Gratitude: The Perfect Starting Point

It’s the time of year to focus on gratitude. Whatever the circumstances in your life, finding one good thing to be grateful for can help shift your perspective. Here’s a short list to get you started!

1. Get grateful for sleep.

 Isn’t it an amazing thing that bodies need to sleep? While you are sleeping your body is storing memories, processing experiences and emotions, strengthening synapses, healing and repairing tissues, detoxifying, and more. The need for sleep establishes a pattern of restoration for your mind and body. Embrace and honor that need! Focusing on getting good sleep consistently can be an open door to a health journey. 

2. Get grateful for nutrition.

 The fact that plants can make nutrition from water, sunlight, and air, and that people can eat those plants and take in what their bodies need, and can enjoy that process as well, is an actual every-day miracle. Practice being grateful for the food you eat—plants, animals and animal products, farmers and ranchers and cooks and harvesters and grocery store workers. Practice being grateful that your body can taste and enjoy these things and gain energy and vitality. Gratitude can actually help you shift your food choices.

3. Get grateful for water.

 For such a simple substance, water is incredibly important! Every cell in your body needs water. Access to sufficient clean fresh water is something to be grateful for. Getting enough water, or replacing other beverages with water, can be a starting point for your health journey. 

4. Get grateful for movement.

 Bodies, including those with movement challenges, are made to move. Rather than comparing your body with other bodies, or your abilities with others’ abilities, try shifting your perspective to gratitude for what your body can do. Moving your body is a simple way to improve your mental health, help cope with stress, release endorphins, keep your metabolism humming, improve your sleep, and strengthen your heart, lungs, bones, and muscles. It doesn’t have to be complicated or expensive. Body weight exercises such as pushups, squats, and lunges, and brisk walking, inside or outside, are simple ways to get started. 

5. Get grateful for calm.

 While it is true that there are any number of stressful situations that can arise each day, it is also true that there are ways to calm your body and mind and to return to a resting state. Making art, journaling, talking with good friends, processing with a therapist, being outside, moving your body, focusing on your breath, practicing grounding yourself in the present moment, and napping are all ways to find calm in your day. Seek some peace and be grateful for it today. 

By having gratitude as a starting point, you can connect with the Big Why for your health journey and focus on your purpose. You have this body to carry you through life, and caring for it improves the quality of that experience. 

Here at Natural State Health Center, we are grateful for you! Each opportunity to inspire, educate, and equip you on your health journey is a blessing to us.