Tomorrow is the last day of November, and November is the month of Thanksgiving, and traditionally there’s lots of talk about what we are grateful for. That’s a good thing to keep in mind on a daily basis.
I’m grateful for a regular practice of meditation and journaling every morning, and I start every journal entry with the same three questions every day:
- What am I grateful for today?
- What am I positive about today?
- What are my creative intentions for today?
At the end of 2016, I posted about feeling gratitude and what I was grateful for last year. (I’m including the link to that post in the comments.) Thinking about gratitude and positivity and my daily journaling let me to thinking about something a good friend of mine, Robert Caverty, has been doing. He started a daily positivity practice. I asked him recently why he’d done so and how he felt he benefited. I’m very grateful to Robert for sharing his experience with me and allowing me to share his words here.
Cheers! Here’s to your health!
Robert Caverty: So, I had been suffering some major depression and was struggling to claw my way back. At some point I realized the problem wasn't going to go away on its own, so I did a bit of research and found that one of the biggest hurdles for depression is the fact that your brain feeds on reinforcement - so when you're feeling down, you think negative thoughts, which makes you feel down, repeat ad nauseam.
Just like trying to not think of a purple elephant, the trick isn't to get yourself to stop thinking about it, but to fill your mind with something else and build on those reinforcements.
The original journal concept was to write three things I liked about the day (regardless of how important they are - could be as simple as "I held the door open for someone"), saying them out loud as I wrote them (for stronger reinforcement) each night, then reread them aloud in the morning.
At first, it was really hard to come up with things to write, and I still struggle with jotting down the first positive at times, but I found each positive made the next one easier to find, so that by the third or fourth or fifth, they start flowing easily. I also found over a few weeks that I noticed more positives throughout the days, since I was slowly (somewhat unintentionally) training myself to look for them.
After a few months, it became habit. Day-to-day troubles became less and less bothersome; I started becoming more productive at work and more able to focus on solutions when presented with a problem. My relationship with my son started improving, and parenting became less about the chore of keeping a child alive and well developed, and more about the joy and shared experiences of life. I stopped seeing problems, and started seeing opportunities in their place. The world didn't change, but my perspective did.
Getting started (and getting over the slightly hokey-ness of the whole process) was the hardest bit, but if I could pinpoint one tool that's helped me come back from the brink, that list would be it!