A quick follow-up to last week’s post on teaching our kids to be grateful – turns out gratitude can actually improve our health.
This Huffington Post article offers some encouraging revelations, based on published studies, including lower rates of depression, increased levels of exercise, happier relationships, increased goodwill to others, more sleep, satisfaction with their lives and general optimism.
Turns out just going through the seemingly hokey exercise of daily writing down several things in your life for which you feel grateful can be enough to change your outlook. Perhaps it’s worth trying this out with kids who seem to have trouble appreciating what they’ve got, or who display disturbing levels of entitlement. The eye-rolling will be epic; the groans will be earth-shattering, but you don’t have much to lose.
