What are you grateful for right now in your life?
What are you grateful for right now in your life?
Is it good health? Your relationship with your family and friends? The animals you surround yourself with every day? Having a good job? Just being able to look out your window to watch birds and other wildlife?
What is being grateful? If we look in the Merriam-Webster dictionary, the definition says:
1 a: appreciative of benefits received
b: expressing gratitude
2 a: affording pleasure or contentment : pleasing
b: pleasing by reason of comfort supplied or discomfort alleviated
Being grateful can be anything tangible or intangible.
When you are feeling good and everything is going right, it’s sometimes easy to forget to be grateful on those days. Take a moment to really observe all you are grateful about and choose 3 things to be appreciative about in your daily life.
The most challenging is finding gratitude in the midst of a crisis or something unexpected. Even if you are going through troubling times, you can always find something to be grateful for. Those moments are the most important times to find things to be grateful about because they can be uplifting in the midst of challenges.
Let’s say today someone wasn’t paying attention to their driving and rear ended your car. I’m shaken, but the paramedic came to help me to see if I was okay. I’m grateful for their help and also grateful my dogs were not with me at the time.
What about those moments you may lose your patience waiting in lines at the grocery store? I may be running late and the poor soul in front of me had their credit card declined. I’m grateful I have enough money to pay for these groceries and that my friends will forgive me if I’m a bit late to meet them.
Being grateful isn’t downplaying the severity of a situation, but it’s a mindset of appreciation no matter what your circumstance. According to Harvard Health Publishing, in positive psychology research, gratitude is strongly associated with greater happiness. Gratitude helps people feel more positive emotions, relish good experiences, improve their health, deal with adversity, and build strong relationships. Gratitude is a way for people to appreciate what they have instead of always reaching for something new in the hopes it will make them happier or thinking they can't feel satisfied until every physical and material need is met. Gratitude helps people refocus on what they have instead of what they lack. And, although it may feel contrived at first, this mental state grows stronger with use and practice.
I love the quote by Jane Marczewski, who goes by the nickname of Nightbirde. She received the golden buzzer at her audition for America’s Got Talent all while she has been getting treatments for cancer.
“You can’t wait until life isn’t hard anymore before you decide to be happy.”
As we celebrated Thanksgiving, whether you celebrated by yourself or with a large family, it’s a time of year to focus on gratitude. Thanksgiving can also be a time of being overwhelmed. It’s okay to be overwhelmed, but try to find small moments of what you can be thankful about. Soon you may find yourself replacing moments of being overwhelmed by moments of being grateful, which in turn, can give you some needed joy!
Why not start making it a habit to focus on gratitude every day of your life? How cool would that be to have that same feeling all year round? Maybe it's not a good idea to have turkey every day, unless you so desire, but give the gift of gratitude to yourself every day. Try it and see how it can change your life, as well as others around you, for the better.
Wishing you all good health, happiness, and being surrounded by other people that are grateful too!