: Dr Christian Heim
: The Science of Radical Gratitude
: Vivid Publishing
: 9781923078062
: 1
: CHF 5.20
:
: Esoterik: Allgemeines, Nachschlagewerke
: English
: 100
: kein Kopierschutz
: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet
: ePUB
Culture wars, actual wars, ecological disasters, economic uncertainty, social upheaval, and you want me to read a book on gratitude!? Yep. Radical idea. Thanks: one simple little word; the attitude of gratitude. It won't change society but it can transform your life. You can go from grouchy and anxious to calm and appreciative. Recent evidence shows the mental and physical health benefits of gratitude. Give it a go. There's little hype here, just facts and practical ideas. As a psychiatrist, I'm in a battle against people's mental illnesses. I also help prevent mental illness in the first place. The recent and radical science of gratitude is impressive and helpful in this. This slim volume references about 70 studies drawing on hundreds of experiments. More than ever, we need gratitude. I cultivate it, and recommend it to anyone wanting more contentment, less mental illness, and to get through without becoming jaded. Gratitude deserves a fair go. Radical gratitude deserves more. Gratitude may not be part of your personality, but science shows that focussing on things to be grateful for will improve health and well-being. This book provides a simple method to do this. Don't knock it till you've tried it. If this doesn't improve your life, we'll be surprised.

Chapter Two
How Gratitude works in your Brain

Through reading this chapter, you will experience gratitude in your brain and begin to understand that experience to replicate it whenever you want. Once you read this chapter you can’t unread it: the conscious experience of gratitude will be in your brain. It’s easier to dismiss information and evidence than to dismiss an experience. Sure you want to continue? You may find yourself committing to developing the wonderful attitude of gratitude in your life.

Still with me? OK. Onward.

This chapter includes basic brain anatomy and brain chemicals. It explains why the attitude of gratitude feels so good after initial effort. It’ll take you through a thought experiment to experience gratitude through easy-to-follow instructions to focus your thoughts. We’ll then tease apart the experience to understand how gratitude likely works. We begin with a simplified version of your brain.

Your brain

Your brain is a complex, interesting and unfathomable universe. Recent science has come to understand much more about the brain and we still have a long way to go. When your brain works, you have a mind. The mind is best thought of as being a process and the vehicle through which it operates is the brain. REF To appreciate your brain, we’ll begin with some of your mind’s capabilities.

Imagine the following, and spend a good amount of time to experience each image before moving on to the next.

You’re reading. Notice that you are here, focussed on this page.

Now, imagine lazing on a yacht in the middle of a lake.

Put your sturdy yacht onto a peaceful ocean on a warm, clear day.

Move yourself to Hawaii and stare at an active volcano’s red glow.

Next sit next to Leonardo Da Vinci as he paints the Mona Lisa.

Now float weightless in a space-ship and see Saturn out the window.

Lastly, have lunch with Frodo Baggins at his home in the Hobbit Shire.

Did you do any of this? You were using your imagination, we know, but where did you actually go? Nowhere with your body, but all over space and time with your mind. What is your imagination? Where is your mind? How can you do this? Why do you have these capabilities? These capabilities are not strictly needed for survival, yet each person is capable of doing this. It’s astonishing: our minds can do things like this, every day and we take it for granted.

The existence of your imaginative mind is thanks to your flesh-and-blood brain. Your brain a fragile 1.5Kg lump of fat floating on fluid. It has the texture of tofu and it has protein added with glucose and oxygen it to keep it going. It’s made up of 60-100 billion neurons, “thinking units” which talk to each other through very thin electric cables called axons and dendrites, and through a complex system of chemical messengers. Each neuron is a tiny universe unto itself. It contains organelles, mitochondria, cytoplasm, nuclei, DNA and many more subatomic particles. Each neuron contains about 100 trillion atoms, each one lookin