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| Show Gratitude to Build Winning Mindset and Lead Happy Life |
Gratitude is the most powerful ingredient of the recipe called happiness. It is known for centuries that gratitude is the best medicine to heal the mind, body, and soul. This behavioral trait of showing compassion acts as an attractant of a similar response from the opposite. Simply speaking, when we show gratitude towards things we have then we attract more of the same. Scholars of human behavior are of the view that if you are feeling low then you can boost your mood by thinking about things you are grateful for. The human mind is unique and if you are wondering how gratitude helps then continue reading to know about the science involved in making you feel great.
The human brain has a reward system, meaning it finds ways to trigger a positive response from emotions like love and compassion. Loving family members, pets, or anything acts as a catalyst to trigger secretion serotonin and oxytocin hormones. More popular as a happy hormone, this hormone duo works in sync to create a positive mind-frame. The more the trigger, meaning love and compassion, the more is the secretion resulting in a better mood.
The sense of accomplishing goals, however small that is, boosts secretion of another hormone called dopamine, triggering a feel-good response. Several scientific studies have shown that when people show appreciation for even small acts and things brain releases dopamine hormone. So, if you wish to start exercising and the next day you just take a very small effort like just taking out your sports shoes and appreciate the small effort then dopamine is realized and you feel a sense of accomplishment. When you are working towards your goals glands release adrenaline and epinephrine, an important action booster. It is natural to be in a stressful situation while working on goals, so it is good to appreciate even small efforts as it triggers dopamine and buffers the adrenaline.
It keeps you motivated to take higher challenges and achieve your goal. If you want to lead a healthy life, then start building the habit of appreciating small efforts and let the growth mindset strengthen.
The growth mindset is not about attaching a sense of reward to the goal but to the fact that you are taking action in steps in the right direction. The more you start appreciating efforts the more your brain will start forming patterns to recalibrate for bigger goals.
Your brain will start appreciating the efforts as well because it is like you are micro-dosing your brain with these chemicals of dopamine. So, even on days when things are not going in your way, you will still be motivated to move ahead by feeding off the existing dose of dopamine. The ability to control these internal reward systems is everything.
In one such study conducted with mice to know the behavioral pattern building of positive responses, scientists kept two mice in a cage and trained them to push each other out of the cage. Interestingly, the mouse that won by pushing the other mice out of the cage has built a pattern to win against other mice as well. The best thing that came out of the study is that the winning mouse showed a remarkable success rate against other mice in different conditions and situations.
This experiment led to finding that in humans the winning circuit is there in the frontal cortex. This is an area that helps us with planning, taking action, and executive functions like all the high-level stuff. So, this is the winning area which is more active in winners than losers. In fact, this area can take a looser, and over-stimulating the area could turn a loser into a winner.
So, the winning area is taking stress, which is wired into all of us and helps us take actions and move forward. In simple words, any winning person builds a winning circuit in the brain, which in turn helps one win larger battles in life.
The gist of the matter is in the fact that your gratitude helps you build and strengthen the winner circuit. So, start appreciating even the smallest possible effort towards goal achievement and this will help you build a winning mindset. It is all wired in the brain, so learn the art of triggering the right hormones in the right context and train your brain to handle higher challenges. This is how you control your mind and thereby the destiny.
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