Unsticking Your Gratitude Practice
Thanks to inspirations like Brene Browne, “Gratitude” is a big deal right now. The media has been spinning on ways to practice gratitude and it seems like every coach on Insta has their own eBook on it.
So everyone’s already doing it, right?
Oh, you’re not?
Well….chalk it up to one more thing you can beat yourself up about, right?
Wrong! If the standard recommendations for gratitude “just aren’t working” for you or you’re struggling to feel it, this post can give you a toe hold on where to start.
We all want to believe in our ability to change for the better. Optimism is hard-wired into our brains; but, when we get stuck it’s easy to get pessimistic about our ability to change. We also all want to believe that knowing a habit will be good for us (or another one isn’t) will be enough to get us to change. Just like knowing vegetables are better for me than chips doesn’t always keep me from chips; knowing gratitude can help my brain and mood isn’t enough to get me practicing every day.
And I don’t know about you; but failing at gratitude practice makes me feel even worse than I did before.
Researchers call that idea that “knowing better will be enough”, even though it’s not enough, the G.I. Joe Fallacy (named after the 80s cartoon). So you’ve heard that gratitude will help you be happier and more resilient; but you’re still not practicing it.
I’ve been there. For years I’d heard that practicing gratitude would lower my anxiety, help me feel happier, and deepen my connections with the people I loved. Yet, every night for months I’d lie down with my notebook at night and struggle to make a list. I couldn’t think of 5 things I was grateful for and I felt pressure that the things on my list should be “grand” in some way. That lack of “gratitude” caused my depression to deepen; and at the time I shied away from it all. It took a few years, and my understanding the research, for me to tease this one out to the point I could practice gratitude regularly.
This blog post comes from my breaking down the challenges I faced to get past that point and skills/tactics you can use to get past your own Gratitude road blocks.
What does “Gratitude” mean to you?
When I first started, part of the problem was carrying around a lot of unexamined assumptions about what gratitude meant. Somehow I’d come out of childhood feeling gratitude with a sense of obligation. I felt grateful when someone else did something for me…and I felt that because you had to. This lead to the expectation that I’d only feel grateful if someone performed an act of service… which left a lot of beauty around me with little gratitude attached.
I also struggled with gratitude because I’d learned it was a feeling; and in order to practice gratitude I thought the feeling had to be triggered by an outside event. I didn’t understand at the time that creating a feeling (known in Neuro Linguistic Programming as State Change) was not only possible, but simple.
Between these two beliefs, I was very confused about gratitude. How could I practice a feeling?
These two realizations, that gratitude isn’t obligation and that I can call up the feeling whenever I want, were the keys to unlocking gratitude for me. But first, I had to journey through some serious depression.
Why Gratitude is Good For You
2018 was one of the most difficult years of my life. Even the most amicable of divorces disrupts your life in unpredictable ways, and I struggled with what it meant for my belief system if I walked away from the life I’d spent over a decade building. I was noticeably depressed and my friends did what they could to support me.
One friend turned me to a Yale course on Positive Psychology (available for free online) and in it they talk about gratitude. The research is compelling that it lowers your blood pressure, lifts your mood, can help you sleep, and can salve many negative emotions. It’s not a panacea for all psychological ails; but it’s a start. (Some self-help coaches are claiming you can’t feel negative emotion while experiencing gratitude. I’ll leave it to you do decide where that line is.)
Each week of the course has homework; and one week was to actively practice gratitude every day. But how!?
Can you feel it?
In order to practice gratitude I had to identify what it really is. Though it had been years since my failed gratitude experiment I still remembered how deflated it left me feeling. Here’s the trick: in all the gratitude research about how positive it’s effects are - they show you have to FEEL the gratitude in order to get the benefits.
That was the key… but how?!
What did gratitude feel like?
How could I call it up?
I’m am one of those people that’s always very friendly to the checkout person or the bodega attendant. I like chatting with strangers. I like the chivalry of people holding doors. So as I lie in bed, trying to conjure up gratitude, I though of the big smile I give the person who makes my breakfast in the morning.
And I asked myself: what if that’s a tiny seed of what this is supposed to be?
Can you think of a time recently when someone did a small kindness for you?
It doesn’t matter how small it was… call it to mind… and think of that like a seed for your gratitude. Feel the smile you gave them to say “thank you” for whatever it was that they did.
That’s the seed for your gratitude.
Make the Juice Worth the Squeeze
Without taking the time to feel genuine appreciation for whatever you’ve decided to be grateful for, you’re not actually rewiring your brain. Thinking about the event without any emotional response just means you’re recalling a shell of a memory.
Upon my “thank you epiphany” I started looking for things and places in my life that felt that way. These were my gratitude toe holds.
Hearing from my sister every morning to check I was ok.
The texts from my best friends with pictures of her kids to make me smile.
Emojis from my mom.
Unlike a few years before, when only having small things would make me sad; taking the pressure off my belief of what it was “supposed” to be like allowed me to really feel gratitude for their efforts. That was a moment in my life when even the littlest kindness was deeply helpful.
Now I’m able to feel gratitude throughout my day for things both large and small. My idea of gratitude is no longer tied to a notion of obligation or a belief they should be grand gestures.
Suggestions if You’re Stuck on Gratitude
Find an anchor - what things, big or small, show you what gratitude feels like
Look underneath - what are your beliefs on gratitude? Are any of them outdated? Are they holding you back?
Start reasonable - if a nightly gratitude journal (the current fad) isn’t working for you, when else could you make space for it? If writing it down feels wrong, what about saying it out loud to yourself? What about telling a friend? Find what works for you.
Be easy with yourself - remember that there’s no “wrong” way to practice gratitude or mindfulness.