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Thanksgiving is all about gratefulness, happiness, and togetherness. It’s a day to express your gratitude to your loved ones, friends, and everybody else. This indirectly brings us happiness and peace. However, there are more blessings of thanksgiving that even help us remain healthy besides making us more happy. Here are some of the wonderful thanksgiving blessings that make this celebration a very special one. ~ Ed.
When you count your blessings, make sure you count in Thanksgiving too! It’s not only a wonderful day but a fantabulous concept.
Though Thanksgiving is a beautiful Christian event, you’ll find a day to give thanks in almost all cultures, societies, and religions. (By the way , Thanksgiving is celebrated in about nine countries around the world in some form or the other.)
Why is that? What is so special about giving thanks?
It is obvious that human beings all around the world, irrespective of their sex, caste, color, and creed know about the power of being thankful.
Quoting directly from a Harvard Medical School mental health letter, gratitude is strongly and consistently associated with greater happiness.
Gratitude helps people feel positive emotions, enjoy good experiences, improve their health, deal with adversity, and build strong relationships.
Aren’t these wonderful blessings? Thanks to thanksgiving, you can have it all!
Being thankful is nothing but being grateful. It is the power of gratitude that makes thanksgiving so special.
Thanksgiving was founded as a religious observance for all the members of the community to give thanks to God for a common purpose.
In this post, I’m going to analyze and discuss the benefits and blessings of thanksgiving from a general, comprehensive, and non-religious perspective.
“If [thankfulness] were a drug, it would be the world’s best-selling product with a health maintenance indication for every major organ system,” ~ Dr. P. Murali Doraiswamy, Duke University Medical Center
The Wonderful Thanksgiving Blessings
I consider thanksgiving as an act or event of gratitude that may be expressed to God or towards people, things, and events.
In fact, I believe in giving thanks every time to everybody, everything, and every event. I’m so grateful to life in general, and you too!
If you read an earlier post on this blog titled “Why We Need to Express Gratitude”, you’ll know that gratitude is an inner benevolent feeling that makes us beautiful.
Honestly, your positive thoughts and kind feelings help spread love and peace. Thus, it makes you more attractive and charming.
Not only this, the power of gratitude also makes you happy, healthy, and healed.
I strongly believe that thanksgiving has medicinal benefits. And to far extent, it is a self-healing magical potion too.
We know that prayer, meditation, and thanksgiving are blessings. I’m mentioning here some logical and scientific reasons as to why thanksgiving is a blessing.
Blessing 1: Being thankful helps you to be stress-free and happy
Stress produces the hormone cortisol and various other toxins.
Expression of gratitude or appreciation counters these chemicals with neurotransmitters like norepinephrine as well as serotonin, dopamine, oxytocin, and other hormones.
In short, when you are being thankful, your brain is rewarded with the feel-good and love hormones. These brain chemicals make you relaxed and happy.
Thus, thanksgiving acts as a coping mechanism to deal with the stress in your life and helps heal your mind, heart, and body.
You can even get over your chronic stress if you practice thankfulness every day and all the time. It simply brings happiness into your life.
DO READ: Transform Your Life to Be Happy in 17 Simple Steps
Blessing 2: Feeling good increases your immunity
Your body’s immunity is affected by the state of your mind and heart. In fact, when you feel good, apart from the other helpful hormones, your body and brain also produces IgA (Immunoglobulin A).
IgA is an immune antibody that plays a critical role in mucosal immunity and helps strengthen the body’s natural defenses. In fact, it serves as the first line of defense against pathogens.
It prevents you from contracting infections like common cold and also saves you from the risks of serious diseases like cancer.
No wonder thanksgiving is called a self-healing medicine. 🙂
Blessing 3: Gratitude helps lower blood pressure
There has been a study that relates gratitude and lowering of the blood pressure levels. Gratitude helps you calm down, soothe your nerves, and stabilize your body’s rhythm.
According to research at the Institute of HeartMath (IHM), true feelings of gratitude, appreciation, and other positive emotions can synchronize your brain and heart rhythms.
These also create an optimal state of coherence, such that the body’s systems function more efficiently, generates a greater balance of emotions, and there is an increase in mental clarity and brain function.
But remember, if you’re taking medicines on doctor’s prescription for your blood pressure problems, keep taking them.
That being said, there is no harm practicing thanksgiving alongside.
Blessing 4: Being grateful improves relationships
According to Harvard Medical School, a study of couples found that individuals who took time to express gratitude for their partner, not only felt more positive toward the other person, but also felt more comfortable expressing concerns about their relationship.
Gratitude comes bundled with love, compassion, and kindness. You can improve your relationships with kindness. Read this post to know exactly how to do that.
Forgiveness and letting go too are ways to be grateful in life. Doing that, you can even save your marriage and rekindle love in your relationships.
Remember, if you are happy with yourself, you are most likely to have good relationships with others. You can be happy if you’re content, at peace with yourself, and love yourself.
MUST READ: Do You Have the LUCK Factor in Your Life
Blessing 5: Thanksgiving helps you age gracefully
A post on the benefits of gratitude lists that there are favorable changes in the body’s biochemistry as a result of continued practice of thanksgiving.
It includes improved hormonal balance and an increase in the production of DHEA (Dehydroepiandrosterone), the “anti-aging” steroid hormone.
Scientists have come up with emotional self-management techniques to increase positive emotions and DHEA level over a one-month period.
So, you can age gracefully and live long to happily enjoy your life on Earth.
“Grateful people take better care of themselves and engage in more protective health behaviors like regular exercise, a healthy diet, regular physical examinations” Prof. Robert Emmons, University of California Davis.
Summing Up
Overall, gratitude or thankfulness makes you an optimist and fills you up with positivity. This strong positive emotional charge helps you reduce stress and improve your overall health and well-being.
If you want to know more details about the health benefits of thanksgiving or acts of gratitude, then read this WebMD article that says, if you want to get healthier, give thanks!
The most common, easiest, and best ways to cultivate gratitude are by writing thank-you notes, thanking someone mentally, keeping a gratitude journal, counting your blessings, praying, and of course meditating.
Now you know the ways of thanksgiving and the scientific reasons as to why they are a blessing. I’m sure now you can bless your own life by implementing them and you don’t need to be a scientist for that!
But I can’t end this post without mentioning this caveat – material goods may or may not bring you lasting happiness. It is always best to be content with and appreciate what you have, instead of focusing on what you lack.
Learn to be grateful every single day and this Thanksgiving is certainly the best time to start this new practice. 🙂
Thanksgiving blessings to you all!
Over To You:
Do you think thanksgiving is a blessing? How do you intend to practice gratitude and make it a part of your life? What are your Thanksgiving blessings?
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