As the end of the year approaches, this can be a great time to reflect on the last 12 months, come together with your family and friends, and think about what you’re grateful for. It’s a wonderful thing to do and there’s so much research about the benefits of gratitude on your physical, mental, and emotional well-being.

One of the proven benefits of gratitude is that it’s a key factor in building resilience. Researcher and author Shawn Achor explains that resilience is about how you recharge, not about how you endure. Resilience is the ability to take events in your stride, even when they are stressful, and it’s about being able to sustain your energy, even in highly demanding situations and tasks. Resilience is so important to your well-being because it’s one of the key ways to prevent burnout and give yourself the chance to truly thrive. Your resilience levels are fueled by qualities like optimism, which is where gratitude comes into play.

Gratitude is the most powerful tool to counteract your brain’s in-built negativity bias, which is your brain’s tendency to tune into the negative things that happen in your life and hold onto them. You may have noticed that you’re much more likely to remember negative feedback, criticism, mistakes you’ve made, or embarrassing moments than all of the positive feedback and things you’ve done right in your life. The way that gratitude helps to counteract this is that by actively choosing to focus on what you’re grateful for, your brain actually relives the experience, which puts it in a positive state.

According to Achor’s research, we know that your brain at positive performs significantly better than at negative, neutral, or stressed. Your intelligence rises, your creativity rises, and your energy levels rise. In fact, it’s been found that all business outcomes improve. Your brain at positive is 31% more productive than your brain at negative, neutral, or stressed. The advantages are significant.

The real power of gratitude is experienced when you have a consistent and regular practice. Studies show that if you can practice gratitude for 21 days in a row, this is enough to rewire your brain to retain a pattern of scanning the world not for the negative but for the positive first.

If you’ve never had a gratitude practice before, or if you want some ideas for how you could change things up, here are eight simple ways to bring in the benefits of gratitude on a daily basis:

There are so many ways that you can introduce gratitude into your life and the key, as always, is to find something that feels good to you.

At Women Rising, we are grateful for the feedback we get from the women who have been through our program and are privileged to witness their transformations.