I love Thanksgiving. Why? It’s pretty much uncorrupted. No need for 24/7 holiday songs. No religious arguments. No stressed-out people pushing and shoving in an attempt to find some perfect gift. No crazy amounts of decorating.

It’s pure. And simple. And you can take from that to build a practice that will keep you well.

If you’re reading this, you have plenty of reasons to feel thankful. Yes, no matter what. But, in our society, those too often get brushed over while the bad stuff gets a lot of attention. And what that does is increase your stress level and damage your health.

So, instead, let’s return to simplicity and a season of gratitude. How and why? Here’s why first:

• Record what you’re grateful for each day, and you will feel better and experience fewer health problems. Participants in a study who focused on gratitude reported better health than those in the same study who either listed hassles they experienced or wrote about anything that impacted them.
• In another study, the gratitude group reported falling asleep easier, getting more sleep and feeling more refreshed when they woke up.
• Gratitude helps protect against heart attacks. One study showed this while another demonstrated that the heart rhythms of people who held loving, appreciative thoughts in their minds followed a more coherent, rhythmic pattern.
• Gratitude helps you manage stress and deal with daily problems better.
• Grateful people are more optimistic, and that boosts your immune system. Among a group of healthy, first-year law students under stress, those characterized as optimistic maintained higher numbers of blood cells that protect the immune system than their more pessimistic classmates.

Here are some suggestions for how:

• Keep a gratitude journal. Every day — at night before you go to sleep is a good time but choose whatever you can be consistent with — write down a minimum of five things you are grateful for. While you can be general, i.e. having a roof over your head, also look for smaller, specific instances, i.e. the sun breaking through on a cloudy day.
• Put up visual cues to remind you to be positive. Even a post it note on your computer, in your car and/or on your refrigerator with an uplifting phrase is enough.
• Enlist a gratitude partner, someone who wants to work on this just as much as you do. Or, as an alternative, spend more time with someone you know who sees the good in life. Role models count at any age.
• Become aware of what you think, the inner dialogue you have with yourself. A lot of negative can exist there. Awareness is the first key to changing it. But, please, please, don’t beat yourself up for those thoughts. Notice them, discover how you can switch them around, then see how they reduce over time.
• Reframe situations you might tend to see in a negative light.
• Extend gratitude to others. What goes around truly does come around.

Take any part of this and begin to practice it as regularly as you can. You only build your gratitude muscle by putting it into action. Once a year is not enough.