Week 21–27 November Writing Prompt | Theme: Gratitude
The Unlikely Brain Switch That Can Turn On and Stay On
Gratitude — how are you tapping into this powerful emotion?
Gratitude practices are some of those things you hear being spoken about over and over again. But when you look at the benefits that have been found through research, you can see why.
It can be mind-blowing to see the kinds of mental, physical and emotional transformations that people experience from practising feeling grateful on a daily basis.
According to Positive Psychology, just a few of those benefits include:
- Improving our psychological well-being
- Reducing stress
- Increasing our self-esteem
- Combatting depression
- Improving our relationships and overall social support
- Making us more giving and less needy
- Improving our decision-making abilities
- Improving sleep
- Reducing blood pressure
- Increasing our frequency of exercise.
“In positive psychology research, gratitude is strongly and consistently associated with greater happiness. Gratitude helps people feel more positive emotions, relish good experiences, improve their health, deal with adversity, and build strong relationships.” — Harvard Health Publishing
But how do you find the right daily gratitude practise that will work for you?
Gratitude Journaling Didn’t Work For Me
The power of gratitude is unrivaled by anything. There are no negative side effects, only positive, and it costs nothing. The only catch is that you must turn your practice into a true habit and really feel it for it to be effective.
Personally, I found keeping up a daily gratitude writing practice hard. Finding a time of day in my busy life when I knew I would always have the time to relax and allow myself to feel gratitude never quite worked.
I chose bedtime as my regular time. I had read that it would put me into a great frame of mind to then fall asleep. However, what actually happened was that every single evening, the last thing I felt like doing was exercising my brain to come up with five things I was grateful for without constantly repeating myself. I was tired and wanted to sleep.
Despite sticking to the exercise every single evening for around three months, I still found it a chore, and because of that, the true essence of gratitude was kind of elusive.
I gave up.
I even wondered whether this gratitude talk was a load of codswallop.
But then life took a bit of a rollercoaster ride and I ended up in a desperately sad place in my life. A place in which I struggled to find a positive direction to ever look in. A place where each morning, when I awoke, I found only a sense of hopelessness waiting for me.
The events that led to this are not so important. The fact is that depression happens to many and can creep up for all kinds of reasons.
The power of gratitude is unrivalled by anything. There are no negative side effects, only positive, and it costs nothing. The only catch is that you must turn your practice into a true habit and to really feel it for it to be effective.
It was when I was at my absolute lowest that I happened upon a blog that caught my attention.
At the time, we were approaching International Day of Happiness, which happens every year on March 20th. The author of the blog was using the excuse of the upcoming day to encourage people to join her project, which was a mission to spread the joy of gratitude worldwide through the medium of photographs.
A number of people had been starting to use photography as a means to capture a vision or a moment in time in which they felt a sense of gratitude. They found that developing that into a daily habit was more profound than any other gratitude practice they had come across. And, with photography now being something at our fingertips, what with our mobile phones having such high-quality cameras, the act of photographing things that you felt grateful for was almost effortless.
The project involved staying accountable by sharing your photos on social media, using the hashtag #capturinggratitude. You could also sign up for a seven-day video series on how to use photography in ways to make the practice even more fun.
I signed up and began.
The Dramatic Transformation
In the beginning, I struggled a little.
For the first few days, I would wonder each day what I could possibly find to take a photograph of. It wasn’t flowing naturally to me at all.
Within a few days, I found myself always looking for something that would strike me as gratitude-photo-worthy. This naturally evolved into my eyes constantly being drawn to things that struck me without even thinking about it.
A week or so into the practice, I was being bombarded with sensory experiences and moments that melted me with gratitude…
And…dare I say it…
Happiness.
Everything began to impact my senses in unexpected ways and I would feel utter joy from what had once seemed like every day, drab experiences.
The sunshine burning through the fog on a cold morning.
The vision of my bare feet in the fresh, green grass.
The sight of rain on the roses that climbed up the garage wall.
And everything that then happened would fill me with a sense of gratitude that literally seemed to spill right out of me.
A friend showed up one day with a child’s chair she had rescued from a skip, which she had then gone and fixed up beautifully. She turned up at my house to bring it for my little boy. That chair has remained a huge reminder of the abundance that my life seemed to attract in a matter of weeks, and the feeling of gratitude for that friend has never left me.
And it may sound corny to say, but my appreciation of all I have, my willingness to go out and make life happen, and my sense of having enough to always pay a little forward have remained constant ever since.
That’s how powerful turning on the gratitude switch has been for me.
This was written in response to Nancy Blackman, MASF’s question;
How has your practice of gratitude affected you? Have there been noticeable changes?
