Giving Thanks to Improve your Health

Next week is Thanksgiving, a holiday celebrating the harvests and blessings of the past year. We at TWINE would like to say thank you to all our customers! You have blessed us tremendously with the numerous reviews and thank you notes we receive daily. Your stories of relief from daily stress, soreness, worries, and fatigue drive us to keep producing safe effective CBD products and create new ones. We are grateful for the opportunity to serve you! And expressing gratitude can benefit us both as it also improves mental and physical health.

There are 17 other countries that celebrate their own version of Thanksgiving. These include different traditions, but they all center around giving some form of thanks and gathering with family and friends. Gratitude is something we can practice daily and is being shown by research to improve mood, sleep, and immunity, while decreasing depression, fatigue, and anxiety. People who spend more time experiencing gratitude seem to spend less time experiencing aches and pains and going to the doctor.

Benefits of Thanksgiving according to research:

• A healthier heart with better heart rhythms and less inflammation.
• Reduced stress hormones like cortisol which are 23% less in grateful people.
• Improved sleep by diminishing stressful feelings and allowing more relaxation.
• Slows down the effects of aging.
• Lower blood pressure by up to 10% on systolic pressure.
• Reduce your waistline by decreasing dietary fat intake.
• Improve your love life with increased production of oxytocin the “love hormone”.

Things to try to feel more grateful:

• Count your blessings. List 3 things for which you are thankful for, big or small, each day. Doing this for even just 2 weeks can make a big improvement in your overall mood.
• Sharing with your family and friends what you are grateful for about them can bring you closer to one another.
• Write a thank you note to someone. This can shift your focus to the positive and make someone else feel good too.
• Keep a gratitude journal. Having a daily gratitude practice reduces dietary fat intake, lowers stress hormones, and could reduce the effects of aging on the brain.

This Thanksgiving at the dinner table take time to share with each other something you are thankful for. Sharing puts value on gratitude, helps us appreciate the people in our life, and view things more positively. This can be done year-round and doesn’t have to be reserved just for holidays. Our lives are full of reasons to be thankful and taking time to notice is good for the body and soul. Happy Thanksgiving!