I´ve heard a lot about gratitude and the positive effects it produces in our lives. A year ago I began to do a bit of research to find out for myself. The benefits of living a life with gratitude are pretty impressive, ranging from improved mental health to a life more complete with fulfilment and happiness. Therefore, I decided to seek out more gratitude… with all those benefits who wouldn´t? I chose the most popular exercises I´d come across, like writing down every day 3 things I was grateful for and reflecting on my day just before I went to bed. However, after a couple of weeks I gave up. They felt more like tasks and I couldn´t engage with them in a way that felt authentic. Maybe I was doing it too half-heartedly, or maybe I didn´t stick with it long enough to feel the benefits. What I was looking for was to be able to integrate gratitude into my daily life, especially in moments when things weren´t going great or where I was taking stuff for granted. So I dropped the exercises and to be honest forgot about gratitude.
That was until I came across a 3-minute podcast on gratitude by Sam Harris. I didn´t have any expectations but I thought I’d give it a go. The podcast or more to the point what was said really made sense to me: it gave me a point of access that the other exercises hadn´t. I mentioned it to my husband and he suggested that I would probably find the philosophy of Stoicism and some of their practices useful. I came across the work of William B Irvine and a series of podcasts by him “The Stoic Path” which linked very well with my quest to find gratitude.
What caught my attention about the initial podcast on gratitude and the subsequent ones on stoicism was that the focus was not on positive thoughts but negative ones. This struck me, not just because gratitude is about being positive, but also because we seem to always be told about the power of positive thinking and the consequences of negative thoughts, i.e. that nothing good can come of them. However, what I was reading and hearing was actively promoting negative thoughts. I, like quite a few people, find negative thoughts at times easier to access than positive ones, and so to find something that was using this tendency to access gratitude was extremely intriguing.
What became clear from the beginning is that idea behind evoking negative thoughts is not to make you feel worse, or guilty, or send you into a spiral of negative thinking. Their role is to act as a trigger to reset your mind and give you access to a different and more positive perspective instantaneously. I realise it sounds counter intuitive. However, there are lots of examples of people doing things that seem counter intuitive to their final goal. For example, I recently read about cold-water swimming: people who in the middle of winter go for a swim in freezing cold water. Most of them describe the shock to their body when they first enter the water but how this experience produces physical and mental benefits: increased circulation, reduced fatigue etc. Imagine the negative thought as the ice-cold water, shocking you and your body to wake up to the positive aspects of your present situation. The key with the cold-water swimming, and negative thinking, is not to stay there too long.
So how does it work? (I will talk about negative thinking and not swimming in cold water…I think for that you just jump in and scream).
There are a number of techniques and practices in which Stoics use negative thinking to provoke gratitude and which give you access to more positive perspectives on your life:
Negative visualisation
Simply imagine yourself in a worse alternative to the one you are experiencing. Ask yourself “Where would I rather be, here or there?”. Then identify 1 or 2 things about “here” that you are grateful for in comparison to the imagined situation.
For example: last week I was walking back from the supermarket, it´s a 20-minute walk along a busy road. It was in the middle of the day and was very hot (I live in Santiago Chile and it´s summer here). I felt tired and irritable, my back was beginning to hurt because of the weight of the shopping. I was getting more and more annoyed and I began to resent where I was and what I was doing, longing to be somewhere else. But before I went too far down that route (mentally) I consciously decided to practice “negative visualisation”. I imagined what it would be like if it was 10 degrees hotter and instead of walking 2 miles I had to walk 15. I also imagined what it would be like if I was confined my bed with chronic back pain, unable even to turn over: I then asked myself, “Where would I rather be, here or there?”. Of course, without a second thought, I chose “here” and what I was currently doing. Instead of getting more irritable and feeling sorry for myself with my current situation, I was suddenly able to appreciate the fact that it wasn´t as hot as it could be, that there were trees on the streets which offered shade, that the supermarket wasn´t such a long walk, and, in spite of the back pain, I was able to walk and do stuff that other people couldn’t. I arrived home in a much better frame of mind and mood, if not a little sweaty.
When doing negative visualisation it is important not to chastise yourself. For example, I could have said “Emma, you are so ungrateful, there are people worse off then you,” etc, but that way lies guilt and frustration. Instead, I evoked a worse scenario then the one I was in with no judgement towards myself, simply to trigger a genuine positive change in my perception of that moment.
Translife mediation
The focus of this practice is to help you to recognise and appreciate that you are living “the dream life”. Maybe that statement isn´t what you think but probably for millions of people you are living the dream life. Let that idea seep in for a moment. There are currently millions of people in the world who would swap their lives for yours in a second. People who are living without clean drinking water, in fear of violence, with a terminal illness, people in early stages of bereavement, living in a war-torn country, etc. It might also be that the future you will look back on this stage in your life with nostalgia and view it as a great time, in spite of it´s challenges and shortcomings. Again, the idea of this is not to be flippant about any challenges or suffering that you are going through now, the aim is to give you access to a more positive outlook on your situation, and all the benefits that this outlook would bring to you and those around you.
Try to imagine an older version of yourself, perhaps when you aren’t as physically agile as you are now, maybe with less energy or fewer friends, living in a nursing home. How might that person view aspects of your current life? What parts of your current life would they recognise as being positive? Perhaps it´s the fact that you can go for walks in the open air, that you are mainly free from physical pain, or the friends and family that you have in your life that you can talk too, even if it’s via zoom.
The last time mediation
This is based on the idea that for every single one of us there will be a last time that we will do everything. A last time to eat your favourite food, a last time to laugh, to read a book etc. When I first heard about this concept I thought, “flipping heck, that is a little dark”. Most of us won´t know when it will be our last time, thank goodness. However, imagine if we did. How would that change your experience of the situation?
For example, when I went travelling (pre-Covid), when it was my last day in a place, even if I had only been there for 3 days, I would walk down the street and think “this is the last time I will be here” and I would try to take everything in and savour the moment. It would make me appreciate the place and the people more than the previous time spent there. I love chocolate and when I know that I’m on the last piece (and that is just until I can go to the shop and buy another one) then I don´t just chuck it in my mouth and gobble it down. I savour every minute. In fact, and this is weird and probably shouldn´t admit it, but I even smell it. It tastes soooo much nicer than the other 25 pieces that went before it.
These are just a few exercises that I have used over the last month that have helped me to access gratitude in perhaps an unusual way but one which seems authentic to me and which works instantly.
If you find these ideas interesting then I would highly recommend doing your own research and listening to or reading William B Irvine.
Good luck and enjoy the benefits of being grateful.
Emma