Saying thank you and walking away from worry

We all have a very powerful tool at our fingertips. This tool can help us turn our thinking from negative to positive, see everything from a more joyful perspective, and feel better any time we want to. It doesn’t cost anything and anyone can use it. What is it? The practice of gratitude.

The myth that I encounter most often about gratitude is that you have to feel grateful in order to practise it. Nothing could be further from the truth. A lot of the time, it works the other way around: I feel hard done by, cross or sad, so I decide to write a gratitude list to turn my perspective around. The very act of listing things I could feel grateful for makes me feel better. As a result I might feel grateful for something that I had previously taken for granted. The focus on gratitude comes first; the feeling of gratitude comes later.

I have found a rigorous application of gratefulness absolutely indispensable to a worry-free lifestyle. As with other strategies, it can work in two ways: 1) as a regular practice to help keep my thinking positive and healthy and 2) as emergency ‘first aid’ when I’m feeling low, something goes wrong or I need a lift. So I try to weave various gratitude practices into my daily life and also keep in mind which ones I can use as and when needed.

Lots of people keep a gratitude journal. I usually write half a page in the morning and half a page at night. I also remind myself to say silently, ‘thank you, thank you, thank you’ as soon as I remember when I wake up. I like to speak my gratitudes out loud when I am driving as well. I’m not a Catholic but when I went to Rome I bought a rosary (pictured) and I like to use it to challenge myself: how many things can I think of to be grateful for, assigning each one to a bead? It’s hard work getting all the way round, so I find myself expressing gratitude for being able to read and write, having all my limbs, being able to drive a car – simple things that we take for granted but without which our lives would be very different. This is a good tip for anyone who doesn’t like making written lists.

And what about gratitude as ‘first aid’? I sometimes encounter surprise or even dismay when I share this, but when something goes wrong I try to bring gratitude into the situation as soon as possible. Sometimes it’s easy to say, ‘what is there in this problem that I can be grateful for?’ but other circumstances can be much more challenging. I have even found myself saying, ‘I can’t see what there could possibly be here that I could be grateful about,’ but at least I was thinking about gratitude. And most memorably, when my Big Problem started to unfold, I said to someone, ‘what if this is the best thing that could possibly have happened?’

Well, that was a challenge to the Universe, and I certainly didn’t believe it at the time, but I have no doubt that my willingness to be open to gratitude helped me to begin to let go of chronic worry and over-thinking. What’s more, as the challenging circumstances have continued, and even become more troublesome and unwelcome, I have found so very many things to be grateful for, many of them flowing directly from the unpleasant circumstances themselves. Gratitude has saved me from being either resentful or sorry for myself. The results speak for themselves, and only encourage me to commit more passionately to bringing this practice more and more into my everyday life.

Something to note: if ‘gratitude’ isn’t the right word for you, don’t feel you can’t join in. Some people prefer the term ‘appreciation,’ with perhaps fewer religious connotations. Personally, I like using ‘appreciation’ too, and it reminds me of how we appreciate a work of art or a lovely view. Just a suggestion.

Today I want to ask a question: there are many different ways of practising gratitude or appreciation, and I’d love to know about more of them. How do you practise gratefulness, on a regular or ad hoc basis? Do you write a journal, share your appreciation with others, or focus on gratitude at a particular time? I’d love to know – please comment below or, if you prefer, contact me separately. Thank you for taking the time to read this.