When was the last time you expressed gratitude toward yourself?
If you’re like me, maybe never?
I’m so busy expressing gratitude for other people or situations that fall outside of me, but never for myself.
It never occurred to me to thank myself for getting up and making myself coffee, for going to the gym and lifting weights, or even for making a greater time investment in my dental routine.
Somewhere in my childhood, I received the message that this kind of self-gratitude was vain, entitled, and rude. I learned at a young age to prioritize humility—even to myself—and to downplay or diminish praise from others and even myself.
I’m not sure where this unhealthy mental program originated, but I can tell you where it ends.
Right now. Before Thanksgiving, the holiday where we express gratitude for potentially everything in our lives, except for possibly ourselves.
Essential oils have helped me create the space for more self-love and gratitude. In advance of Thanksgiving, I am excited to share my new self-gratitude ritual.
What is Self-Gratitude?
Self-gratitude is the practice of appreciating and valuing yourself, your accomplishments, and your internal qualities.
Gratitude is the conscious act of feeling grateful for tangible or intangible things. It involves a conscious effort to acknowledge your strengths, celebrate your successes, and recognize your own self-worth.
It is the process of recognizing and acknowledging yourself as much as you appreciate others and external wins in your life. Self-gratitude is about being grateful for who you are, how you choose to navigate the world, and what you have accomplished. Feeling gratitude for yourself can manifest as being thankful for who you are on the inside. It is a way for you to see yourself as valuable and worthy of love, care, attention, admiration, respect, and enjoyment.
Benefits of Practicing Self-Gratitude
Research finds that focusing on self-gratitude practice may help you boost your mood by enhancing your ability to feel more positive emotions, improving physical health, and enhancing cognitive functions, including memory.
Gratitude has been found to:
- Improve physical health: Research finds that gratitude is linked to traits indicative of better physical health, including conscientiousness, emotional stability, and optimism.
- Enhance Emotional Regulation: Research on gratitude shows that it activates brain regions associated with emotional regulation, decision-making, and reward processing. The experience of gratitude alters physiological aspects of the brain, including feelings of happiness and contentment.
- Boost Cognition: Research on” Neural correlates of gratitude” correlated gratitude with brain activity associated with moral cognition. The research found that when you are grateful, it activates reward circuits related to social interaction and social cognitive processes.
What’s more, self-gratitude and the feeling of being appreciated can help you to feel happier and more content with your life. This is because the act of giving thanks to yourself can make you feel better about yourself and present benefits like:
- Nervous System Regulation: Gratitude activates the parasympathetic branch of your nervous system. Gratitude may help condition the brain to handle stress better and rewire the brain to filter negative ruminations and focus on positive thoughts.
- Increased Mental Strength: The HeartMath Institute found that when you feel gratitude or appreciation, your heart rhythms become more synchronized and coherent, which increases the mental clarity, resilience, and well-being needed for discernment and better choices.
- Enhanced Emotional Resilience: Feelings of gratitude have been found to activate the parts of your limbic system that have been found to help regulate emotions and calm feelings of anger, fear, and sadness. This seems to work, in part, because gratitude enhances empathy and reduces aggression. At the neurochemical level, feelings of gratitude are associated with increased neural modulation of the prefrontal cortex, the brain region responsible for managing negative emotions such as guilt, shame, and aggression.
- Boost Mood: Gratitude has been found to boost serotonin and activate the brain stem to produce dopamine, improving mood and making us feel good. HeartMath researchers found that “gratitude causes a synchronized activation in multiple brain regions and lights up parts of the brain’s reward pathways. Gratitude can boost endorphins that produce a natural euphoric rush; it can increase oxytocin—the love or bonding hormone—where you feel more warm-hearted connections with others; it can boost the neurotransmitter serotonin that makes you feel happy and calm; and it activates the brain stem to produce dopamine, which helps you feel pleasure.
- Lower Stress: Gratitude may reduce negative emotions and provide a natural stress reduction. Studies on gratitude and appreciation found that participants experienced lower cortisol levels.
- Reduce Anxiety and Depression. By reducing stress hormones, gratitude reduces symptoms of depression and anxiety. Gratitude and gratitude journaling have been found to reduce anxiety. Self-gratitude enhances hope and optimism about the future, which helps you appreciate the positive things in your life.
- Reduce Pain: Gratitude may reduce feelings of pain by regulating dopamine levels. Research on “Counting Blessings Versus Burdens” found a positive effect on physical well-being among participants with neuromuscular diseases. Similarly, a 2012 study published in Personality and Individual Differences found that grateful people experience fewer aches and pains and report feeling healthier than other people.
- Enhance Immune Function: Gratitude and feelings of appreciation help regulate the effective functioning of the immune system. Research found that gratitude may reduce physical symptoms such as headaches, sore muscles, and nausea. Gratitude is believed to downregulate threat responses, decreasing cellular inflammation.
- Improve Sleep: Studies have shown that receiving and displaying simple acts of kindness and expressing gratitude activate the hypothalamus, which helps regulate bodily mechanisms that promote better sleep.
- Promotes a positive feedback loop: The physiological calming effects of gratitude make it easier to continue practicing it, which can lead to a more positive outlook and behavior patterns over time.
Essential Oils to Support Your Self-Gratitude Practice
Essential oils can help support your daily self-gratitude practice.
Your sense of smell can evoke emotions and memories. It has a significant effect on our mood and how we respond to specific situations, making essential oils an “essential” tool to help you fully embrace the feeling of gratitude.
Essential oils may help you enhance feelings of love, gratitude, and abundance. Your sense of smell links directly to the limbic lobe of your brain, which stores and releases emotional memories and trauma. Smelling essential oils can help you mobilize and release negative emotions so you can sincerely feel gratitude and appreciation for all aspects of yourself and your life.
Plants and the oils derived from plants help not only with physical ailments but also with emotional processing. They help support movement and gently release stagnation, including emotional stagnation, so that you can begin to release stuck energy and old patterns and open up to new potential.
Essential oils can also calm the intensity of the emotional flow, allowing you to chunk the release so that it feels more manageable. In this way, essential oils help you control the duration of the pain, releasing just a small amount of intensity at a time, much like slowly and carefully unscrewing the top of a carbonated beverage to release excess carbonation without an explosion.
Combining essential oils with positive thoughts or feelings of gratitude can help expedite your healing.
My Essential Oil Self-Gratitude Practice
As a gift to myself, I start and end my day with an essential oil gratitude practice. I feel that the oils both calm my body and mind, allowing me to receive this powerful self-care ritual better and amplify the health benefits of gratitude.
I keep the following blends on my nightstand, along with a gratitude journal, and I start and end every day by writing down or repeating to myself 3 (or more) things I am grateful for. If you are new to gratitude journaling, I wanted to share some ideas to get you started. When I am struggling to find gratitude, I might write something like:
- I am proud of how I continue to show up for myself
- I am proud of how far I’ve come, even on the hard days
- I am grateful for the peace I find in quiet moments
- I am thankful for my body’s ability to rest and recover
- I am grateful for how I have grown through the years
- I am grateful for the strength I showed today
- I am grateful for the little things in my life that spark joy
- I am grateful for the lessons I learned today
- I am grateful for all the little achievements I make every day
- I am thankful for my body’s natural ability to heal
- I am proud of the boundaries I’ve learned to set
- I am thankful for the kindness I showed today
- I am thankful for the ability to choose how I respond
- I am grateful for the growth I’ve found in discomfort
- I am proud of the courage it took to keep going
- I am grateful for the clarity I’ve gained over time
- I am thankful for this moment, precisely as it is
How to use self-gratitude prompts:
- Say them out loud: Repeat them to yourself while looking in a mirror or inhaling essential oils.
- Incorporate them into daily routines: Say them while brushing your teeth, driving, or getting ready in the morning.
- Write them down: Keep a journal or write them on a sticky note to place them where you can see them often.
- Say them before sleep: Use them to end your day with a sense of peace and gratitude.
Essential Oils for Self-Gratitude
Essential oils can trigger changes in mood, stress levels, and energy — all of which can help strengthen feelings of gratitude. My favorite essential oil blends to support gratitude are:
Heart™
Heart™ balances the heart to enhance self-compassion and support, integrate, and reset all body systems, including supporting feelings of receptivity to self-gratitude.
Your heart integrates and balances your physical, emotional, and mental bodies, providing blood to every cell and every organ. It also serves as a complex information-processing center, influencing brain function, the nervous and hormonal systems, and most of the body’s major organs. When any part of your body isn’t functioning optimally, your heart has to work harder. For example, when your body is in a state of stress, it needs more oxygen, increasing your heart rate. Your heart is your body’s reset button. Still, a state of constant stress can fatigue the heart and compromise our ability to reset, leading to inflammation, infections, toxicity, and heart disease.
By returning your heart to balance, you support the cardiovascular and circulatory systems, regenerate the structure of your heart, and help reset the homeostatic mechanisms of your entire body. Heart™ is formulated with powerful calming oils, including Jasmine, which is as calming as the anti-anxiety drug valium, according to a 2010 study. Jasmine has a mildly soothing effect, helping alleviate anxious thoughts, relieve stress, and ease depression. Jasmine oil stimulates the brain, helping to uplift mood and promote feelings of self-confidence and optimism.
Heart™ blend also contains Neroli, known to soothe anxiety and frantic thoughts, calm negative emotional responses, and support optimism.
Apply Heart™ over your heart (left side of the chest) to balance the heart and support, integrate, and reset all body systems, including mental clarity, physical health, and emotional balance. Heart™ blend also supports feelings of open-heartedness, expansiveness, and receptivity while mitigating loneliness, sadness, and grief.
As you deeply breathe in Heart™, try to breathe in the deep sense of gratitude and allow yourself to receive love and praise. As you slowly exhale, allow your breath to dispel any patterns of low self-worth or self-limiting beliefs.
Fascia Release™
While it is very easy for me to give love, it has always been difficult to receive compliments, help, or even self-gratitude.
Opening your heart to receiving love—including self-love—requires you to also open the tissues around your physical heart that can hold on to blocked or stuck heart energy. Opening the space around your physical heart with a fascia blend helps amplify and enhance your capacity for gratitude.
You see, when you experience stress or heartbreak, part of you is resistant, which triggers you to physically contract, constrict, or pull away from physical danger, a negative thought, or an emotional aversion. In the process, you constrict and physically guard your heart in preparation for an attack. This causes you to physically constrict forward—think fetal position—and constrict the muscles on the back of the heart.
When you do this, you internalize the fear without release or recovery. In short, energy doesn’t flow, and your body constricts, which locks the stress in your body. And blocks your ability to receive love from yourself and others.
Topically applying Fascia Release™ over the front and back of your physical heart—with focused application both above the clavicle bones in sweeping outward motions and in a gentle vertical caress from your throat and the sides of your neck down over and below the heart—opens the space to allow energy and emotions to flow down and out of your system.
Formulated with essential oils derived from flexible plants with deep roots in the earth, like Frankincense, Fascia Release™ helps improve mental and physical flexibility, providing the physical and emotional space to release any old thoughts or physical patterns that may be interfering with your ability to receive self-love and gratitude.
Fascia Release™ blend contains Lavender oil, known for its calming and soothing effects. Lavender is known to calm the mind, which makes it easier to focus on gratitude. Rose is known for its ability to open the heart, supporting feelings of self-compassion and self-gratitude. Frankincense helps calm your nervous system and promotes mental flexibility. This may help encourage emotional honesty and promote capacity for self-gratitude. Finally, Ylang Ylang helps balance heightened emotions and eases mental restlessness, which might make it easier for you to stay present in the moment and practice gratitude. A study on the “Harmonizing Effect of Ylang-Ylang Oil” highlights how inhaling Ylang Ylang can stimulate your senses and keep you focused.
Topically apply Fascia Release™ over the front and back of the heart, over the throat, or inhale to support your gratitude practice.
Parasympathetic®
Activating the parasympathetic nervous system counteracts your stress response, promoting relaxation and greater awareness, which enhances your capacity to experience gratitude.Parasympathetic® shifts the nervous system from the sympathetic (“fight-or-flight”) mode to the parasympathetic “rest and digest” mode, creating a sense of calm that enhances your mental capacity, helping to support the brain to help you remain steady, calm, and optimistic, which then allows you to identify and experience self-gratitude more clearly.
Your sympathetic “fight or flight” state turns on when survival and safety are threatened—which can occur during unexpected, intense, and sudden stress or change. When you are stuck in a cycle of sympathetic dominance—not activating your parasympathetic nervous system—your body’s alert mechanism for survival remains on high. You can become trapped in a perception that you are not safe, which lays the groundwork for pessimism and negative thinking.
The parasympathetic system restores a sense of safety and balance, which calms the brain and the body by activating the parasympathetic nervous system to help you identify and support your own needs. The research found that when stimulated, your vagus nerve releases anti-anxiety chemicals that help you focus on positive emotions, decrease mental distress, and improve mental well-being.
Parasympathetic® empowers a flexible mindset and the ability to pivot when necessary, which can be valuable in a rapidly changing environment. Although external events— such as death, divorce, illness, and even election results—fall outside of your control, the parasympathetic branch of your nervous system allows you to intentionally and thoughtfully choose how you react to these events. As a result, you may feel empowered to sustain resilience, identify the most efficient path forward, and demonstrate the ability to make wise decisions even in turbulent times while guiding others.
Research has found that your parasympathetic nervous system supports the development of learned optimism by helping you think about your reactions to adversity in new ways and by consciously challenging negative self-talk. This learned optimism involves cognitive restructuring, where you can help yourself and others become more optimistic by consciously challenging negative, self-limiting thinking and replacing it with more optimistic thought patterns.
When you do not feel safe envisioning a positive outcome, you might activate what is known as a freeze response of your nervous system—also known as disassociation so that you don’t feel pain. This often includes a disconnection to your sense of smell. Smelling essential oils, like Parasympathetic®, can help thaw the freeze response and restore your ability to sense your environment and feel safe in it. This sense of embodiment and safety may help you feel more engaged, attentive, and present in the moment, which may help you avoid worrying about future events and things beyond your control.
Apply Parasympathetic® over the vagus nerve (behind the earlobe on the mastoid bone) to activate the vagus nerve. This activation helps discharge energy and shift from the frozen state into the healing parasympathetic.
Limbic Reset™
It is almost impossible to experience gratitude when you are stuck in a mental loop that focuses on the negative. It is your limbic system—and particularly your amygdala—that keeps you stuck in that negative thought cycle. Shifting your limbic system into a more positive start may help enhance your capacity to experience self-gratitude.
Limbic Reset™ helps calm the amygdala (the brain’s fear center), making it easier to experience positive emotions, such as gratitude.
As you may know, your limbic system is the emotional control center of your brain. It helps you process emotions, engage in social interactions, learn, and stay motivated. When your limbic system detects a stressful situation, it activates the amygdala, which floods the body with stress hormones. Simply put, when the amygdala is overactive, gratitude becomes harder to access.
Resetting your limbic system brings your brain out of survival mode and into a state of regulation, where you can then reconnect with gratitude.
Inhaling essential oils is one of the quickest ways to lower limbic activation. Your sense of smell connects directly to your amygdala—only two synapses away—making scent uniquely powerful for emotional shifts.
When your limbic system is calm, your brain can more easily access thoughts of appreciation and gratitude.
Limbic Reset™ contains a proprietary blend of essential oils designed to calm threat arousal and send safety cues, helping reset your limbic system and supporting healthy emotional regulation. Limbic Reset™ was explicitly formulated with essential oils such as Frankincense and Sandalwood, which contain the chemical constituent sesquiterpenes, which may help increase oxygen in the limbic system, promoting mental clarity and focus while also encouraging feelings of thankfulness.
The citrus oils in Limbic Reset™ help lift your mood and clear your energy, so you do not take on or carry negative emotions or a pessimistic mindset toward others. For example, Melissa oil is known as an antidepressant with uplifting, emotion-balancing compounds.
Limbic Reset™ also contains Helichrysum oil, which is touted for brain function and known to cross the blood-brain barrier and carry oxygen to the limbic system to help rewire neural circuits in your limbic system and calm an overactive stress response. Cedarwood is known for its stabilizing and grounding aroma, and Ylang-Ylang supports emotional balance.
Featured Oils:
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