Practicing Gratitude

Yes, practicing gratitude. I can feel the cringing from here, but trust me on this!

When we’re feeling low it can be harder to notice anything else; all we can see is things that support that negative view of things. It’s like we have blinkers on and we find it hard to see anything else. Clinical depression makes that even more difficult, with the depressive filter over everything and sucking us dry. But there are things we can do day to day to help challenge that. More on that in a second!

First of all, what’s behind that negative filter? Surely something that has us spiralling downwards can’t really serve any purpose? Well, yes and no. It’s all about spotting danger and threats, and ultimately an attempt to keep us safe. In prehistory there was an evolutionary advantage to being ready for threats. If you’re spotting dangers and threats you live to fight another day, so not a bad instinct to hold on to. In the modern world, while we’re not quite facing the same dangers our distant ancestors were, we have our own threats to survival. Losing our job impacts our ability to get the food we need to survive and shelter from the elements, so those same primal instincts hit the alarm bell and have us focusing on the danger to keep us safe.

Now there’s a but, and it’s a big but, this is exhausting and not something we can maintain long term. The more exhausted we are the less energy we have to do anything else, or notice anything that might challenge that. We prioritise dealing with the danger and fixing the problem (even if it’s not something we can actually fix) and our world progressively gets smaller and smaller and our mood nosedives.

We can push against this. One helpful thing we can do at the end of every day is ask ourselves, “ok, what happened today that can I be grateful for?” It can be anything. It might be someone complemented you at work. Or it was sunny for the first time in ages. Or maybe you met a friendly dog outside the supermarket and it was happy to see you. It doesn’t need to be anything big and it’s the little things that are really the point.

When we’e feeling low or stressed, we can miss these things completely. It doesn’t mean that they’re not happening, they still are, but we’re often not noticing them or forgetting about them quickly. But doing this and making it part of our day, can help us notice them and appreciate them and challenge that negative filter. I usually ask clients to start with 5 and we can count them off with our fingers, and see if we can gradually build up to 10. What typically happens is that maybe the first few are easy, but we find ourselves almost scrabbling around for more, which can really have us thinking about how they day went and noticing things that we didn’t spot or appreciate at the time. The little positive things get more important, and the things we might have taken for granted we appreciate more.

The more we practice this, the easier it comes to us, and the more resilient we can become when it comes to challenges.

Sow while it might seem hokey, I’d like to challenge you to give it a go for a week and see what difference it makes to how you feel and how you see the world. What happened today that you can be grateful for?

If you’d like to work with me on your mental health, you can get in touch with me via the website or drop me a message directly at mckellarcbt@gmail.com