Gratitude, Appreciation, Heart and Health

Gratitude, Energy, Life and Living

Experiencing and expressing gratitude enhances our energy and helps to build resiliency thereby assisting to manage stress and influence health.

Gratitude helps by bringing coherence to our energy and consciousness and thereby increases the effectiveness of our capacity to be creative and intuitive as well as healthy. Research has shown it to be to be a powerful emotion that generates positive outcomes in health, well-being, and in the creation of reality.

The Heart-Mind Connection
Akin to gratitude is appreciation, the word often used in the HeartMath materials to speak about the feeling that generates positive shifts in physiology. To paraphrase their definition, appreciation is an active emotional state characterized by a perception and recognition of something for which you feel grateful. Appreciation, gratitude and unconditional love are the emotional states that have been shown to produce coherence within our energy fields. (Coherence is defined as that state where two or more systems are in sync, thereby operating more smoothly and effectively.)

Affecting Health and Happiness
In research studies when subjects produce high rates of coherence in the heart, they also exhibit increased heart-brain synchronization, increased immunity, improved physiological function, decreased stress, and better emotional management.

Individuals capable of sustaining high levels of coherence by holding feelings of love, gratitude and appreciation through intention showed profound changes in their DNA. High states of coherence produced an unwinding and lengthening of DNA strands, while fear, anxiety, frustration and stress caused DNA to tighten, become shorter and switch off many of its codes.

Members in a control group who could not produce high levels of coherence showed no changes in their DNA.

The bottom line is that our habitual states of mind and feeling affect our lives on many levels and the heart is a key player in regulating these effects.

People with an active focus on gratitude report feeling happier in their lives regardless of outer circumstances. Research has shown time and again that our happiness is an inside job.

What are some ways you can bring more gratitude and appreciation into your daily life?