not necessarily have to share it with another person to benefit, but if you do, it actually helps both of you!  You can do this at the dinner table and model the practice of gratitude for children as well.  

Sometimes it is difficult to be grateful for things in your life.  While there is a lot of uncertainty in our world right now, I am thankful that my daughter found our school’s bowling team this winter (yes, we have a bowling team).  She has a passion for volleyball and has played that year-round for several years.  While we are in amazing volleyball programs that focus on athlete development over winning, it can still be stressful.  At the last minute, she decided she wanted to join the school’s bowling team between the end of school volleyball and the start of club volleyball and it has been such a refreshing experience for her.  My daughter puts a lot of pressure on herself and it has been so good to see her participate on a team that removes that pressure and focuses on having fun.  Best of all, her best friend and several other girls from the volleyball team are doing this with her, and they are very supportive of each other, especially since most of them are novice bowlers.  She comes home with so many stories and with such enthusiasm that it is an amazing gift for us to listen to her every night.  

This holiday season, I hope you will focus on finding your “bowling team”-find gratitude in the most unlikely place; it will inspire you to look in other unlikely places for both gratitude and joy.

And if you are looking for more holiday health inspiration, join me and Leslie Johnson from Green Bean Grove for our FREE webinar on Holiday Eating and Stress Management.  Spots are limited, so register here to secure your spot: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/1789469153409?aff=oddtdtcreator

Participants will receive a code for 10% off of services at BOTH Creekside Health Coaching AND Green Bean Grove nutrition counseling!

Interested in reading more of Putting Your Own MASK on First?  Click here to order your copy today: https://www.creeksidehealthcoaching.com/work-with-me