“What Is Something You Are Thankful For”: 50 Pandas Shared For What They Feel Grateful This Year

Being grateful not only during holidays but in your daily life can have amazing benefits.

Bored Panda got in touch with a professor of psychological and brain sciences at Indiana University, Joshua Brown, Ph.D., to learn more about the healing properties of gratitude. When asked what the benefits of practicing gratitude are, Joshua said: “I can tell you that my colleagues and I studied gratitude expression, and we found that even writing a few short letters of gratitude to someone improved mental health even if the writer didn’t give the letters to the person they were grateful to.”

To understand better: gratitude is a mental state that we reach by practicing gratitude. To practice, you can start by just thinking about what you are grateful for once a day. You can even keep a gratitude journal or, as Joshua mentioned earlier, write letters. The purpose is to get you in a state of gratitude.

But the best part of practicing gratitude is that it has a long-term effect. Joshua said: “We also found that the practice of writing gratitude letters caused a measurable increase in the brain response to gratitude even several months later, in a region toward the front of the brain.”

So, Pandas, maybe it is time for us to start this new habit not only on holidays but every day.