The Physiology of Appreciation

"Everything is interconnected. Gratitude improves sleep. Sleep reduces pain. Reduced pain improves your mood. Improved mood reduces anxiety, which improves focus and planning. Focus and planning help with decision making. Decision making further reduces anxiety and improves enjoyment. Enjoyment gives you more to be grateful for, which keeps that loop of the upward spiral going. Enjoyment also makes it more likely you’ll exercise and be social, which, in turn, will make you happier."

This is a quote from an interesting article I ran across last night: Four Rituals that Will Make You Happy, that explains the neurochemistry of thought. Fabulous that such studies can now be made, a bit frightening to think of joy reduced to serotonin and dopamine, but it made me reflect on all the advice I hear about being grateful, counting your blessings; old advice for the New Age.  Personally, I wonder how it is that people are not grateful on an ongoing basis, because everything I see every day inspires in me a sense of wonder - I marvel at how the universe works, how it can operate on such a massive and yet intimate scale, how can it all WORK!

I spend most of my thoughts on how I fit into it all and how I can keep coping with the inexorable flow, the mad ride down the rapids that is my life. And now I read the physiology of appreciation, how we create our responses and mold our attitudes, and how we can do consciously what I have done unconsciously for all my years. It must be true, because while I have bad days and down times, I have never had what anyone would call depression. And here I thought I was just special when, as with all things in this marvelous universe, there is a plan, a recipe for joy.

Other people who obviously carry with them the same wonder and appreciation for such magnificence are scientists and artists and teachers and historians, people of any ilk who feel a passion for figuring out how we work. Scientists want to understand the mechanics: physicists and chemists and biologists and engineers. Artists want to capture emotional realities, to examine how we feel what we feel. Historians and archaeologists pick away at the scope of existence over time and the impossible layering of memory it brings. What is memory? What does it give us? Why do we have it? What are our own responsibilities toward it? Why are we here?

For me, it is hard to understand how a mind so occupied could become depressed at all, and therein lies my saving grace, and I appreciate it.