Enhance Mental Health With a Culture of Gratitude

Work contributes significantly to mental health. Based on everything from assignments and responsibilities to relationships with leaders and colleagues, work makes a difference in how people feel physically, cognitively and emotionally.

You can enhance your own mental health and your company can play a role as well by ensuring you have a sense of purpose, performing as well as you can and seeking opportunities for growth. But another way to nurture and sustain mental health is through something unexpected: gratitude.

You can foster gratitude for yourself, and organizations can cultivate cultures of gratitude—and these will have positive effects for people as well as for business.

Gratitude can be defined broadly in a few different ways. You can think of it as an overall attitude of appreciation or a way of being—a focus on what’s positive in life. Gratitude is also an emotion—when you feel thankful for a situation or toward someone for something they’ve done, for example. And gratitude is an expression as well—when you demonstrate your attitude or your feeling through actions and the things you say or do.

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