The neuroscience behind the practice of gratitude is tremendously compelling for our community. At the unconscious and limbic level, it inhibits the sympathetic response system that activates anxiety and its attendant flight, fight and freeze responses. At a cognitive level, it creates alternate pathways for our thoughts to travel to, interrupting us from distressing, rumination over negative thoughts. With daily practice, it has an enormous long term impact on our ability to sleep, regulate the production of stress hormones and for our emotional, physical and mental wellbeing, according to Mad
huleena Roy Choudhary in The Neuroscience of Gratitude and How it Affects Anxiety and Grief
However, before you reach for your favorite gratitude practice – a journal, jar, a physical gesture, or a state of mind, it is important to process where you are, and when to express gratitude. Without going through the process, delineated in this flowchart, your expressions of gratitude may not do the work they need to do for you.
~Lakshmi
Lakshmi Rao Sankar is a member of the I-ASC leadership Team, and S2C practitioner. She is a leader in nonprofit stewardship, and organization development and a partner in a consulting firm for nonprofit organizations.
