A Gratitude Practice Boosts Your Immune System

You have heard me talk over the years about how negative emotions such as stress, anxiety, resentment, and anger can weaken your immune system, negatively impact your overall health, and can even cause a psychosomatic sickness. Not to mention how a person’s mental state can 

also affect the degree of severity of an existing physical disease. The good news is that just like negative emotions create illnesses in our bodies, experiencing positive feelings can boost our immune system and improve our overall health.

Recently researchers have found out that positive emotions such as gratitude protect from physical illness, and they also predict lack of depression, higher achievement, and physical health. Not only does gratitude is profoundly healing and soothing, but it also helps people face the many challenges that may come their way. Below are examples of studies that demonstrated the positive effects of gratitude on your health:

• Practicing Gratitude Improves Emotional and Physical Well-being. The practice of gratitude can have dramatic and lasting effects on a person’s life. Studies have discovered that grateful people are happier, less stressed, and less depressed and receive more social support

• Gratitude is associated with higher levels of good cholesterol (HDL) and lower levels of bad cholesterol (LDL). 

• People who write in a gratitude journal for fifteen minutes before they go to bed sleep better and longer.

• Grateful people experience fewer aches and pains, lower blood pressure (even when under stress), and improved mental clarity, and they report feeling healthier than other people do. 

• Gratitude improves psychological health such as increasing happiness and reducing depression. It also reduces toxic emotions, such as envy, resentment, frustration, and regret.

• Appreciation enhances empathy, decreases aggression, and improves self-esteem. 

• Gratitude increases mental strength and resilience, reduces stress, and helps to overcome trauma. 

• Practicing gratitude led to a 7 percent reduction in biomarkers of inflammation in patients with congestive heart failure. 

• Keeping a gratitude diary for two weeks produced sustained reductions in perceived stress by 28 percent and depression by 16 percent. 

• Experiencing gratitude lowers levels of cortisol (stress hormones) by 23 percent. A daily gratitude practice can decrease the effects of neurodegeneration that occurs with increasing age. 

• Writing a letter of gratitude reduced feelings of hopelessness in 88 percent of suicidal inpatients and increased levels of optimism in 94 percent. 

• Grateful people have between 9 to 13 percent lower levels of Hemoglobin A1c, a key marker of glucose control that plays a vital role in diabetes.

There you go, gratitude is not just a new fad that people are into nowadays, it really does improve your health. So to boost your immune system during this fall and winter why not incorporate a daily practice of gratitude to boost.

Remember I'm always here to help email me at toni@drtoniCamacho.com if you have any questions on how to boost your immune system. And click here to check out my cold/flu/covid/immune herbal supplements.

Happy Monday
Toni