Neuroscience and Gratitude: A Natural High

Did you know that gratitude strengthens the mind-body connection through the positive

effects that occur when you feel the emotion of being grateful?

Gratitude can act like a natural antidepressant, increasing your levels of dopamine, serotonin and relieving anxiety and pain.

Several scientists and psychology researchers have investigated the physical effects of gratitude on the human brain. It has proven that gratitude can be a real game-changer in people’s lives.

You don’t need to bog yourself down in technicalities to understand that when you flow your energy towards things you are grateful for, your vibrational frequency raises. You shift your brain towards positivity.

Scientifically speaking, you stimulate neurotransmitters in your brain (specifically, dopamine and serotonin) which increase feelings of happiness and peace. In short, positive emotion creates significant improvements in your physical body.

Let’s investigate how gratitude does this…

Hebb’s Law states that “neurons that fire together wire together” which means that the neural pathways you are practicing more often are the ones that will remain dominant in your brain. When you activate the same thoughts, you fire up the same neural pathways or circuits. If you begin to shift your thoughts and focus towards gratitude, you activate different neural pathways or circuits in your bra,in which strengthen the more they are used.

This is how you can use your brain’s ability to form new neural connections to change your reality.

The challenge lies in the fact that we are habitual creatures; it’s far easier to keep going over the same old round as the day before, i.e repeating the well-travelled neural pathways we always use. Turning your attention towards the positive and finding reasons to be grateful, creates new neural connections and circuits. The more that you repeat feeling grateful, the stronger that gratitude circuit in your brain will become. It’s all about repeating thoughts and focused attention so that you create positive emotion again and again until it becomes your default.

Dopamine and Serotonin Increase

The good news is that your brain helps you out with that shift towards positivity. When we feel the positive emotion sparked by gratitude, the brain releases dopamine and increases serotonin production, both of which cause a natural high and cultivate positive feelings that will help motivate you to express gratitude again.

Dopamine helps you to feel happy, and when you feel happy and positive, you are far more likely to take positive action in your life, increase positive behavior and pass on positivity to those around you. It’s pretty much a win-win for everyone!

Serotonin is another mood enhance; increasing will power and giving us the drive and determination to keep on creating positive change in our lives.
The neurotransmitters of dopamine and serotonin travel to the happy center of your brain much like the way an antidepressant works. A gratitude practice can, therefore, stabilize our moods, relax us and generally boost our sense of wellbeing as a natural alternative to medication.

Health Improvement

A study shows that gratitude can improve health over a long period. The regions that light up in the brain when we express and feel gratitude are also linked to the brain’s “mu opioid” networks, activated during intimate touch and relief from pain. In simple terms, this data suggests that gratitude is connected to the circuits in the brain linked with social bonding that could lead to improvement in health in the long run.

Help Depression

A researcher named Prathik Kini at Indiana University did a study investigating how the practice of gratitude can alter brain function in depressed individuals. Their examinations discovered that the feeling of gratitude could actually induce structural changes in the neural networks of the brain, suggesting that practicing gratitude regularly really could alter your brain and re-wire it.

In conclusion, practicing gratitude can also shift our brains towards looking for the positive and what is going right, instead of finding problems and reasons to be negative.

What we put our attention on grows, so think about what you want to grow in your life, and flow your energy towards it.

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