Ho-ho-holy-Gay Queer!

Oops, I meant CHEER!

The Holidays are always interesting for me being a transplant and feeling split between two worlds. I also have a hard time with the consumerism and pseudo religiosity they involve and always find that I am always happiest when I have less material stuff bogging me down.

What I do love about the Holidays, however, is spending time with friends, the way things slow way down, spending time with family and watching New York City light up like a Christmas tree.

Whether the Holidays feel warm and amazing or stressful for you, I just learned a bit about the science of gratitude that might be useful. Apparently, (I did not know this), the most effective way in which gratitude affects the nervous system is not from expressing gratitude, but from receiving gratitude from someone else.

There’s been a buzz for years on how much gratitude can affect your mood, lifting depression and anxiety, and balancing your autonomic nervous system on top of clear scientific data supporting that it almost immediately lowers your blood pressure, as well as the levels of inflammation in the body, and boosts your immune system and metabolism.

Since the benefits are so strikingly positive, I figured it is valuable to get more specific on the best way to get the greatest benefits from your gratitude practice.

So try this:

Find a story in which one of the people is offering gratitude toward the other that makes you feel all the feels and three times a week, spend 2 minutes, just two minutes, thinking about and going through the story with as much specificity as you can. Letting yourself experience it again. You can also do this with a note, a text or a moment in your life when someone has been grateful for you.

And because we don’t live in a bubble and you still have four days of the week that are open, try using one to three of them to express your heartfelt— and yes, it must be heartfelt, otherwise the person will feel it and it won’t have the same meaning— feeling toward someone you love, boosting their mood and all of their systems.

It is a limitless resource we all have access to. And perhaps, we all too rarely let people know how much we appreciate them.