Episode 257: Thanksgiving Gratitude Benefits
Welcome to another edition of Around with Randall, your weekly podcast for making your nonprofit more effective for your community. And here is your host, the CEO and founder of Hallett Philanthropy, Randall Hallett.
I often speak about gratitude, and I'll start this edition of A round with Randall. With that in mind, I'm grateful for you and spending a few minutes of your time to chat, listen, discuss, think about the various subjects of the world of nonprofits and philanthropy with me. Randall. We entered the Thanksgiving Day week, and it's my favorite holiday.
Not even close. I think there are more important ones from a religious perspective for me, maybe for others. But when I look at the totality of what a holiday can and should mean, Thanksgiving is the one that lives and breathes most with how I live my life every day. I say in my website, I say when I'm introduced or asked for it to be said that I believe gratitude is a cornerstone of one's life.
That when we look at how we view life, if we view it through the lens of gratitude, that it helps so much in our life from the psychological to the emotional to the physical. And so at this Thanksgiving holiday, I want to spend just a minute talking a little bit about why gratitude should be something we all embrace more often.
Even me, who talks about it all the time that just for a few minutes, we take a moment and realize that if we spend just the right kind of moments, thoughts, maybe even a little activity looking at our life in a more positive way, good things will come of it. So let's start right at the top. Why is it that gratitude is so important?
Well, we've always assumed that happier people, grateful people are possibly having positive outcomes in their life. The last 50 years, maybe a little less of research has shown a much deeper understanding when it comes to our minds and our hearts and our bodies as to why gratitude drives health. So if we start with the physical, physiological, if you want to put it that way, we think about gratitude for those people who are more grateful, who spend time trying to figure out how they can be more gratitude driven on a daily basis.
A study by UCLA found that it improved heart rate variability as well as lowered blood pressure. That in a longitudinal study out of Harvard, that 9% decrease or lower risk of dying amongst women over a four year period if they lived a life that was more grateful. Gratitude can also be associated with biomarkers in our body, which is really more about inflammation, and it reduces inflammation when our body struggling, particularly in the heart.
And so we have multiple studies that say your heart health is better. Stress in your nervous system are also affected by how you view life. And whether or not you embrace the idea of gratitude. That person. Some hear a sympathetic system. Really, the rest and digestive process really allows all of this idea of gratitude to lower heart rates.
Blood pressure, cortisol, which is a negative, effect on the brain in terms of a hormone, is reduced. This is a study from UCLA. We also know that people sleep better when they have a life full of gratitude, and they spend a few moments thinking about how fortunate they are. Even our inflammation, as we talked about, but all the way down into our epigenetics, the inside parts of our genes will fight major disease and fight the idea of inflammation more quickly.
This idea of immune health interesting study there. We also know the emotional sides of gratitude and the power that it has. It reduces anxiety and depression. Another UCLA study, it also has the effect of reducing stress.
We also can tie the idea of being thankful around the ideas of having more positive emotion, more life satisfaction. Well-Being scores actually go up. All of this fosters a sense of a stronger sense of self-esteem, resiliency, and to be able to buffer the ups and downs of life, whether that's envy or negative social comparisons, whatever else in life throws at you.
From an interpersonal perspective, gratitude strengthens relationships and encourages positive, pro-social behavior, meaning you're willing to give back and engage and connect more. And at the end of the day, what we also know is, is that it shifts our thought process to be less internal or self view and more outward, which actually increases empathy. Why am I telling you all of this?
Part of my existence as a consultant is to challenge the status quo, to make people feel uncomfortable, to help with people's improvement. More organizational today is about more personal, no matter the challenge your life has. And we all have them, some at times greater than others. The choice of how we view life is really a choice. While we can't change what happens to us much of the time, we can choose how to deal with it.
And that's the essence to me of gratitude. That's what I spend my time telling my kids multiple times a week. Life isn't about what happens to you, it's how you deal with it. There are things that you can do every day, every couple days, once a week, to foster this idea of gratitude. Whether it's a journal that you write a couple things each day or every couple days of good things that have happened, or things you appreciate, or you spend what would be thought of.
And this is why I think yoga and other areas where there's a kind of a mental pull back, the idea of kind of a reflection process. The Jesuits use this for 50 plus years since Saint Ignatius. The idea of reflection a couple times a week at night, for 15 minutes, in a quiet room where you just think about your life and all the good that comes has come to you.
It's a choice. The reason I like Thanksgiving in particular is because it forces me in a week that's full of family and turkey and football and all these other things, all of which I love to spend moments when normally it's really busy to realize how fortunate I am for health, for family, for the way I was raised, for my wife, for my kids, for the work that I do, for the fact that there are people more than I really realize.
Because I begun to see some numbers, because I was forced to. And how many people listen to this damn podcast every week? I'm grateful to you. I'm grateful to my clients. I'm grateful for the opportunity to teach. And so, on this Thanksgiving holiday, what I ask of you don't normally ask a lot. Usually I'm giving. Now I'm asking.
It's for you. Take a few minutes. Find a place in the parking lot where you can sit quietly in your car or small corner of your home, or take a walk into nature, or just lay in bed quietly and take just a minute to realize how grateful you are for the blessings you have. You will be better for it.
I will do that in most of those ways. Don't have a lot of nature to walk through, but I'll take a walk and I'll sit quietly and I'll find, because I love my car and listening to podcasts, I'll sit quietly and turn off the radio and think about how grateful I am, and I hope that I'm better for it.
Thank you for spending a few minutes on your Thanksgiving week with me. I hope that you have a glorious chance to enjoy the many wonderful things that Thanksgiving brings and that, most importantly, you and your family and all the people that you surround yourself with are healthy, happy, and looking forward to the holiday season to come in December.
I'm thankful for you and as I always say, when we stop when we conclude this podcast, make it a great day.