How Gratitude Acts as Medicine

Physical symptoms are often manifestations of mental and emotional stress, and there’s one easy act you can do every day to bring calm to not only your mind, but almost every organ in your body.

Gratitude practices aren’t just a mindset but offer deep physiological impacts that influence your whole-body health. This concept is supported by both traditional Chinese medicine and western medicine perspectives.

I’ve watched emotional pain create worse physical symptoms in many of my patients, especially those with pain, stress, and perimenopause. Once they began adding gratitude rituals to their everyday lives, their treatments worked better and pain subsided easier.

 

How Emotions Affect Your Organs

In traditional Chinese medicine, we practice using the idea that different emotions influence different organs. When an emotion is held too long or becomes stagnant, it can disrupt the Qi (chi) of the organ it’s housed in, affecting its ability to function properly.

Qi is your vital energy that animates you, moves your blood, and keeps your organs functioning. When it’s perfectly balanced, you’ll experience great health both physically and mentally. Emotions have different effects on Qi – anger rises it, worry creates knots, grief contracts, and fear scatters.

Gratitude is a unique emotion that smooths and nourishes Qi. This is why gratitude is such a powerful practice if you’re experiencing pain or hormonal transitions – both require smooth Qi movement to recover properly.

Practicing Gratitude for Better Health

A daily gratitude ritual can have a dramatic effect on not just your mental health, but your physical health, too. You can experience:

• Parasympathetic activation

• Lower cortisol and adrenaline

• Lower inflammation

• Improved heart rate

• Better sleep

• Reduced pain intensity

Your gratitude practice doesn’t need to last hours a day. Even a few minutes can reset your nervous system and balance the Qi throughout your organs. Different intentions can even have specific implications on each organ. Here are practices you can do to nourish each organ, and I’ll explain how different emotions affect different organs later.

Heart centered breathing balances your heart and calms your spirit. Place one hand on the center of your chest, then inhale deeply and slowly through your nose. As you exhale, imagine that your breath is moving into your heart. Think about something that you’re grateful for, the more that you feel the emotion the more effective your practice will be. Stay with this feeling for 3-5 breaths.

An intention ritual with tea can nourish your spleen and kidneys. Make a warm cup of calming tea and sit with both feet on the ground. Take a moment before your first spit to think of something you’re grateful for from the day. Sip your tea slowly and imagine the warmth moving through your digestive system.

A gratitude scan can support your lungs and heart to shed grief and gain emotional balance. Start by scanning your body from head to toe and notice 2-3 things you did for your body that day. Every time you exhale, thank your body for providing for you. Repeat this process for 3 minutes.

Gratitude journaling can help your spleen and liver by offering emotional processing and mental clarity. Write down 3 things you’re grateful for, and why these things bring positivity and joy to your life. Take a slow breath between each entry and feel in your body how grateful you are for these things.

Practicing gratitude while stretching is a great way to get extra pain relief and support your liver. Choose a gentle stretch and identify something you’re thankful that your body can do. Continue to breathe slowly throughout your stretch.

Acupuncture is a great treatment to pair with gratitude to get the most out of your practice. Five Element Acupuncture focuses on how these emotions affect your organs, and how who you are plays a role in your health. If you want to maximize gratitude’s effect on your health, schedule an appointment with Good Needles Acupuncture to achieve the best state of health you can.

Heart Health and Gratitude

Your heart houses your mind and spirt, or your Shen. When your Shen is unsettled, you’ll feel anxiety, restlessness, irritability, insomnia, and racing thoughts. These can even lead to more physical symptoms like heart palpitations and heart weakening.

Gratitude anchors your heart and smooths its energy, helping the heightened emotions settled. From a western perspective, it’s even found that gratitude lowers your heart rate and blood pressure by activating your parasympathetic system. This also regulates cortisol spikes, the stress hormone.

For those with pain, your symptoms keep your nervous system in a heightened state. When your Shen calms, pain signals can calm. This softens your pain-stress cycle, helping you find relief, especially when paired with acupuncture.

If you’re dealing with perimenopause, you’re likely experiencing heart palpitations, restlessness, and emotional irregularity from your hormonal shifts. Gratitude steadies your heart and settles your Shen, easing the emotional intensity that can be difficult during this stage of your life.

Digestive Stress and Gratitude

Your spleen is in charge of digestion, energy, and mental clarity. Worry and ruminating thoughts weaken your spleen, which can lead to bloating, fogginess, and fatigue.

Gratitude pulls your mind away from overanalyzing your stressors and focuses on appreciation, relieving burden on your spleen. From a western perspective, it’s found that stress pulls blood flow away from digestion during fight or flight, and gratitude can help restore this process to normal function.

Worry can magnify pain. When you practice gratitude, it interrupts the mental loops that worsen your symptoms and calms inflammation. With a stronger spleen, you’ll have more stable energy for less intense pain patterns.

Perimenopause strains the spleen due to constant, intense hormonal fluctuations. Now your spleen must work harder to balance your blood sugar, stabilize your mood, and process work throughout the day. The worry and increased mental load from these fluctuations add an even bigger burden to the spleen. Gratitude eases mental spiraling and removes this burden from your spleen.

Lungs and Gratitude

Your lungs house feelings of grief, self-judgement, and heaviness. Qi from your lungs influences the quality of your breathing, immunity, skin, and emotional processing. Fall is the season of grief, so it’s especially important to practice gratitude during this time of year to nourish your lung health.

Gratitude lifts the heaviness that unprocessed grief leaves in your lungs, encouraging better breathing and immune response. With more oxygen, you’ll experience less tension and more lightness.

Pain can shorten your breath and tighten your chess, amplifying feelings of discomfort. Gratitude deepens your breath, allowing the stored emotions to release and pain to subside.

In perimenopause, you might’ve experienced waves of sadness or heaviness that feel difficult to process. By softening your lungs with gratitude, you help your body process these emotions and create more space to breathe comfortably.

Liver Health and Gratitude

When Liver Qi stagnates, you might feel irritability, tension, headaches, or anger. It’s in charge of the flow of Qi throughout your entire body, and it’s important that it functions well to keep you healthy. Gratitude dissolves the stagnated emotions that block your Qi.

Musculoskeletal pain likely has a component of liver Qi stagnation, leading to your tight muscles and headaches. When you practice gratitude to release stuck emotions, it helps process physical pain, too.

Perimenopause symptoms are strongly associated with your liver because of its role in processing hormones. Liver Qi stagnation shows up as mood swings, temperature swings, and irritability. When you smooth your Qi with gratitude, it lets go of the pent up anger and reactive symptoms.

Kidney Health and Gratitude

Your kidneys store your Yin and Yang energies, which are the balancing energies that nourish and activate your body. Fear, overwhelm, and stress deplete your kidneys, but gratitude builds them back up.

Chronic pain is incredibly depleting, especially when fear comes with it. Gratitude reduces this fear to nourish and warm your kidneys, helping your body build resilience against pain.

Yin declines during perimenopause, which leads to night sweats, anxiety, and fatigue. Gratitude reduces the fear that often comes with these symptoms, giving your kidneys the ability to restore themselves.

Rebuilding Your Health With Gratitude

The more treatments you combine with gratitude, the more your health will flourish. I recommend routine acupuncture with these treatments to get the most out of your gratitude practice.

Five Element Acupuncture is a great way to tap into who you truly are to get the most out of both your treatment and your gratitude practice. I practice this form of acupuncture in my clinic in Lakewood, CO. If you’re interested in giving it a try, schedule an appointment and we can begin the work to rebuilding your Qi, organs, and happiness.