Thankful Thursday!

Did you know that it takes more muscles to frown than it does to smile? Did you know that studies show, just the simple act of smiling can actually cause a chemical reaction in your body? Did you know that movement, dancing being my favorite, releases endorphines and other chemicals that fight depression? Did you know that it is proven that speaking positive over your own life actually changes you physically?

” A study group with unprecedented similarity in lifestyle and social status, supports earlier evidence that expressing happiness, interest, love, and other positive feelings enhances physical health…” say psychologist Deborah D. Danner of the University of Kentucky in Lexington and her colleagues…
“Nuns whose stories contained the most sentences expressing any of 10 positive emotions lived an average of 7 years longer than those whose accounts included the fewest such sentences, the team reports in the May Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. The researchers also found that longevity increased by 9-1/2 years for nuns whose life stories contained the most words referring to positive emotions and by 10-1/2 years for nuns who used the greatest number of different positive-emotion words.”

In Chemistry we learn that “In all chemical change, chemical bonds are broken or formed. Energy is required to break a chemical bond (just as energy is required to stretch a spring until it breaks).” it requires energy from you in order to break a pattern over your life. If you are a “naturally negative” person, it is going to require some energy to change that bond. When you exert energy to change your life you will chemically change the way your brain thinks. Dr. Scott Hannen tells us that the brain has memory neurons which become hard wired, what you put in it will be processed to literally make you become what you think. If you want to change your life you have to reprogram your brain, once it has been hard wired to think differently it will come “naturally”. Your thoughts literally make you become who you are.

Thankfulness is not something we should only live for a day, or one month out of the year. It must be a lifestyle we live. Developing Thankfulness in your life can physically change you, your circumstances, and the way you see others. Living a Thankful life can actually cause you to live it longer, and you will enjoy it more along the way.

Even if your life is not going the way you would like it to, now is the time to speak things that are not as though they were. You can find something you are thankful for. “Although the fig tree shall not blossom, neither [shall] fruit [be] in the vines; the labour of the olive shall fail, and the fields shall yield no meat; the flock shall be cut off from the fold, and [there shall be] no herd in the stalls: yet I will rejoice in the LORD, I will be joyful in God my Savior.” Habbakuk 3:17-18