There is a wide range of beauty tricks that support slowing down the process of aging and the appearance of fine lines and wrinkles. People usually have an approximate idea of what they need to do and avoid to reduce the damage caused by age and maintain a youthful look for longer.
Some of the most efficient tips include moisturizing your skin a lot, avoid harmful habits such as smoking and protect your skin from UV radiation. Being grateful and aware of the good things in your life is a positive practice that has been most recently added to the list of efficient anti-aging solutions.
Practicing gratitude can help slow down the aging process and provides many health benefits. Overall gratitude is an excellent positive attitude supporting a healthier and happier lifestyle.
Researches have been conducted on the benefits provided by practicing gratitude and have demonstrated seven ways in which showing appreciation for what we have can help slow aging down.
Here are the 7 ways gratitude provides a healthy anti-aging skincare:
1. Gratitude Helps Reduce Depression
Being grateful has been demonstrated to help reduce depression. Focusing on things a person is grateful for helps them turn their attention away from what is troubling them. That alone wouldn’t be enough to shake something so invasive as depression.
However, showing appreciation increases the likelihood people have to help others. Helping others can have a powerful impact on depressive people, giving them the feeling of making a difference in the world.
The positive effects of gratitude on depression have been clinically demonstrated through a psychological study comparing treating people with cognitive behavioral therapy or CBT and using gratitude as a treatment. The study, published in the Clinical Psychology Review, found that treating patients using the practice of gratitude was just as efficient as CBT.
2. Helps Reduce Stress
Stress is an important factor contributing to aging faster as it increases tension in the body and puts pressure on your mind and health. In addition, stress can lead to moodiness and participate in spreading animosity.
Overall, being stressed is not good for your well-being and when excessive, it can have severe consequences on your health increasing the risk of heart problems, diabetes, high blood pressure and obesity.
A study on meditation has shown that gratitude is an efficient way to combat stress. In that experimentation, people have been asked to spend 15 minutes a day meditating on the positive feelings they might have for some things or some people in their life and feelings of gratitude.
People focusing on these positive aspects of their life have a significant reduction of cortisol, the stress hormone and showed an increase in DHEA which is a hormone associated with feeling relaxed.
3. Improves Quality of Life
Dr. Roberts Emmons from the University of California, Davis, is an expert on the benefits of gratitude on both wellbeing and health. This Psychology Professor has been studying the effects of gratitude since 1984.
Showing appreciation appears to be the start point of a plethora of positive behaviors significantly improving people’s lifestyle. People that practice gratitude are more likely to exercise more, feel better about life in general, experience less physical pain and are more optimistic about future events.
These effects of gratitude have been demonstrated through Emmons comparison of people that keep journals in which they focus on what they are grateful for and people that keep a journal on negative or neutral events. Through this experiment, gratitude has been proven to promote positive events that support enhancing longevity and happiness.
4. Helps People Achieve their Goals
As gratitude allows the spreading of positive feelings it is a great support and underlying motivation for people. Thus, showing appreciation can help you achieve your goals, benefit demonstrated in another study conducted by Dr. Emmons.
Being grateful supports personal attainment, personal growth and helps people focusing on what is essential avoiding negative thoughts and distractions, thus fueling people with positive energy helping them create the life that they want.
5. Supports Recovery from Cardiac Illness
Researches have been conducted on observing the effects of optimism and gratitude on people recovering from cardiac illness. Led by Dr. Huffman, this study has demonstrated that people who were feeling grateful were more likely to properly follow their diet, meditation and exercise for long periods of time, ultimately supporting a faster and better recovery. Both the practice of gratitude and the optimistic attitude have been associated with higher levels of physical activity and a reduce the risk of remissions in recovering cardiac people.
6. Supports Lower Blood Pressure
A Temple University study suggests that hypertensive people that show gratitude, experience a significant reduction in blood pressure, unlike the control group whose blood pressure remained the same.
A study on the effects of mood and anxiety on blood pressure showed that people who were feeling negative and pessimistic had high blood pressure levels meaning that being negative can significantly harm your health. Optimistic people had healthier and lower blood pressure, however, when they did feel anxious, the pressure would dramatically increase.
Thus, it is essential to try and control negative feelings and keep a positive outlook on things. Listing the things you are grateful for definitely helps in that process and enables people to find a silver lining in most events. Being grateful supports an improved health and diminishes the risk of developing severe chronic diseases.
7. Helps Exercise More
Many would like to exercise or take the resolution to start doing so in the new year but even though the idea is there it is quite difficult to find the actual motivation to workout. A lot of people struggle with that and end up not exercising enough or very irregularly.
Dr. Emmons, the gratitude expert, found that feelings of appreciation can help people muster the motivation to engage in more physical activities. The participants practicing gratitude in Dr. Emmons study were exercising 1.5 hours per week more than others.
Regular exercise has been demonstrated to have several essential health benefits. It can help maintain a healthy, dynamic and youthful body, reducing the risk of joint and bone degradation. Thus, if practicing gratitude supports exercising then it ultimately supports living a healthier and better life as exercise releases high levels of serotonin, a chemical responsible for feelings of happiness.
Gratitude Anti-Aging Skincare Benefits Summary
Practicing gratitude is something that can be learned and should be learned as it not only acts as an anti-aging solution but also supports an overall improvement of people’s quality of life and health. Gratitude improves interpersonal relationships, reduces the risk of falling into depression as it helps you focus on the good things in your life and provides you with the motivation and energy to achieve your goals.
Whether you make a list of things you feel grateful for or you spend a few minutes every day meditating on them, gratitude will help you age well and live fully.
