Gratitude on the Tough Days

It’s Thanksgiving tomorrow, a holiday centered around the idea of gratitude. “Be thankful!” and “Have an attitude of gratitude!” are plastered all over corporate social media and cartoon turkey paper napkins at the grocery store. And, if your Thanksgiving crew is anything like my family, “What are you grateful for?” is a question you literally have to answer around the table.

But in a week where there’s been a mass shooting at an LGBTQ+ club, multiple nationwide displays of anti-semitism, rumblings of yet another holiday COVID wave, and a continuation of emotional international news, being thankful right now may feel…well, tough. 

So if gratitude feels hard to access this year, that’s okay. But if it’s something you’d like to try to tap into, here are two strategies that may help.

Zooming In

When things feel big and overwhelmingly challenging, turning our focus on the small things can help ground us. This means not putting pressure on ourselves to find big things to be grateful for–rather, identifying a few small things that bring us joy and comfort: this warm cup of coffee, a favorite song, a cozy bed, a friend who sent you a funny Titkok. There are no “right” answers. What’s made your week/your day/your hour a little better?

Zooming Out

Sometimes it’s helpful to move in the other direction and identify things that offer us some perspective. Maybe it’s gratitude for modern medicine, for forests full of trees that have been standing for hundreds of years, or for all of the things that had to go right for you to meet some of your favorite people. I saw an instagram post by Dr. Will Cole (@drwillcole) that noted that in order for us to be born, we needed 2 parents, 4 grandparents, 8 great grandparents, and so on, all the way up to 12 generations. In total, over 4,000 people needed to exist over the last 400 years for you to be born. “All of us had ancestors who navigated hard places,” says DaRa Williams on a podcast episode about gratitude, “Navigated them at least successfully enough that you and I are sitting here today. And so one of the places for me that brings immediate gratitude, like that just generates it in the heart and in the body, is to remember the people I come from.”

Bottom line is this—gratitude is beneficial, if we can access it. There’s research that shows gratitude practices can increase our happiness, improve our mental health, strengthen our relationships, and reduce our materialism. It can literally change our brain chemistry over time. Finding new ways to look at things may help us access that gratitude, not just this week, but any time things get tough.

Additional resources for building a gratitude practice:

How to Be Grateful When Everything Sucks with DaRa Williams on the Ten Percent Happier podcast (This episode was on repeat for me in Fall 2020)

Gratitude Meditation with Headspace

Good Days Start with Gratitude: A 52 Week Guild to Cultivate an Attitude of Gratitude - Writing Journal

Delightful: Gratitude Journal - Smartphone App