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Harnessing the power of Gratitude to Relieve Stress and Overcome Anxiety
- Cass Curran
- May 28
- 7 min read
No doubt you have heard by now that gratitude is good for you. In this article, we’re going to take a look at why gratitude is good for relieving stress and anxiety in the moment and why regularly practising gratitude can actually help us to overcome anxiety in the long term.
We’ll also have a look at a few simple gratitude exercises that you can get started with to begin developing your gratitude practice today.
Before we progress, to put it simply, gratitude is being or feeling thankful and/or expressing thanks for something or someone.
Gratitude has been a pretty popular area of study the past couple of decades. The results are in and they only speak very highly in favour of practising gratitude for our mental and physical health and well-being.
As I am fond of mentioning, our physical and mental bodies are not separate entities but are intimately intertwined, so it generally makes sense that what’s good for one is good for the other.
Just to wet your palate and boost your appetite for gratitude, here’s an incomplete list of benefits associated with feeling, expressing and having gratitude.
Gratitude improves or increases:
emotional resilience
quality of sleep
self esteem
relationships
social support
optimism
decision making
memory
feelings of life satisfaction
spirituality
Gratitude reduces:
negative thinking
blood pressure
need for mindless over-consumption
pain
inflammation
suicidal thoughts
fear
depression
anxiety
That last one’s the one we’re focusing on here and we’ll come to more on that in just a moment.
Before we get to that, let’s have a bit of a look at the different ways gratitude presents itself.
Gratitude can be the expression of thanks from one human being to another. This is the kind of gratitude that does stuff like improve relationships and increase social support. It’s also the kind that increases productivity in the workplace.
Gratitude can be us thanking ourselves or our lives. This is the kind of gratitude that leads to optimism, emotional resilience and ongoing feelings of contentment and life-satisfaction.
Gratitude can be feelings of thankfulness for Mother Earth and all of her blessings. This is the kind of gratitude that leads to a reduced need to over-consume. This is the kind of gratitude that protects our precious natural environment.
Gratitude can be feelings of thankfulness to God, Great Spirit, the Universe, or however you might know the All that Is. This is the kind of gratitude that enhances a sense of spirituality, strengthening supportive connections with the self, with others, with all of life on Earth and with All that Is.
I just want to mention too that it’s not only always the ‘good’ things that we can be grateful for. How many times has something appeared ‘bad’ in the moment and yet, in hindsight, it was acting in our favour all along, even if we couldn’t see it at the time?
All of these presentations of gratitude make up happier. That might sound a little simple but it’s true.
Why does gratitude relieve stress and anxiety?
The good news is, when we choose to be thankful, or when we feel, express or receive gratitude, we activate the two main areas of the brain that regulate emotions – the amygdala and the hippocampus. These feelings also immediately reduce the presence of the stress hormone, cortisol, and encourage the release of the feelgood neurotransmitters, dopamine and serotonin.
This is why we can feel better immediately in the presence of gratitude.
The even better news is that when we allow ourselves to continue to choose gratitude, in any number of ways, we strengthen our neural pathways and build volume in specific areas of our brains for long term benefits.
As well as this good stuff that’s going on in the brain, when we develop and maintain a gratitude practice, it forces us to focus on the positives. And regular practice of anything can lead to a new habit.
To take just a few of the benefits mentioned above and show how they contribute to our quality of life will help to indicate how they can also relieve anxiety both in the short and long term.
When we’re expressing and receiving more gratitude in our relationships, in all our relationships, the quality of the relationships improves. The more positive our relationships are, the more we can feel supported and safe in the world, which can contribute to reduced experience of anxiety.
When we sleep better, let’s face it, pretty much everything’s better. A good night’s sleep goes a long way to providing relief from stress and anxiety for numerous reasons that will be discussed elsewhere.
When we have better attention, memory and decision-making capacity, our work and general life-related ability and productivity improves. This can also be hugely supportive in terms of anxiety relief.
Negative or ‘troublesome’ thinking plays a big part in the anxiety experience. By practising gratitude, reducing our negative thinking and focusing more on the positives, we are taking care of an important part of the anxiety equation.
Enhancing our self-esteem and our satisfaction with our lives can also contribute to reduced anxiety.
So, let’s have a look at some simple ways we can develop a habit of gratitude, for all of the delightful benefits to us and to the greater good.
Gratitude Practice Exercises
Gratitude is something that can be practised any moment of the day or night.
In fact, if you’re one who wakes in the middle of the night and has a good old worry about something, see if you can remember to run a list of things you are grateful for through your mind instead, if you’d like to get yourself back to the rest and digest mode and back to sleep.
Gratitude on the go
Once we start to play with it, it's easy to find so many things to feel gratitude for, especially when we can appreciate all the small things that add to our quality of life.
For example:
Special gifts that nature reveals to you, like a sunrise, a rainbow, light reflecting off dew on the grass, a soaring eagle or a tiny lady beetle.
An act of kindness you received from someone or an act of kindness that you shared with another, even something as simple as a smile.
Your home, the comfort of your bed, the soothing cleansing of your shower, the fact that you are sheltered from the weather.
The sustenance of your food, the aroma of your morning tea or coffee, that you have food.
Your loved ones - parents, children, siblings, lover, friends, colleagues, members of your community, local and global.
And your self - your body, your mind, your soul and spirit and the fact that you are loving yourself enough to create a better life experience for yourself.
This list is just the beginning; it could grow infinitely if you let it.
Start by thinking of something for which you are grateful and expand this thought out into feeling. Really let yourself feel the benefits of the thing/person/situation you are grateful for and let yourself grow the feeling of thankfulness and appreciation within you. Wherever and however possible, allow yourself to express your gratitude.
As well as this being a thinking/feeling/expressing exercise you can do as often as you remember to, so many times throughout the day, here are a few examples of exercises that you can do to further ground and enhance your experience of gratitude.
Gratitude Journal
Get yourself a little notebook in which to keep a record of the things for which you feel grateful on any given day. At the end of your day, take some time to note down one or many things for which you have felt gratitude during the day. Or cast your mind back across the day and take note of the things in your day that you are grateful for.
Alternatively, you can start your day with a list of entries in your gratitude journal. These might be things you already have or things that have already happened, or they might be things you are anticipating throughout your day.
This is a surefire way to get you in a positive frame of mind for the day, as well as kick-starting your day with your brain firing out those feel good neurotransmitters!
Gratitude Buddy
Find a friend or family member with whom to share your gratitude experience of the day. Sharing this experience multiplies the benefits for you and for the one with whom you are sharing. This can be a lovely thing to do with your loved ones at the dinner table.
Gratitude Jar
Get yourself a jar and some slips of paper to sit somewhere you will be able to see easily – maybe your desk, bedside table or the kitchen bench. Make sure that you write at least one gratitude note on a slip of paper each day and put it in the jar. As you see the jar filling up, you will be reminded of how much there is in your life to be grateful for. This is another lovely thing to involve other members of your family or household in.
Be On The Lookout
Start with choosing just one thing or person in your life and really deeply consider how it/they add to your life. Begin to create a list, either mentally or on paper, or, if you prefer, on your phone, of the things you are grateful for as they relate to this thing or person.
As you move through your life, be on the lookout for anything else you can add to your list.
Once you’ve done this for one thing or person, choose something else and repeat the process.
Developing this practice, or any of the above practices, will have you habitually looking for and finding things to be grateful for.
Express your Gratitude for Others
This is something that can happen so many times throughout the day and it's as easy as saying "Thank you". Whenever someone has done something for you, thanking them will make you feel better, it will make them feel better and it can strengthen positive connection between all us humans.
When it comes to strengthening positive bonds, gratitude is one of the best tools. And, as was mentioned above, better relationships can contribute to reducing the experience of anxiety.
Following on from the exercise above, let those who contribute positively to your life know that you appreciate them.
Saying Grace
Regardless of our religious or spiritual leanings, saying grace is a beautiful and simple way to be present with our gratitude for the food we have and for the people with whom we share it.
Saying grace simply means that before hoeing in to our meal, we take a moment to say thank you for the food and for the company in which we eat it.
Hopefully this article has got you realising how many things in your life you can be grateful for if you just let yourself think about it for a bit. And hopefully you'll be thinking about being grateful and feeling and expressing your gratitude lots more. And if you're doing this, no doubt you'll be reaping the benefits, as will those around you.
In the world of simple, natural, free and easy things that life already gave us to support our well-being and to minimise or even eliminate our experience of anxiety, practising gratitude is surely one of the loveliest and most rewarding.
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