How To Practice Gratitude and Stay Connected with Your Loved Ones
Photo by Glenn Carstens-Peters on Unsplash. This post was originally published here.
A daily exercise to calm your anxiety and deepen your bonds
“Gratitude helps people feel more positive emotions, relish good experiences, improve their health, deal with adversity, and build strong relationships.”
There are so many benefits to practicing gratitude but you only experience them if you put in the work.
If you scribble down items like you’re writing a shopping list, then you aren’t going to feel the positive effects.
A gratitude practice is about deeply acknowledging the parts of your life and your experience that you appreciate. It is taking the time to feel the gratefulness you hold within you. It takes work.
I know, because I learned the hard way.
In 2017 I was eighteen months sober and obsessing about drinking. What was the point of not drinking if I wasn’t going to feel happy?
My sobriety coach at the time set me an exercise. She told me to write a list of ten things I was grateful for every evening and read it back in the morning.
She told me to focus on small, specific, sensory details. The sort of sentence I was used to turning when worldbuilding for a novel. She suggested I send it to a friend, to keep myself accountable, and pay attention to how I felt after doing it.
For the next six months I committed to this. For the first time in my life, I cultivated a gratitude practice. Something I made an effort to do on a daily basis. Whether I was tired or not, whether I felt grateful or not, I wrote down ten things and I sent it to a friend.
And guess what happened? I began to feel better. I noticed that my days were full of small gifts. That even when I was afraid of the future, there were beautiful things right here and now. I stopped obsessing about beer.
Not only this, but gratitude was infectious. I invited more friends to join me, wanting to share the positivity and I started to receive four or five lists a day.
It is something that I have continued, sporadically, ever since that time it saved my life by keeping me sober.
So set aside ten minutes, and start practicing now.
There are lots of gratitude apps you can use. I use a recovery app called My Spiritual Toolkit, which contains a gratitude list function. If you love stationary use a special notebook.
And if you’re struggling to feel grateful at the moment, that is understandable. But put the effort in. Remember this is a practice.
Picture the person you are most grateful for, see them smiling at you, feel your energy lift in response. Remember something specific they said that made you laugh. Feel how lucky you are to have them. The items on your list should make you smile or feel like smiling.
Focus on specific, sensory details. A perfectly made coffee or the sound of your partner’s voice when he calls you a pet name.
Find something beautiful to focus on. Look out of your window at the pink apple blossom or a perfectly white seagull.
Remember to feel the pleasure of noticing.
When you have ten items, send it to a few of your closest people via Whatsapp. If you wrote by hand, send a photo of your list. Invite your friends to write one back and join you.
Reading the highlights of your favourite people’s day will shake you out of your own thoughts for a moment. It will cheer you up, and help you feel connected. It allows you to get to know each other better. And it inspires you to write your next list.
Sometimes you will make it onto your friends’ gratitude lists, and you get to see the positive impact you can have when you are kind or hilarious or helpful.
Practicing gratitude in this way changes you from the inside. It helps you through difficult periods, without turning to negative coping strategies. It trains you to appreciate all the positives in your life at a time when you are struggling.
It encourages you to create more enjoyable moments because you understand what gives you pleasure, plus you know you will have something to write about later.
Exchanging gratitude lists helps you to understand your own life, and reflect on what you want more of. It reminds you of how many different ways there are to spend your time, even when you are in self-isolation.
Sharing your lists helps you to connect more deeply and positively with your dearest friends and relatives.
If you feel far from gratitude, then put the effort in, and see if you begin to feel better. The hours of gratitude you undertake in the process of learning to live through this mad time will train you in resilience.
Over time, you will find that you can tune into Gratitude FM more easily because you have done it successfully so many times before. Sometimes the music might get hazy, but you will find you know the frequency off by heart.
If you keep doing the work of twisting the dial and paying attention, you’ll get there. And your friends and relatives can join you too.
by Chelsey Flood