Hey! if you have the weekend off, you're just a couple of days away! Are you kicking butt and taking names in your pursuit of life? Have you made a conscious effort to make one small improvement? Are you working towards the best future you can have for yourself? If not, why not? Don't you deserve it?
Gratitude. This is going to be a recurring theme on this blog. To me, it's just too important of a topic to not focus on consistently. Gratitude is the foundation of successful living. Gratitude can take away your ego, it gets you out of your own head. I think before we can look at the positivity of gratitude, we HAVE to look at it's negative or bad parts/ideas. What? Gratitude can be bad? No, not really bad, but there are times when it's hard to express or feel gratitude. Research has shown that gratitude isn't always good. Here are some instances when it might be bad.
You can overdose on gratitude. If you have to high of a goal set for your gratitude, you might fall short and then bed yourself up for feeling less grateful and happy than if you hadn't kept track of your gratitude at all. Maybe instead of focusing on trying to come up with several things to be grateful for on a daily basis, you only think about gratitude once or twice a week. Quality over quantity.
If you are in a bad relationship, whether with your significant other, your boss, or your roommate, you might not be able to express gratitude for them. Don't stay in a toxic environment, account for the ENTIRE relationship, not just the good parts.
Bad things will happen. Horrible, gut-wrenching things. It might be the loss of a relationship, the sudden death of a loved one, getting fired from a job. Maybe you or a family member has had a bad medical diagnosis. When these catastrophic events happen, it's hard to feel any gratitude, any thankfulness at all. And that's okay. "Life is suffering. No amount of positive thinking exercises will change this truth."-Dr. Robert Emmons
"In such moments, gratitude can become a critical cognitive process-a way of thinking about the world that can help us turn disaster into a stepping stone."-Dr. Robert Emmons
So telling people simply to buck up, count their blessings, and remember how much they still have to be grateful for can certainly do much harm. Processing a life experience through a grateful lens does not mean denying negativity. It is not a form of superficial happiology. Instead, it means realizing the power you have to transform an obstacle into an opportunity. It means reframing a loss into a potential gain, recasting negativity into positive channels for gratitude.-Dr. Robert Emmons
So we must make the choice if we are going to let the crappy happenings in life drag us down, destroy us or are we going to try to find even a little bit of good in the bad?
More to come....