Stress Reduction Through Gratitude By Deanna Collins At Isnare.com Ezine Articles

We are all aware of the stressful times we are surrounded with, and these situations can easily lead us to feeling overwhelmed. Learning to combat stress is a helpful skill we can learn so as to regain a maximized quality of life. There is a very effective way of doing this, through cognitive redirection, and focusing on the positive aspects of our lives instead of the negative ones. By taking the time to acknowledge good fortune in our lives, and not allowing setbacks or problems to become dominating factor in our outlook allows us to deal with stress on a more successful level.

Many times it’s just easier to be ungrateful about the things we do not have instead of being grateful for the positive things we have been dealt or what we have achieved. These positive parts of our lives are often overlooked and taken for granted until some sort of disaster hits. All too often we can forget about having a roof over our heads, a warm bed and even a hot shower. Once we can identify those things for which we have to be grateful for, we have the perfect exercise for positive thinking, and it could actually change our feelings towards stress as well as balancing out the related effects.

The factors causing stress are many, but it is defined as a state where an individual is not in equilibrium with their individual surroundings. It is known to us now that the distinction between both body and mind is of limited usefulness. Negative thoughts are able to have an affect on the body, just as trauma can affect the mind. Experiences of stress prompting negative emotions may have a direct affect when it comes to body chemistry. In response to any threat or stress, our bodies produce hormones and other chemicals, such as adrenalin and cortisol.

Fortunately this works both ways. A calming environment along with some positive thoughts can fight the mental and physical effects of stress. Allow yourself a bit of time every day simply to concentrate on the positive – even if it is as little as a few minutes – you will be able to remove yourself from the causes and effects of stress.

The need to recognize those bursts of good fortune can have a radical effect on our perspective. Problems have a tendency to cast a dark cloud so to speak over the parts of our lives that are going well and distorting our perspective on things. Let’s take for example that sense of panic we feel when tasks are uncompleted instead of giving ourselves some praise over what we did accomplish. When the period of stress is prolonged or extended, it is entirely possible for us to develop unhealthy patterns of jumping automatically to a negative conclusion. By focusing on those things that make us happy is a very powerful technique we can use to overcome that pattern of thinking negatively, thereby reducing stress as well as giving a boost to the immune system.

When you are stressed or tense, it may start out looking like quite a bit of hard work to identify those things you are grateful for. Practice and patience will provide you with the ability to take the time to smell the roses so to speak. At first it may be a case of hindsight being 20/20 but with time it will become automatic.

While training yourself to be able to recognize those many things to be grateful for, you will stop taking things for granted. Seeing those items that may seem trivial to some, such as the bud of a new leaf on a tree, or a new tulip in the garden, will trigger the recognition and with it the internal need for celebration. As it becomes integrated more easily into your daily routine you will be able to see just how the process can reinforce your ability to deal with stress while you practice positive thinking.

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