When was the last time you stopped to think about how grateful you are for a given thing? Was it this month? Last week? Hopefully today?
We all have things to be grateful for, but so often we forget to appreciate them. It is easy to focus on the bad things that happen to us throughout the day. More than easy, it’s normal. Our brain it’s wired to focus on threads since we lived in the Stone Age. This was the way we survived. This was the way we evolved. By focusing on the negatives, we were able to modify our environment to give us a more comfortable, easy life.
Centuries of evolution got us spending more time reviewing what we could have improved in our day more than clapping at our successes.
In today’s climate though, we need to step back and look into the things that we are grateful for, in order to keep our sanity and fight depression. Which is so common these days.
We are all bombarded with picture-perfect vacations, bodies, lifestyles. It is easy to feel miserable about our reality. A lot of people these days are “low key depressed”. They don’t even realize they are, but they are not satisfied with their lives, not their achievements.
A few years ago, a Swedish team created an interactive software for data visualization called Dollar Street. This software compiled pictures from more than 50 countries across the globe. The pictures show how people live, filtering it even down to their economic status within that country.
You can see things so intimate as to which tool they use to brush their teeth. Some people from Malawi appeared showing their fingers and a bit of clay for it. When it came to menstrual hygiene, some women in the pictures had nothing to show.
Without showing this vast gallery, the study proceeded to ask students living in Sweden, from 1 to 10, where did they think they ranked in terms of wealth, compared to other kids their age around the world. The average answer was something around 5.
Objectively, these students were living in the top 9–10 compared to other students in the world. But that’s not the way they felt.
The more you look out at other realities, the more you realize all the things you take for granted you should be grateful for.
Do you have a secure roof where to live? Do you have access to potable water, clean air, warm baths? You are already way above the world’s population average.
Knowing these numbers not only makes us more grateful for what we have, it also makes us happier. It turns out, the more you appreciate what surrounds you, the more you enjoy your life and feel genuinely good about it. This is like the butterfly effect. You start to irradiate this, also making others happy to spend time around you.
Every day, before I fall into Morpheus’ arms, I think of three things I’m grateful for. I try to go from something general that is going on in my life (the big picture as you could call it), to small, tinny details I enjoy or appreciate from it.
An example of a day could be: I’m grateful to have an immune system that rarely gets sick, I’m grateful to be able to have the time to work on things that I’m passionate about, and I’m grateful to have socks to wear every day.
It’s that simple.
At first, you will run out of ideas after a few days saying things consistently, but then is when the magic really starts to happen. Once you force yourself to find things every day to be grateful for, you will realize there are lots of things that you are taking for granted.
Learning the art of appreciating them will instantly make you happier. You will even become more aware of these moments while you are experiencing them, like while taking a shower under running water regulated to your ideal temperature.
This will rewire your entire way of looking at your life. And it doesn’t mean you become a conformist, it just means you will learn to value all the many things that you should have always appreciated to start with.
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This post was previously published on Change Becomes You and is republished here with permission from the author.
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Photo credit: Unsplash
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