Episode 37: Gratitude

If you are finding that your healing is stalling or if all you see is your “lack” of progress, today’s show may be just the medicine you need. Join me as I discuss how gratitude changed my entire healing journey and set me on a path forward. I’ll also talk about the science of gratitude and the multiple studies that have been done that prove how speaking or writing declarations or statements of gratitude change everything, including depression and apathy and allow one to cultivate both motivation and peacefulness.

Take the Gratitude Quiz here: https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/quizzes/take_quiz/gratitude

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Transcript

            Welcome to Episode 37. Today’s topic is “Gratitude.”

            I remember the day. I remember it very, very well. It was a frigidly cold day in mid-November 2017 and I was nearly twenty long struggling months into my healing journey. I’d worked very hard during that time to progress with my many physical problems and thought I was doing “everything possible” to heal. But I’d just finished my appointment that day with my functional medicine doctor and found out that even after doing everything right and following the programs to the letter, my adrenal glands were still dangerously flatlined. I felt completely shattered to the core. I remember falling apart in her office during our consult and feeling totally overwhelmed and burdened by what seemed at that time to be a never-ending cycle of one horrible setback after another. I walked to my car and sat there and just stared out the window. 

Then a potent rage hit me, but I couldn’t scream that hard because I also had a very serious case of TMJ and I had to wear a mouthguard that restricted my movement. That just added to my list of physical problems back then. Sitting in that car, on that frigid November day,  I felt as if my entire world was circling the drain. I had zero energy, zero optimism, and little motivation to keep moving forward. What was the point? I thought. For nearly two solid years, I was battling constant anxiety. I’d gain a little footing and take two steps forward and then someone would happen, and bam, four steps back. Progress was all thought about. I had laser focus like an eagle on PROGRESS and the more I did that, the more it seemed the dial kept moving in the wrong direction. I saw everything from a POV of lack and loss. I had a tunnel vision that was so self-destructive but I didn’t see it as that. I saw it as “focusing on a goal of restoring my health.” But my myopic POV was actually so intense that I was unable to SEE anything around me. See the beauty around me. What beauty? All I “saw” was my long miserable eighteen months by that time, of ill health and my mental state becoming more fragile and unbearable deal with. I, in turn, was becoming more difficult to live with as well. All I talked about was “making progress” and all I was getting fed back to me from Life was what I interpreted was “lack of progress”. 

And if on cue, right then, my phone rang and it was a friend who had been through her own major health issues and had come out the other end after many years of walking through the fire. I answered, even though I wasn’t in the mood to chat. And I remember saying to her, “this is not a good time for me” and of course she asked why and I told her. I went through the long list of what was going wrong and how lost and stuck and miserable I felt at that moment. 

            She let me go on and on for probably five minutes until I let out an exhausted breath and there was a moment of silence in our one-sided conversation. And very off-handedly, she asked me one question: “What are you grateful for?” “Grateful!?” I exclaimed. “Grateful??? There’s nothing to be grateful for!” And again, in a very low-key tone, she said, “There’s a lot to be grateful for.” And again, I reminded her of all the things that were going wrong in my health journey. And again, she said, “Tell me one thing you’re grateful for.” I sat there and really thought about it but couldn’t come up with one thing. “You’re sitting in your car, right?” she asked. “Yes,” I said. “Aren’t you grateful for your car?” she asked. “I thought we were talking about my health!” I replied. “We are,” she calmly said. “You’d be shocked,” she said, “how being grateful for what you have, no matter how small it may be to you, impacts your health and your recovery.”

            We talked for another half hour or so as I drove back home that day. She suggested that before I went to sleep every night, to say out loud five things I was grateful for, even if it was as simple as “I’m grateful for the covers that keep me warm on this bed.” I agreed to do it, even though I had low expectations and little enthusiasm for the idea. After all, I had trained myself to that point to only focus on what was going wrong and all the potential terrible outcomes that were lurking on my dark and gloomy horizon. But I’d promised her I would give it a shot that night and I tend to keep my promises. 

            So that night, I eased into bed and adjusted myself so I could potentially feel relaxed, which was never easy at that time, I let out a tired breath and said out loud, “I’m grateful for these covers that are keeping me warm tonight.” And I said it just like that. So that was one down, I thought. Four more to go. And boy did I struggle with those four things. I really had to lean into it. And honestly, I just wanted to sleep so I needed to find those four remaining ones a.s.a.p. And I remember coming up with the most mundane statements. “I’m grateful for this bed.” “I’m grateful for the cool breeze coming in the window.” “I’m grateful for my car.” “I’m grateful for my pillow.” There. Done. I said to myself. And I went to sleep. Hmmm. I went to sleep. Somehow, I’d bypassed the usual nightly thirty to ninety minute self-destructive pattern of worry, terror and anguish. 

            Woke up the next day and welcomed the day with my usual, at that time, dreary, broken, exhausted feeling and my morning ritual utterance of “God, how in the hell am I going to get through this day?” Yes, that’s how I greeted my day every morning back then. And you get what you expect so I had another crappy day. But that night, I crawled into bed and with a weary, sarcastic tenor, repeated the same five points of gratitude I’d said the night before. I mean, she didn’t tell me to come up with different ones, right? So I figured, I could rehash the old ones and be done with it. And just as I finished saying out the loud the last one, I heard a chime ding outside through the crack in the open window. And I thought, “Huh, that sounds pretty.” So being the overachiever I tended to always be, I thought, you know what, let’s go for a bonus gratitude tonight. So out loud, I said, “I’m grateful for that chime outside because I like the way it sounds.” And, yes, I said it with the same tired sarcasm I used to employ. Because I hadn’t learned yet that sarcasm is the unhealed person’s weapon of choice that is employed at every opportunity to mask their bitter hostility and create a protective barrier between themselves and others. And I didn’t fall asleep as quickly that night because instead of ending on a good note of gratitude, I decided to gin up a lot of anxiety. Because once you’ve dipped your foot into the river of self-sabotage, it’s not easy to pull it out. Eventually you get to the point where you’re not having the experience. The experience is having you and that completely obliterates one’s perspective. 

            So every single night, no matter how crappy my day was, I repeated the same gratitude statements. Even in the same order. And I continued doing it every night until about one month later when during the DAY, I was outside one morning, standing in the snow and the sunlight briefly pierced through the evergreen branches and it looked like fingers of light reaching through the needles of the tree and into the fresh snow. And it had a mystical quality to it. I just stared at it until the clouds came together and extinguished the light. And my first thought, was “That was beautiful.” And my second thought was, “And now it’s gone. I wish it had lingered a little longer.” And I stopped and went, wait a second. How about be grateful for getting a chance to see that. Focusing on the brevity of it, was being focused on lack and not gratitude. Because yes, it was brief, but I just happened to be standing outside in this exact spot to witness that short but breathtaking sparkle of nature. And that’s when I realized that I had been so caught up in my self-focused, tunnel-visioned point of view of everything that was going wrong and all the setbacks and yada, yada, yada. And while I was doing that, a lot of beauty was happening around me and I wasn’t ‘seeing’ it. And right then, I wasn’t just grateful for that light piercing through the tree. I was also grateful for that awareness. And it was that day that I started to really look around me for the little things that were packed with beauty and awe and color and light. So sunsets became my favorite pastime. And I would add those sunsets to my nightly gratitude list. And that list went from a paltry six or seven things, to dozens within a few weeks. And of course, I included the people in my life I was grateful for, my animals, the house I lived in at that time, as well as the sunsets and the sound of the rain falling outside. 

            And little by little by little, my health and my wellbeing began to change. I also stopped investing in my focus on progress. I celebrated every single minutia that went right on a particular day. I’m so grateful I could chew my food without my jaw going into a spasm. I’m so grateful that I attended that class even though I didn’t want to go. All the worry I had been entangled with, took a backseat. No, not a backseat. It wasn’t even in the metaphorical car. It was more like in a trailer I dragged behind me. But inside the metaphorical car, it was packed to the gills with gratitude. And I cannot begin to tell you how within a period of about six weeks, my nervous system began to become less triggered. Instead of worrying about some ache or pain that I had, I was making sure I had good view of the sunset. Everything began to calm down for me and everything seemed to be put in its proper perspective. Did I still have a long way to go to heal my body and my mind? Absolutely. I had years actually. But they weren’t years that were burdened with the weight of my inability to lift up my head and look around and see the minutia that had always been there but that I could not see because I was too focused on lack and what was not “right” in my life. Instead of the lack I’d been chosing, there was now endless bounty. I was reminded of that quote from Michael P. Watson, “You will never get what you want until you are thankful for what you have.”

            And over the months that followed, the tension in my body was greatly reduced. When I wasn’t clamping down on my muscles in anticipatory anxiety, I was able to move better. And when I could move better, I felt better. And that was one more thing to be grateful for. I noticed after a few weeks of doing my nightly gratitude practices, that I was able to take a deeper breath, and it was only then that I realized how much I’d been holding my breath and breathing in shallow breaths. 

And other interesting coincidences, shall we say, began to materialize in my life. I began to attract various healers, bodyworkers and the like who were perfect fits for what I needed. Yes, there were still a few that didn’t work out. But for the most part, better individuals started coming into my life and because of them, my health and mental well-being truly gained traction. One of those healers did energy medicine and he was always talking about how vital gratitude was, especially when you were ill, because, as he put it, “Gratitude anchors you in the moment.” It requires you to be present and even if it’s just for a few minutes, you give yourself the gift of choosing to not focus on what’s wrong but instead, what is right. I found one of the emails he wrote me during that time and in it he wrote, “Gratitude lowers the resistance one carries around when they are ill. The more gratitude, the less resistance. The less resistance, the greater the chance for the nervous system to relax so that the body has space to heal. Gratitude doesn’t come as a payment, but as a precursor that allows for the energy your body needs to heal itself and to draw to it exactly what it needs at the exact time it needs it.”

And he was right. The more grateful I became, the more I became a magnet for being in the right place at the right time for either some type of information I needed at that exact time or for meeting someone who could help me in my healing journey. And I didn’t understand this magic yet until I began to read about the science of gratitude. Because they’ve actually studied the subject. And there’s more studies and stories than I have time to tell you about. But there are ones that stand out to me. 

            There was the story written by a former Russian prisoner of war who was put in solitary confinement. He was starved, tortured and taunted by the guards. His cell was freezing cold and all he had to lay on was a hard slab. The only light into his darkness came from a dirty window that hung above his head. One day, as the story was told, in a state of dissociation, he managed to climb up high enough and peer through the tiny, murky window. It was a wasteland of bleakness as far he could see with no trees, only posts with barbed wires. But one day, when he peered out the window, a simple grey bird was perched on the wire post. The bird was not spectacular in his appearance. In fact the bird was plain. But he was immediately aware of the life inside it. The ability it had to fly away and return. In the story, the prisoner wrote how he was so deeply grateful for that plain bird and how thankful he was whenever he was able to pull his broken body up to the window and catch a glimpse of it. In his physical, mental and emotional undoing, with nothing but darkness engulfing him, his gratitude for that bird is what kept him going until he was finally released from prison. Some would hear that story, and attribute it to his shattered state of mind. But perhaps it took that broken state of mind for him to be able to set the darkness aside briefly and focus on a tiny bird outside his cell and dream of the day that he too would fly from that nightmare. 

            As for the many studies that have been done on gratitude’s healing effect on the body and brain, there is consistent evidence that spending time each and every day in a state of gratitude where one expresses either out loud or in writing their gratitude for whatever they have at that time, has a noticeable effect on the neurotransmitters in the brain to the point where it strengthens neural pathways and eventually creates a permanent grateful receptive nature within the individual. Did you hear that? That’s profound. There’s no pill you have to take or supplement or expensive you have to buy. You just have to train yourself to be grateful. 

            In the multiple articles I read on this phenomenon, the average time it took to see quantitated changes in neurotransmitters such as dopamine, serotonin and oxytocin which is the bonding and love hormone, was four weeks of daily practice, whether they were saying it out loud or writing it in a journal. But the real changes in not just the subject’s neurotransmitters but also how they subjectively regarded the quality of their life at twelve weeks versus when they began the experiment, was at the 12-week mark. Which makes sense since there’s this agreed upon theory that it generally takes about 100 days to change a habit and be able to see how that habit has improved one’s life. 

            There was an anecdotal story I read that was about teenagers who had experienced moderate to severe trauma and who were developing PTSD. The sooner these teens could go to therapy and be able within their therapy to find any type of gratitude for their situation, even if it was just “I didn’t die and I’m grateful for that,” the less likelihood of them experiencing lingering psychological effects that turn PTSD into a chronic lifetime issue. 

            In the book, “Brain Rules,” by Dr. John Medina, he mentions how gratitude “successfully shifts our focus from our burdens to the blessings we have” and that through this, we have that surge of feel good neurotransmitters as I already mentioned and with that surge of those chemicals in the brain, apathy is reduced, motivation is improved and depression is lessened.

            There have also been studies on how gratitude changes the neuroplasticity of the brain. This is a big deal. Stress, especially chronic stress, actually kills brain cells. This was determined in studies in the late 90’s. Stress also has been shown to not only negatively impact how the brain functions but also the actual structure of the brain itself. That was mind-blowing when I read that and I thought about how much unhealthy impact my brain has had to endure over many decades. But back in the 1960’s, it was determined that the brain’s neurons had the potential to what they referred to as “reorganize” after a traumatic event. That reorganization leads to what is now called neuroplasticity which means that while certain brain cells die, the potential is there for the brain being able to ignite new neural pathways and reconnect via those pathways into a different state of mental being. Thus, by practicing gratitude daily, weaving it into your lifestyle so that it’s not something you have to remember to do but just “do” when something happens that fills you with gratitude, that has been proven to increase the intensity of grey matter in the brain that is associated with emotional regulation. Think about all these people right now who can’t regulate their emotions and because of that, they are doing and saying things that getting them into a lot of trouble with their families, with their jobs, on their social media accounts. Being able to have the ability to take a breath and step back before having an emotional outburst is a superpower these days. It shouldn’t be but here we are. So if the practice of gratitude positively changes the neuroplasticity in one’s brain so that over time they develop better emotional coping skills, you think that might be something to practice? I do. 

            The next one I read really intrigued me because as someone who always worked harder than I ever enjoyed myself in life, the increased neuroplasticity when your brain is on gratitude strengthens neural pathways that are connected to allowing yourself to experience positive emotions. And through that, the ability to experience joy is increased. That one really caught my attention. I don’t have the time available in this episode to dive into the depths of neuroplasticity, but I encourage you to research it yourself if it’s something that sparks an interest in you. And definitely investigate the connection between neuroplasticity and gratitude. I find it fascinating. 

            Daily gratitude practices that are woven into the tapestry of your life helps to lower cortisol, which is the stress hormone. And take it from someone who had severe adrenal burnout three times in her life, starting at the age of twenty-six, the lowering of high cortisol at night is absolutely necessary if you have any chance at getting a good night sleep where you aren’t tossing and turning or waking up and not being able to get back to sleep. And then the lack of sleep, continues to raise your cortisol levels so that you get in this vicious loop of various sleep disorders and even sleep apnea. 

            There’s a lot of interesting studies on how gratitude positively affects one’s resilience and resilience is such an important behavior to cultivate. It’s not a forced or fake toughness. Resilience certainly is about strength but I look on resilience as strength with buoyancy. Strength with flexibility. Strength with the ability to bounce back. Not getting mired in the event or the situation or the person you’re dealing with to a point where that energy weakens you or makes you angry, which also weakens you. Resilience in the way I experience it is not about putting walls up. But more about fortifying your energy field, your body, your mind, your heart, your spirit so that you don’t absorb every experience in a way that eventually destroys you. Resilience is not denying that something didn’t hurt you. You still feel it and don’t pretend it away. But then this inner energy that’s akin to a bouncing energy fills you up and you stop focusing on what is wrong or sad and you spring off the couch or the bed or the chair and say something like, “Okay, it’s time to move forward” and that springboard energy carries you forward. Resilience is a beautiful thing, let me tell you. It’s the difference between agreeing to linger in a state of total undoing and destruction versus propelling yourself into a state of carrying on and not allowing whatever happened to define your ability to live, to love, to enjoy life and to gain greater awareness. And there are plenty of studies to prove that daily gratitude practices foster better coping methods that allow you to adapt to stress in ways you never could before. Adapt or die, folks. Participants in one 2018 study scored higher on their levels of satisfaction, happiness and pleasure after practicing daily gratitude. And a further study linked to that one proved that depressed patients who did daily gratitude practices, were more motivated and willing to bounce back from their depressive experiences instead of staying in that depressed state. That’s resilience. Being able to take a different approach and regain a sense of enjoyment and buoyancy in life after going through something that normally would have sidelined you. I can attest to this effect of gratitude. Because even though I’ve had to go through a lot of deep issues over the last two years that would have normally taken me out, my commitment to my daily gratitude on a daily basis throughout the day, not just before I go to sleep, is a big reason why I’ve been able to keep my head above water and not succumb to the various circumstances. That doesn’t mean I don’t feel them deeply. I do. But they do not take me out anymore. And that is worth the price of admission, believe me. 

            Emotional resilience that is generated through gratitude, also benefits problem-solving capabilities. I noticed this aspect within myself, and it definitely got my attention. Because instead of feeling on the spot and confused when I needed to problem solve quickly, I found myself stepping back, taking a breath and not allowing fear or anxiety to block my ability to solve the problem that was in front of me. Instead of ruminating on “the sky is falling” or “what could happen,” I bypassed that completely and trusted in my ability to figure out the solution I needed or various solutions. There was an absolute shift in the way I processed those situations. And I even had a couple people comment to me that they noticed I wasn’t falling back on old patterns that had always created a lot of stress and drama in my life back then. There’s also this grounded quality I feel much more since being in a consistent state of gratitude. This isn’t gratitude expressed in a cringeworthy, syrupy way. This is gratitude with both feet firmly planted in the earth and expressing myself from my heart center.  

            Extending that heart centered thankfulness to others for things they do for us, either saying it to them or writing a thank you email or better yet, send them a card through the mail. Shock the hell out of them. And this is not about giving yourself a pat on the back. You only do it if you feel compelled to do it. Because they actually did a study on this too. When we receive or give thank you cards, our brain briefly is redirected in such a way where we stop and take it in and puts us in the present moment. Think about when you’ve received a card or a very thoughtful email that made you stop and sit there and go, “Wow. Damn.” I know I have and it lingers for a bit and filters through you in such a way that you get up from that experience and it stays with you throughout the day and maybe for days later. That’s powerful medicine right there. And if you give that experience to someone else? Someone who maybe doesn’t ever hear “thank you” or “I appreciate what you’re doing for me,” that’s a big deal for them. If someone helps you or gives you the name of a healer or therapist who turns out to be a true life saver for you, tell that person who gave you their name Thank you. And a lot of times, I learned, people aren’t used to hearing how much what they did changed your life for the better. In fact, sometimes when you tell them, they look at you strangely. I had that happen a few times. Kind of like, “What’s your angle here?” because I think people are so conditioned unfortunately to not trust kind comments toward them or think there are strings attached or that you want someone from them. And that’s not your intention. You’re just saying, “I really appreciate what you’ve done for me.” Not because you’re trying to be nice. But because you recognize, especially when you are ill or dealing with a chronic issue, that people who provide you with actual answers and help that make a difference are rare but they are out there. And the acknowledgement of those people resonates like a tap on a crystal tuning bowl and it reverberates within you and within them. You may be the only person in their life who has ever thanked them and not done it for any ulterior motive but simply to acknowledge them. 

            I learned a lot of important life lessons over the last eight or so years. And one is you can’t ask a person to love themselves who has no concept of that. You ask someone who doesn’t love themselves to write down on a piece of paper what is good about them, they can’t do it. There is too much resistance to that exercise. In fact, asking them to do that can backfire because since they can’t come up with anything they love about themselves, they interpret that as “I’m a lost cause. It’s pointless for me to continue living in this life.” A healer friend of mine said something so interesting to me about this a couple years ago. She said “You can’t expect someone who has spent decades or a lifetime in shame, guilt or self-persecution because of what family has programmed into him/her to love themselves. That’s too big a leap. It requires a journey and loving oneself comes through gratitude.” She was right. I started to think about this on my drive home from her office one day. I realized that Gratitude was the bridge toward lowering the damned RESISTANCE so many people have right now in an attempt to find peace within themselves and maybe, just maybe, begin to find even the most minor things to love about themselves. No matter how small, it’s a start. Is that not beautiful?

I’ve mentioned this quote before: “Life doesn’t get easier. You just get stronger.” And gratitude is the pathway I found that cultivates that strength through multiple pathways. If you take a quiz to find out whether you are a grateful person, I’ve posted a link in the show notes that I encourage you to explore and see where you fall on the gratitude spectrum, so to speak. When you get your results, really examine where you are. And if you are a high functioning person who is grateful 24/7, congratulations. Keep going. And if you are lower on the scale, use that to motivate you to see where you could improve your life by being thankful for what you have. This is re-wiring your emotional and mental programming using gratitude as the spark. I’ve done and I know it works. Didn’t cost me anything but the “time” it took each night before I drifted off to sleep to say what I was grateful for in the most basic of ways. I am thankful for this roof over my head, for the food in the house, for the various people and pets that made my life enjoyable and so on. I can attest that when I added this into my daily life seven years ago, the gratitude began to crowd out the erroneous sense of lack I thought I had. The “Bowl of Gratitude” was pouring over and lack and constant self-criticism were forced out of that bowl simply because the power of Gratitude was too powerful. Thus, “like magic,” I began to stop seeing myself as someone who “didn’t do enough.” Why? Because I was “suddenly” feeling that what I was able to accomplish, I was grateful for and that was “enough” for that day. And that energy helped me move forward a little more each day until I was able to move my body more effectively. Why? Because the buoyancy of the Gratitude released the RESISTANCE that was causing everything from chronic muscle spasms, nerve pain and constant inner mental and emotional turmoil. Thus, when my chiropractor adjusted me, the procedure “held” longer than 10 minutes. Sometimes, I could go days without a muscle spasm which was absolutely a “miracle” back then. That eventually extended to weeks and then months and longer. Everything got better.

When you see your cup as full and that lack is only a distorted perception brought on by the programmed chatter you have allowed to infiltrate your consciousness, “suddenly” you are living in a world that delivers “blessings” to you on a constant basis. “Suddenly” you actually “see” the sunrise and the sunset and you stop a little longer to take them in. “Suddenly” the sun glistening through the droplets off a long icicle that hangs off the side of the house is entrancing and you’re like, “I got to see that!” It’s like being a child and seeing these things for the first time. The world comes alive again and the “magic” is revealed. The magic that was there all along but I was too mired in self-criticism to “see” it. I learned something else about gratitude that changed me deeply. And that is when you are able to be grateful for your illness, or your accident or an awful situation you had no choice but to go through or any other event in your life that you always regarded as traumatic, horrendous, or whatever term you gave it, when you are able to see how that event, that illness, that situation allowed you to learn and grow and become who you are today. Resilient, strong, perceptive, compassionate. Those are all very good things. Because you realize that without that thing that destroyed you for a period time, when you chose to heal it and overcome it, even in the midst of your worst fears and terrors, it was that thing that was the impetus for your internal transformation. That illness, that accident, that divorce, that separation, that job loss, that death was the vehicle that drove you to seek the healing that eventually alchemically transmuted “that thing” into the path that led you to your salvation. And “that thing” deserves a lot of gratitude, no matter how brutal or unforgiving an experience it was. Because if it weren’t for it being the catalyst to wake you up, you would still be asleep today. 

I haven’t missed one night over the last seven years, no matter how exhausted I might be, without saying out loud or even whispering if I’m too tired, all the things I am grateful for that are in my life and that also happened on that day. And there have been a few nights, where I fell asleep whispering, thank you, thank you….thank you.  

That’s all for this week. Thank you for choosing to listen to this show. If you like this show, share this show or any other episode you like with someone right now who you feel needs to hear it. Check out the notes for this episode where you’ll see the links to find me on Instagram and X @laureldewey or thealchemyofnaturalhealing. Look for that gratitude quiz too which I’ve included on today’s show notes. On all the show notes, I’ve included the companies I support and have helped me in my healing process, so check that out and look for the discount codes. Looking forward to you joining me in two weeks where I will go into the Vault and debut unaired segments of past shows that had to be cut for time but I hope carry value for my regular listeners. Until then, remember that “Awareness is a demanding mistress. Once she wakes you up, she won’t let you go back to sleep.”