Developing An Attitude Of Gratitude #1

It's been said that the antidote to anxiety and depression is gratitude. Who wouldn't want to learn about something that has the power to free us from two of the most miserable emotions we can experience.

Here is the reason behind this assertion, the emotion of anxiety is caused by the feeling of being out of control. While there are several ways we can experience anxiety, the primary and most noted way is when we think and focus on the future. When we imagine or visualize a bleak future we become anxious, the main reason being that we feel out of control about a bleak future, since there is nothing we can do to change it. This feeling is one of the most common drivers of anxiety.

The reason why bleak futuristic thinking leads to anxiety in a massive way is as follows; I am sure that you have heard the term "What if Thinking". This line of thinking is... What-if I die, what-if I am poor, what-if my lover leaves me, what-if my lover dies, and so on. Firstly, I want to bring to your attention that these what-if possible worries I enumerated are all contradictory. If I die then I can be poor, if my lover leaves me then they can't be dead and so on. The fact that you can be worried about contradictory concerns, make the possibilities to stress yourself out with infinite.

Secondly, these what-if thoughts can be applied to any areas or dimensions of life. We can have what-if thoughts regarding, health, wealth, relationships, it is unlimited to the what-if possibilities we can conjure up to scare ourselves and whip us all up in frenzy. So it’s quite easy to get caught up if this pattern and experience anxiety. This explains why living in a future dimension can be problematic.

Now, there is also the possibility to live in the past and experience regret, anger, and depression. While the past has the benefit that you can only have one negative thought per minute, since it already happened, unlike the future than you worry about many contradictory possibilities in the same minute. It has an additional drawback and that is that what you regret, are angry or depressed about has an element of truth, since it did actually happen, which makes it much more real and it has a much heavier effect on our emotional system.

I am sure you would agree that both of these options are less than optimum. They cause us to experience many negative emotions. What is the solution? The answer is simply to live in the present, the present does not have those negative emotions in it, as well as the present is within your control and you can do something about it. This power will make you feel much better and in control.

What is the emotion of the present? The answer is gratitude. In order for you to feel grateful, you need to feel it in your emotions, and that forces your mind to be in the present. While this sounds like a great idea, I am sure you have tried this idea before and have recognized that just forcing yourself to be grateful is short-lived. There is a specific way that you need to train your mind to achieve the goal of being grateful and to integrate this a thinking pattern that you will be able to run in a sustainable way.

There is no self-help program that doesn’t encompass some type of gratitude training in it. I will share with you what I found has worked for the over 1000 client I have successfully helped beat their anxiety & depression.

You need to teach your mind how to develop the skill of cultivating the emotion of gratitude. The way I found works best and is very simple to do. Make a list of 10 things that you can be grateful for. However, these are things that you know are great in your mind, but don’t feel grateful about them in your heart. For example, your ability to see for most people on a scale from one to ten. One being low and ten being high, most people appreciate their vision emotionally like a 2 or 3.

I am not talking about how much you appreciate vision in your mind. This exercise is referring to the feeling appreciation for your vision in your heart when your emotional system is activated. In order to conjure up a feeling of gratitude about the fact that you have the ability to see. You may have to imagine losing your vision and getting it back, in order to feel the gratitude. Another way to bring up positive memories where you had good visual experiences in your life, this will also help you feel grateful for something you don’t really feel grateful on a regular basis.

The goal is to move the numbers up with every exercise session, on the 1-10 scale you should move it up a few numbers to cultivate the emotion of gratitude. Every time you increase the number you are training your mind to manually call upon the emotion of gratitude. After a while, this will become easy and you will experience the emotion of gratitude most of the time.

This skill will help keep you out of the past & future and keep you in the present and this will protect you from anxiety & depression.