Gratitude
During the pandemic taking care of our mental health is not easy as there is a constant fear and uncertainty and it feels like running a race with no finishing line.
“Gratitude is an emotion that grounds us and is a great way to balance out the negative mind-set that uncertainty engenders,” said Dr. Guy Winch, author of the book “Emotional First Aid”. If we want to take care of our minds during this pandemic, understanding how to trigger this feeling is an important tool to have at our disposal.
In his article,Why Gratitude is Good, Dr. Emmons shares, “You can’t feel envious and grateful at the same time. They’re incompatible feelings, because if you’re grateful, you can’t resent someone for owning things you don’t.” He goes on to share that his research found that people with high levels of gratitude have low levels of resentment and envy. When we take time to focus on what we are grateful for, we choose positive emotions over negative, thus we take steps to nurture our mental health and well being.
We need to practice gratitude as it is like a workout and a healthy eating plan for your mind. When we take time to focus on what we are grateful for, we choose positive emotions over negative, thus we take steps to nurture our mental health and wellbeing. We can also focus our gratitude to our friends and family thereby reminding ourselves that while uncertainty exists in some aspects of our lives, certainty still prevails in many others. Another practice is to keep a daily gratitude journal as Dr. Winch suggests starting the practice of “writing one paragraph every day about one thing for which we are truly grateful and why that thing is meaningful to us.
If we want to be able to keep running in this race with no clear finish line, we need to learn to take better care of the runner. Although there is no one solution, learning to trigger gratitude may help us cope along the way. Gratitude and prayer to Maha Periyava and Vaishno Ma got me going in Germany 10 months in one single room. Try today, do share your examples?