ThanksLIVING - Revisiting Gratitude
This time of year I am always perplexed as to why we are compelled to show gratitude on just one day. One of my good friends told me that she was trying to make every day a day of gratitude - making it more of a ThanksLiving year-round.
Gratitude helps people feel more positive emotions, relish good experiences, improve their health, deal with adversity, and build strong relationships. It is almost impossible to feel anxious if you are feeling gratitude simultaneously.
But knowing what one should do is not the same as knowing how to do it. How do we have gratitude? How can we live in a mindset completely opposed to the entitled, ungrateful, whiny, empty way most people live?
The answer is far simpler than we realize.
Grateful people search for good.
It doesn’t require a unique gift to find the negative in any situation. No one is perfect, so there are problems all around. Especially in our world of 24-hour news.
Gratitude mindset muscles that lack exercise can atrophy into complaint.
Work those muscles!!! Finding the good does require effort. It is rarely on the surface or in the spotlight. Most often the best of things are hidden underneath an appearance of normalcy or the mundane. Our eyes are easily misdirected from the good by fault or mistake. While negative qualities often leap off a page, the positive attributes of people or circumstances are most often overlooked.
But some can see them. Some have trained their eyes in such a way that they can see good where no one else can.
Grateful people have a unique ability to find the good which is around them. They do not deny the bad. They do not turn a blind eye to suffering or refuse to speak of sorrow. But in the midst of the negative experiences of life, they actively seek the positive, identify it, celebrate it, and recount it for others to hear.
We have so much to be grateful for. Just look at the past two years when we were not able to get together with our family, we can see each other now!
Try this! Get in the practice of writing down 3 things that you are grateful for every day. See if it doesn't kick start those gratitude muscles.
All material was gathered and researched through my amazing fellowship program, The Arizona Center for Integrative Medicine.
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