This week's message offers psychoeducation on how gratitude practices heal the brain and strengthen your relationship with yourself and others.
Your Brain on Gratitude by Stephane Smith ©
Gratitude practice is such a commonplace self-care suggestion - so commonplace that the healing power of gratitude is often taken for granted.
How can something so simple reduce the felt senses of pain and discomfort that result from trauma, loss, fear, stress, and anxiety?
Let us break it down by asking and answering a few questions:
1) What happens in the brain when you experience fear spectrum emotions?
2) What happens in the brain when we willfully practice gratitude?
When you experience fear spectrum emotions/thoughts there is a kind of stressed communication between the left and right sides of the brain. Some physical ways that you might sense this include increased heart rate, changes in your breathing, shakiness, and many emotions that you may assess through the practice of checking in with yourself.
Physical and emotional sensations produced by fear spectrum emotions are totally normal and act as information to help you navigate the world to meet your needs. Sometimes trauma, the accumulation of stress, and "bad" habits make us predisposed to experience fear spectrum emotions more frequently than is helpful.
Therapeutic practices - including gratitude practices can help increase the frequency of more comfortable and helpful sensible experiences/emotions and thoughts.
The right and left sides of your brain communicate with each other as you move through your day. The back-and-forth dialogue coordinates your thoughts, emotions, words, and actions.
When you move through your days with ease <<>> the communication between the side of the brain is relatively clear. Synthesized communication between the sides of the brain is so significant that the right side of your brain controls the left side of your body and the left side of the brain controls the right side of your body. All day and night your body is maintaining the autonomic functions of breathing, your heart beating, your digestion, your ability to see and hear ect.
Gratitude practices have the power to help the left and right sides of your brain communicate more effectively. Gratitude practices activate the ventromedial prefrontal cortex which occupies the center of the frontal lobes and has mediating structures on the right and left side of the brain while cycling information through the amygdala.
The prefrontal lobes are responsible for conscious experience. The amygdala - part of the limbic system - produces both anxiety and empathy. The amygdala receives its primary information from the hippocampus during felt anxiety and from the ventromedial prefrontal cortex during a gratitude practice. Gratitude produces a felt sense of connection to ourselves and one another and replaces fear spectrum emotions with understanding and compassion.
When engaging in conscious gratitude you are functionally empathizing with yourself, activating that left and right brain communication, and healing the brain from traumatic stress and general trauma.
There are specific neurons that only activate in empathetic connection called mirror neurons they are most active when using the frontal lobes while processing the great here and now.
This message offer psychoeducation on how gratitude practices heal the brain and strengthen your relationship with yourself and others.
References:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/new-thoughts-about-gratitude-charity-and-our-brains/2018/12/21/238986e6-f808-11e8-8d64-4e79db33382f_story.html
Siegel, D. J. (2012). The developing mind: How relationships and the brain interact to shape who we are. New York: Guilford Press.
