The Gratitude Goldmine

found in every pit of despair - and the fleeting treasures of pleasure.

……..

We've all learned that life is no trouble free affair. No matter what family we come from, how good looking the face in the mirror, no matter our academic accomplishments or our professional position, troubling events will find us at various times of our lives.

It's how we deal with these troubling times that makes the difference.

Perhaps the most common remedy for the difficulties in our lives is to find some type of pleasure to compensate for them. Pleasure is often sought out as a reward for our troubles - be it consuming food, purchases, entertainment, adulation, intoxication, etc.

Cultures across the world continuously reinforce this pleasures-for-our-troubles solution. Marketers and advertisers use the formula every day.

In fact, one of the most sought after activities in life is discovering new pleasures and new twists and combinations of our already preferred pleasures. Then, when times get tough, whatever we've discovered are our most potent pleasure hits - the greater the pain the bigger the hit.

Dependance on these doses of pleasure run the range from slight to extreme; and addiction is what we call it when we are unable to control our dosages of pleasure. All of us have seen in ourselves, or at least seen in others close to us, the destructive lengths people will go to fulfill these addictions.

If we are honest with ourselves, we see that we have dependencies, again slight or extreme, to something(s) that gives us pleasure. These things give us temporary relief from our troubles; and temporary is the key word here. The feeling of pleasure only lasts so long - and important to realize, hitting that temporary pleasure dose over and over again has detrimental effects on our health and well-being.

To be clear, this is not to say pleasure is inherently bad. The abuse of pleasure is where the imbalance and harm comes from. Finding a healthy balance for our pleasures is an art and science we need to dedicate ourselves to every day.

So what is an alternative then to these high frequency, temporary hits of pleasure for handling our troubles?

One of the most powerful alternatives is practicing gratitude. The greater the trouble, the more potential the effects that gratitude can bring.
 
A disclaimer here before we go further - practicing gratitude is risk free, costs no money, feels amazing and the deeper you go into gratitude the better you feel. Maybe the best thing about gratitude is that it is limitless. Practice now, and you can do it for the rest of your life, as much as you want.

What are some of the side effects of gratitude? Clarity, calm, better relationships, positive emotions and attitude, smiling, a decrease in destructive behavior and a general feeling of joy.

That sounds pretty good right?

So how can despair lead us to gratitude? Simply put, despair is one of the greatest tools for stripping away our illusions. When everything is going as planned. When everything is stable, we don't have as much pressure to change, to look at things in a different way, to switch up our routines and habits. In troubled times our stability is shaken - and it's a prime opportunity to make big changes.

Change is after all, the one constant in the universe.

Has a relationship or a job you were so attached to for your self-worth fallen apart? Have you lost money, opportunities, even someone you loved? It's tremendously easy to feel lost and incomplete in these situations. 
What's left? 
The answer - the here and now.

Are we focused on what's in front of us? The delicious meal, our friends and family, the sunshine, our body, the random smile on the street. Have the trees stopped producing oxygen and the birds stopped flying in the sky? Of course not.

Troubles, disasters, loss, emergencies are powerful mechanisms that take us out of our so called comfort zone. They give us a potent opportunity to see the precious, incredible, and fragile fortune all around us. The gifts that, being so caught up in the rat race and occupied with triple doses of pleasure, we don't normally appreciate. We take them for granted.

The good news is that it's never too late to be grateful. We can be grateful right now that we are reading this ,)

The important thing is to practice. So here are a few tips to practicing gratitude.

Tip 1. Gratitude needs to be expressed. If we don't make a point to focus on what we are grateful for and say it, at least to ourselves silently in our heads, the waves of other thoughts rush in to fill the space. Being grateful out loud is better, and the bigger the crowd, the bigger the impact. Try it. You can feel it in yourself, and you will feel it reflected back from the others listening when you express gratitude out loud.

Tip 2. Gratitude is contagious. Like all emotions, the feeling of being grateful has the power to, and probably will, affect others around you.

Tip 3. Practice makes perfect. Like anything we repeat over and over, the act of being grateful becomes more natural, more fluid, stronger, and a bigger part of our daily life. Keep it up.

Tip 4. Use gratitude in the darkest times to stop negative thinking. When the mind will not stop worrying or thinking about something that causes stress, say silently, or better out loud something you're grateful for. Use gratitude as a bridge to come out of thinking completely.

Tip 5. Sacrifice a little of what you love in order to appreciate it more deeply. Example: Fast, start a food-fast slow, and then go a whole day without eating anything. That next day we remember to be grateful for something so basic, and so easy to take advantage of. That's just one small example of sacrifice.

Now that you've been reminded, go express some gratitude right now.

Example: I appreciate you reading this.

Written by,

Erik Ossell Sept 2020