Gratitude and Volunteering
November is a fantastic month of service, remembrance, and thankfulness. Midland Health and Midland Memorial Hospital have always given back to the community, especially around the holidays. As health professionals, we have a special place in our hearts for acts of service and kindness. Our willingness to volunteer for over 40 organizations around the Permian Basin is not just in service of others; it also helps us. Volunteering is a legacy practice as a hospital employee, not for the reasons you might expect. We volunteer because not only does it help our community and its members whom we cherish, but it helps us. Yes, volunteering is a way for our staff to cultivate gratitude, a significant and essential emotion when you work in high-stress areas like the hospital.
Gratitude, the mother of all emotions, can help humans decrease stress in daily life. Hopefully, we have all felt what it feels like to be appreciated. Gratitude is the emotion felt when a person does something good for another person without being asked, instructed, or incentivized. When children do chores without being asked, someone holds a door for a stranger, and the act of kindness is not in short supply: the best emotion to foster and grow is the feeling of gratitude. Gratitude, unfortunately, is not something humans are born knowing how to do. We must be taught and practiced through acts of giving and selflessness to experience the gratitude another human being feels for us and how grateful we can feel for someone else.
Gratitude is a powerful human emotion, and what does it have to do with stress? Gratitude is the body's natural stress reliever. By conveying and receiving simple thank-you messages, stress is reduced and managed by the body. Psychology and mental health researchers have established an overwhelming connection between gratitude and good health. Studies revealed overall feelings of improved health based on a drop in the stress hormone cortisol measured in people who reported feeling thankful, grateful, and appreciative. In stressful situations, the people who do the best are the people who help others. For humans, well-being is having a sense of purpose, supporting others, experiencing gratitude, and feeling grateful for our lives.
Several studies support the idea that helping others improves our health. Stress is reduced through the act of supporting others. The act doesn't have to be complex. Something as simple as a handwritten note, listening to a friend in need, or offering an afternoon to help a neighbor can cultivate gratitude between individuals and strengthen bonds and healing.
Tactics like keeping a gratitude journal create stress reduction, improve sleep quality, and build emotional awareness. Acts of gratitude are linked to optimism, improved mental health, stress management, sleep quality, self-worth, and even heart health.
Midland Memorial Hospital (MMH) and Midland Health employees are some of the most thoughtful and kind human beings in all of Texas, heck, the world, for that matter. We encourage you to show your kindness in the community this season through volunteering. Take one day, spend it helping someone else, and see how that act changes you.
The patient education coordinators for MMH took time recently to volunteer for the Literacy Coalition of the Permian Basin by making Powerbags. Midland Memorial Hospital employees and Midland Health Employees this year and this holiday season will volunteer at several organizations near and dear to our hearts: Hope Chest, Senior Life – Meals on Wheels, The Field's Edge, West Texas Food Bank, Dress an Angel – Helping Hands, The Midland Soup Kitchen Ministry, Vitalant – Blood Drives, Keep Midland Beautiful – Trash Pick Up Events, Gifts of Hope / Hope Circle, and Fix West Texas to name a few. We encourage you to reach out and volunteer; the gift of giving is always its own reward.