Sunday, November 18, 2012

Gratitude


“Don’t go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first.”
Mark Twain

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Remember:

Gratitude builds humility as we recognize an act of kindness, service, or caring from someone else. True gratitude is a foundation for faith, courage, contentment, happiness, love, and well-being. Being grateful leads us to look outside ourselves and turn to the bestower of the blessings.

As we regularly express our gratitude to our Heavenly Father, we cultivate an uplifting attitude.

Bitterness, resentful feelings, or mean-spiritedness cannot exist in a grateful heart. Greater happiness is achieved as deeper gratitude is developed.

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See Related Gratitude Resources  for games and coloring pages

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Gratitude, thankfulness, gratefulness, or appreciation is a feeling or attitude in acknowledgment of a benefit that one has received or will receive.

more from wikipedia:

A large body of recent work has suggested that people who are more grateful have higher levels of subjective well-being. Grateful people are happier, less depressed, less stressed, and more satisfied with their lives and social relationships[19][22][23] Grateful people also have higher levels of control of their environments, personal growth, purpose in life, and self acceptance.[24] Grateful people have more positive ways of coping with the difficulties they experience in life, being more likely to seek support from other people, reinterpreted and grow from the experience, and spend more time planning how to deal with the problem.[25] Grateful people also have less negative coping strategies, being less likely to try to avoid the problem, deny there is a problem, blame themselves, or cope through substance use.[25] Grateful people sleep better, and this seems to be because they think less negative and more positive thoughts just before going to sleep.[26]
Gratitude has been said to have one of the strongest links with mental health of any character trait. Numerous studies suggest that grateful people are more likely to have higher levels of happiness and lower levels of stress and depression.[27][28]