4 . What if a simple practice could greatly enhance your happiness, promote your physical health, improve your relationships, and even help you deal with life’s toughest challenges?     1     However, countless studies and personal stories show this powerful secret: gratitude.

Gratitude is a powerful emotion and a transformative habit.     2     It’s also about acknowledging the goodness in our lives and recognizing that the source of the goodness often comes from the outside of ourselves. It’s a celebration of the positive aspects of life, both big and small.

Practicing gratitude encourages us to change our viewpoint from scarcity (缺乏) to abundance. It prevents us from focusing on what we lack or what we want, directing our attention instead to the happiness we already have.     3     By encouraging positive emotions, gratitude can help reduce feelings of anxiety and depression. Moreover, it can enhance overall mood and emotional resilience, enabling us to better cope with stress and life’s challenges.

    4     Research has suggested that individuals who regularly practice gratitude report fewer physical problems, experience less pain, and generally feel healthier than others. They’re also more likely to engage in health-promoting behavior, such as regular exercise and routine check-ups.

Gratitude plays an important role in developing strong relationships. It helps to strengthen bonds, reduce aggression (挑衅), and promote feelings of social satisfaction.     5    .

5 . We all know that staying healthy is important. So here is another health tip: Empathy, which refers to the ability to share another person’s feelings and emotions as if they were your own. How can this be? Isn’t empathy about focusing on the other person?     1    ?

Empathy helps you survive

Empathy can save your life, which certainly is good for your health!     2    . If someone is screaming and running for you to follow, or even has a look of terror on their face, you pick up their fear and immediately tune in to the situation. That can be the moment when you run away from a dangerous situation.

Empathy connects you to others

    3    . While it may be centered on figuring out what is going on for others, in that process, you nurture the important human ability to connect better with others, And being connected to others is good for your well-being.

    4    

Stress may be brought on by many different things. Over periods of time, this state of pressure becomes unhealthy. When you fully engage in empathy, you draw on skills for emotion regulation (调节). In doing so, you are also controlling emotions that can be stressful.

Empathy guides your moral code of conduct

Perhaps larger than almost everything is how you treat others and expect to be treated.     5    . When you create rules that make you safe, protect you from those acting badly, and take care of those less fortunate, you are using empathy to guide those codes.

6 . It makes the world go round. It teaches lessons, makes people feel warm, and sometimes causes pain.     1     That’s right — we’re talking about the knee shaking, palm sweating, heart pounding feeling of love!

There are many types of love. Most people feel love for members of their family—this long-term connection is often called attachment. They may feel this same emotion toward friends or even pets.     2     These feelings are quite different from those people feel for family and friends. Sometimes, these initial feelings grow into long-term love similar to that felt in families.

Why do people feel love? Many experts believe it’s rooted in survival. After all, most people first feel love for family members or caretakers.     3     Especially for children, this is a major advantage for survival. Later in life, when people start to love romantic partners, this is driven by similar needs.

    4     It can reduce stress and lower blood pressure. Spending time with loved ones can also lead to a longer lifespan. In fact, close family and community relationships is one factor that may help people live longer.

With all this talk about love, maybe someone, you care about is on your mind. How can you show someone you love them? There are plenty of ways! You can convey love by showing appreciation, giving praises, and being a good listener. Sharing, doing small favors, or giving a hug can also show a person you care.     5     If you care about someone, tell them so. Making a card or writing them a letter can also be great ways to share love. If you’re not sure what to do, just ask yourself: What actions make you feel loved?

7 . The Dance of Life

Before children learn to talk, and without having seen anyone dance, they express happiness through simple rhythmic movements or what we later recognize as simple dances.     1     There are birds that actually have group dances: circling, bowing, advancing, and retreating in unison.

Nevertheless, it is only human beings who have adapted dance to therapeutic purposes. Dance as therapy goes back a long time. Primitive people first danced by themselves instinctively and found, after a while, that repeated rhythmic movements produced a good feeling.     2     This was the birth of dance therapy.

    3     It was used for a wide variety of purposes and on different occasions: religious ceremonies, war dances, hunting dances, rain dances, planting and harvesting dances, marriage and funeral dances. Sadly, today, many “advance” industrial societies, such as the U. S. , have lost many of the functions connected to these older dances. They have been replaced, for example, with rave dancing which, at its best, involves shaking your body at a rave or nightclub.

But the “primitive” use of dance as therapy has recently seen a huge revival.     4     There are nearly two million website for dance therapy on the Internet, and dance therapy groups around the world combine pleasure with health and well-being. People who may be put off by therapies based on weird philosophies will readily take to dancing every Saturday night. Dance therapy nowadays, in fact, is taken very seriously by both alternative and conventional medical practitioners. It would seem that the “dance of life” continues to move us all.

8 . While everyone feels lonely at times, being alone too much can negatively affect your physical and emotional health. Studies have found that loneliness can be just as harmful to your health as smoking 15 cigarettes per day.     1     . Here is something you can do right away when you feel lonely.

·Acknowledge that you’re feeling alone

Admitting feeling alone doesn’t mean you’re a loser or you’re weak.     2     . So simply putting a name to loneliness might help your brain make sense of how you’re feeling and instantly help you feel a little less lonely.

·     3    

When you are feeling alone, sometimes it’s easier to connect with old friends than it is to make new ones. Perhaps you have lost touch with your college roommates over the years. You might reach out and see how they’re doing. Talk about how you’ve missed being able to catch up and say that you’d like to reconnect.

·Join a group or club

    4     . From book clubs and community service projects to hiking groups and business societies, you will likely discover there are many ways to connect with people in your area.

·Learn something new

Getting excited about something you’re learning— whether it’s a new language or a new skill— might help when you are feeling alone.     5     .

9 . Having an actual phobia (恐惧症) is anything but enjoyable.     1     . For children, it leads to heightened anxiety and may lead up to school avoidance. If you or your child experiences a phobia, you may wish to try the following to reduce the distress surrounding it.

1. Name the fear.

    2     . Dr. Dan Siegel, clinical professor of psychiatry at UCLA, summarizes this experience as “name it to tame it.” Pixar’s movie Monsters, Inc. illustrates this nicely as the monster in the closet becomes less scary when Boo names it Kitty.

2. Talk about and analyze the fear.

Ask yourself whether the fear is sensible.     3     . It is important to note that while the percentage of many feared items happening is extremely remote, they are not necessarily 0 percent. Therefore, this step is often paired with finding a way to make peace with the feared stimulus (刺激物) still existing in the world.

3. Safely face the fear.

This is demonstrated to be the most enduring way to put fears behind us. Any unhelpful coping mechanisms, especially avoidance, must be removed.     4     . For instance, if someone is afraid of snakes, picturing a snake in one’s mind comes first, then looking at a picture of the sidewinder (响尾蛇), and finally going to the zoo. These steps can be paired with relaxation strategies to limit the physiological fear response. Not facing, or worse, avoiding, fear tends to give it more power and make the phobia stronger over time.

    5     . However, when that fear becomes excessive or fixed, it can prevent us from enjoying the joys or necessities of life. If a phobia persists, it is always an option to seek the help of a mental health professional. Whatever you do, it is important not to let the fear consume you or your child’s life.