A Seattle Anxiety Therapist Shares How a Gratitude Practice Can Support Your Overall Mental Health
Image from Pexels by Erika Andrade 11/18/24
With Thanksgiving quickly approaching, it’s a great time to talk about gratitude. Noticing and highlighting gratitude can be a helpful tool in building protective factors to guard your mental health and strengthen mental fortitude. What I label as ‘cheap’ gratitude is forced, inauthentic, and performative. The kind of practice discussed here is genuine, intentional, and deeply personal.
What Is A Gratitude Practice?
A gratitude practice pertains to consistently taking time to intentionally identify things, people, places, experiences you’re grateful for. It’s intentionally highlighting what is dear to you, what you cherish and celebrate. There are no right or wrong answers, nothing too big or too small. This seemly small yet impactful practice can serve to counter negative assumptions, deficit mindsets, and over time build broader perspectives.
What Are The Benefits Of A Gratitude Practice?
Shift perspective through person, place, or time.
Mental health challenges can lead to you experience tunnel vision, focused on your own experiences or engagement in recurrent thought patterns. Shifting perspective is a helpful psychological skill to build flexibility. This can be done by changing person, place or time. A gratitude practice can help shift perspective both in the moment and upon reflection.
· Less stress
· Improve mood
· Support physical health
· Improve sleep
· Cultivate relationships
Why Do I Struggle With Gratitude?
Image from Unsplash by Simon Maage 11/18/24
Humans have an evolutionary adaptation towards a negativity bias. It’s more important you remember Steve got eaten by a tiger over by that bush than remembering one time Steve found delicious berries at that bush. Your nervous system was built to alert you to danger, and it hasn’t evolved to the (relatively) safe modern life you live today. Therefore, your system has been cultivated to detect and respond to potential threat to increase your chances of survival. You’re literally programed to look for the ‘bad’ and ‘dangerous’ things around you. This negativity bias is the opposite of gratitude. Your higher mental processes, the ones that make you human, allow you to engage in gratitude. Creating a practice of it allows your brain to strengthen its ability to find it. You find what you seek. If you’re looking for sad, bad, or dangerous things, you will find them. If you look for abundance, kindness, safety and joy, you will find them. I want to make it clear; this does NOT mean engaging in toxic positivity. It does mean expanding and adding to what you seek. It means being intentional about knowing your brain’s tendencies and committing to building habits that will make your life more enjoyable.
Do I Have To Be Happy To Be Grateful?
Absolutely not. You do not have to be happy or in a good mood to practice gratitude. In fact, these are the times it’s most important to practice. Feelings change, they come and go. Gratitude isn’t grounded in feeling a certain way.
How Do I Build A Gratitude Practice?
Firstly, like many things in life, it takes practice. There will be times you don’t do it as consistently as you’d like and that’s okay! Practices are meant to grow, change, fall off, and start again. So be careful not to judge yourself about your gratitude practice, that starts to defeat the point. You can mold a practice to fit your life, your needs and tendencies. Engaging with your practice either at the beginning of the day or the end of the day can either set an intention or help decompress. Here are some ideas on ways to create a gratitude practice:
· Gratitude Journal using words or images
· Share gratitude with loved ones
· Create a jar of items or words
Image from Unsplash by Ben White 11/18/24
· Get in nature
· Gratitude Meditation
· Do some art
· Engage in Mindfulness
· Create a sharing ritual (dinner time, bedtime, etc).
· Donate time, energy, or resources
· Share a authentic compliment to at least one person
What’s a practice that you’ve tried that I haven’t listed?
Reach Out To A Seattle Anxiety Therapist
If you struggle with getting stuck in spiraling thoughts, worry, and stress that stop you from living a life you want to live, reach out and schedule a free consultation today. Through therapy, you can find more peace, contentment, and intention. Use the button below to schedule your consultation and start investing in you.
About the Author: Seattle Therapist Chelsea Kramer LMFT
Chelsea Kramer is a Seattle Therapist who works with individual and families facing grief, anxiety and trauma, with special focus on medical challenges, reproductive health, and life transitions.
Learn more about Chelsea’s specialties: grief, anxiety, infertility, pregnancy loss, chronic illness, menopause, medical trauma
Learn more about Chelsea
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