According to the American Heart Association, “expressing gratitude can improve sleep, mood and immunity, can decrease depression, anxiety, chronic pain and disease.” Consistently combining gratitude observation with the performance of acts of thankfulness can help raise your positivity, too. If you want to begin or up your gratitude practice, the New Ulm Public Library has books to help guide and inspire your plan. Here is a list of books–with descriptions from the publishers–to get you started.

Gratitude by Oliver Sacks. “Gratitude is Sacks’ meditation on why life [continued] to enthrall him even as he [faced] the all-too-close presence of his own death, and how to live out the months that [remained] in the richest and deepest way possible.”

The Gratitude Diaries: how a year looking on the bright side can transform your life by Janice Caplan. “On New Year’s Eve, journalist and former Parade editor in chief Janice Kaplan makes a promise to be grateful and look on the bright side of whatever happens. She realizes that how she feels over the next twelve months will have less to do with the events that occur than with her own attitude and perspective.”

Wake up Grateful: the transformative practice of taking nothing for granted by Kristi Nelson. “As you go about your days, it is easy to get stuck in a mindset of anxiety and scarcity. In this book the author invites you to open yourself to the gifts already available to you. With exercises, prompts, meditations, and affirmations she shows that you have the tools for bring gratefulness into your own life.”

Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude by Ross Gay. “The pieces in this book, become a sustained meditation on that which goes away– loved ones, the seasons, the earth as we know it — that tries to find solace in the processes of the garden and the orchard.”

Get Me through the Next Five Minutes by James Parker. “Each ode is an exercise in gratitude. Each celebrates the permanent susceptibility of everyday humdrum life to dazzling saturations of divine light: the squirrel in the street, the crying baby, the misplaced cup of tea. Parker’s odes are songs of praise, but with a decent amount of complaining in there, too: a human ratio of moans.”

The Thank you Project by Nancy Davis Kho. “As it turns out, emerging research proves that actively appreciating the formative people in your life, past and present, can lead to a lasting increase in your happiness levels–and this book offers a charming, entertaining roadmap to see, say and savor your way there.”

Resilient: How to Grow an Unshakeable Core of Calm, Strength and Happiness by Rick Hanson. “These days it’s hard to count on the world outside. So it’s vital to grow strengths inside like grit, gratitude, and compassion—the key to resilience, and to lasting well-being in a changing world. True resilience is much more than enduring terrible conditions. We need resilience every day.”

We have many more books–for all ages– on this topic at the library. See you soon!