Do you ever feel like those "GRATEFUL" signs are cheesy? I get it. Especially when you're dealing with anxiety or constant negativity. But what if there was actual science behind feeling grateful that could flip the switch on your stress and anxiety?
This episode is for YOU! You'll learn:
The NERDY Brain Science behind why feeling grateful is SO powerful (and why it's not just toxic positivity!)
Simple, Practical Ways to use this science to your advantage
How to Stop Feeling Anxious and Overwhelmed and start feeling more joy in your life, especially during the holidays (even if you hate them!)
How to Rewire Your Brain for gratitude (it's easier than you think!)
Discover the difference between gratitude and thankfulness, and learn
How to Feel More Compassionate towards yourself and others
How to Build Resilience against stress and anxiety
How to Boost Your Confidence
How To Feel More Joy in your life, every single day
Even if you're feeling stuck in a negative rut, this episode will show you how to feel more joy and dig yourself out. You'll get actionable tips you can use right away, including:
Setting Gratitude Reminders on your phone
Creating a Gratitude Practice
Paying it Forward to help others and improve your own mood
Listen to this episode and learn the simple secret to feeling more grateful and reducing stress and anxiety.
P.S. Feeling stuck and overwhelmed? Reach out to Megan and learn how she can help you transform your mindset and your life: https://www.megandevito.com/workwithme
Podcast Transcript:
Welcome to Episode 11. I am recording this episode on a gorgeous day at the beginning of November of 2022 which means I'm thinking ahead to Thanksgiving, but honestly, I live in northeast Indiana and it is gorgeous out. So I'm kind of wrestling between Thanksgiving feelings, the beautiful weather, and wanting to pull out my Christmas lights from the attic and decorate outside. I don't throw up my tree the day after Halloween but I love Christmas and I'm excited and I love Thanksgiving. I don't want to rush past Thanksgiving because it's a huge important holiday but I'm a Christmas fan. Plus, I just finished painting my living room and getting things all pretty upstairs. So I want to see it all lit up. I have a lot to be thankful and grateful for this year and I've been working on slowing down all year long so we will see how long I can hold out. But I know that once the my college kids get home for their break, it is Game On and honestly I cannot wait because they love Christmas as much as I do. But I'm not there yet. And since the release of This episode is only two days before Thanksgiving in the US and I don't want to keep you waiting any longer. Let's just go ahead and get started.
01:57
If you haven't guessed yet, this week, or this episode, is going to center around feeling thankful, grateful and blessed. And I know there are a lot of signs like little wooden signs you can buy for your wall or your bathroom, your kitchen and there's #blessed all over the internet, but have you actually stopped and really let yourself sink into that feeling of being grateful or thankful? Or knowing that you are blessed? And do you even know what that means to be grateful or why it's important? Because there's science behind this. Yes, I know it can feel kind of cheesy when it's on a wooden sign and I know it might seem like garbage, but stick with me here. If the idea of being grateful, or positive, thankful or anything else feels ridiculous because of this never ending war with anxiety that you've been dealing with, or because if it was that easy to feel better, you've done it already. You are exactly in the right place. I've got some really great nerdy brain science stuff to share with you and some super easy, practical ways that you can use the science about your brain to your advantage. No toxic positivity stuff here, just truth and another simple step you can take to flip the switch on stress and anxiety so you can start feeling more joy in your life, especially at this time of year. And I know this is not everybody's favorite time of the year. I know a lot of people get really sad. A lot of people get super stressed out, especially if you're introverted or you have some social anxiety. I know you can feel pretty rotten. It seems like there's a love hate relationship with the holidays, so whether you love it or hate it, This episode is for you.
03:44
Sometimes something as simple as feeling grateful might come across as wishful thinking but I also know how the brain works; how your brain works and how my brain works. So let's start with the nerdy stuff: I like the nerdy stuff. And so we are clear, the nerdy stuff was the crack in the dam for me. What I mean by this is when I learned what was going on in my brain, about how my thoughts work, and why my whole body was anxious, it opened up so much to allow me to understand the feelings that I experienced in my body, and to start taking the meaning out of the feelings and the power out of my thoughts. Does that makes sense? When I learned what my brain was doing, why my body felt the way that it felt, and why my thoughts always went down a rabbit hole, when I started understanding the "why," it changed things for me.
04:46
So let's start with the facts. I imagine this is really how the rest of the world does life. And the rest of us anxiously minded folks are anxiously minded people who are just waiting to figure it out. They've got it This is their normal, and we get to move into their normal, which is sometimes a heck of a lot better than our normal. But we're going to find gratitude normal today. Here's the deal, your brain will do whatever it takes to keep you alive and it doesn't know the difference between what is real and what you imagine. I have talked about this in every single episode.
05:20
1. Your brain is going to do what it takes to keep you alive and kicking. It will overreact, it will give you all the garbage thoughts in the world, and it will just keep going, if you keep believing it. I know that's easier said than done. I know it feels real. I know that your brain is screaming at you sometimes and your body is freaking out; I get it. We get to learn that our brain is just doing its job. "Thanks brain! That was really unhelpful. But thank you." That was number one.
05:55
2. Your brain will always take the easiest and most familiar path first. This is what habits are made of. The easy path is the freaking out path. It's the, "I feel like crap" path. It's that "this is the way I've always done it" path. It's the "it seems too hard" path. the "if I change it can be scary" path. "If I do this, it's too big, I don't know how" path. This is all normal, your brain is doing what it's supposed to do. Because if you don't do anything, you're alive right now you might feel like crap, but at least you're safe. So, "thanks brain, again,... not helpful,... not what I want." But you can start to understand why your thoughts are the way they are. I always think "this". Of course you do! That's what your brain wants you to do. "My body always feels like this, so there must be something wrong." No, that's just what your body does. When you're anxious, you have to be able to separate the way that you think and the way that you feel from the science and once you understand the science, you can start picking apart the knots in your thoughts and in your feelings.
07:00
3. When your brain sees something that it recognizes, it causes your body to react. If it perceives something as dangerous, or strange, or new, or it throws some idea out there that it's bad for some reason, your brain will do everything it can to keep you from doing that thing; whatever it is! For me, at one point in my life, it was shaking people's hands. For you, it might be leaving your house. It might be talking to someone you don't know. It might be quitting your job. It might be confronting your spouse. All of those things can be perceived as deadly, which is crazy. Like, quitting your job will not kill you. It might scare the crap out of you, but it won't kill you. Your brain doesn't want you to do that because, "what if you don't get another job?" "What if you don't have any money?" "What if you starve to death and become homeless?" "What if everyone thinks that you left them and screwed them over?" What if, what if, what if! That is your brain doing its job. Those are the thoughts that your brain will feed you to keep you from not taking action and that's just one example. S, this can be true for fun things like vacations, like I'm going to go on a vacation to wherever it is that you would go. Last year for me was a good example. Last year for me at about this time, I took my first trip ever to California. I had been wanting to go for a very long time. My best friend from high school, one of my best friends from high school, actually lives in LA. I missed her wedding because my son was turning one or two that year so I thought I needed to stay home for his birthday and I don't regret being home for his birthday, but I do regret not going to California at the same time. But I finally made it out there and I'd loved it and it was gorgeous! But I will admit to you, for the first part of my day when I landed in San Francisco, I was anxious and there was nothing wrong. I loved it! I wasn't tired, I wasn't sick. I mean, I kind of got carsick as we drove up through the windy hills and stuff but then I took motion sickness medicine and I felt great. But I still felt anxious because my body is perceiving things is different and new. I flipped the switch on my thoughts and I changed it to excited, and I had the best freaking time ever with my mom in California! But the point of that story was that if your brain recognizes something as new or unfamiliar, it can feed you anxious thoughts and feelings. It's doing its job. "This isn't normal for you." Heck, no! It was way better than normal! I was in California! But if I didn't recognize what was going on, that would have ruined by vacation. It can also give you the same response for things that are deadly like rattlesnakes or like potentially dangerous things like if you decided you were going to walk a tightrope over the Grand Canyon, which would be really stupid. That would give you the same feeling as going on vacation. If you didn't recognize the feelings and you let them get out of hand. This is why it's a important to understand what your brain is doing; that feeling it feels the same whether you're excited to go on vacation, or you're an idiot and you want to walk over the Grand Canyon on a tightrope, because the feelings are the same, but the thoughts behind them are what make us process them differently. Does that make sense? All right, let's keep going.
10:20
Let's get clear on the difference between gratitude and thanksgiving or thankfulness. Before we go any further, I have Thanksgiving on the brain. So gratitude, and thankfulness they go together, but they're not the same thing. Gratitude is really this attitude of appreciation for everything, even the sucky stuff. When you have gratitude, you are inherently thankful, but more as a part of your existence. Even when you wake up, and you have a totally normal day and nothing particularly exciting is going on, you can be grateful. You can be thankful for particular things in that day but gratitude is not dependent on what is going on in your life. It is just you can have a really, really bad day, a horrible day, the day that my grandmother died, I was grateful and I was wrecked. Not the same - not the same, right? Like I don't have to feel good to be grateful. I can feel terrible. And This is why you don't have to be toxically positive, to be grateful. Thanksgiving is different, or thankfulness is different. I am not going to drop the Thanksgiving word... Thankfulness is different. It's focused on a particular situation or event. I was never thankful that my grandmother died but I was grateful that I get to be with her. I was grateful that I had 45 years with her. I was grateful for all these other things. I was incredibly sad but I was thankful that I was there. It's an emotion that can revolve around a gift or an emotional moment in time, that was a very emotional moment for me. So if you think of a time that you got a surprise gift from someone, and you were so excited, and you were so thrilled that you ran up and you hugged them, and you said thank you. When you say thank you to someone that was an emotion. Thankfulness is an emotion, gratitude is an attitude. You could have an attitude of gratitude. You've seen the sign or the slogan on the back of the t shirt, right? So to be clear, you could admit things that pretty much are in the toilet, and still feel grateful for what is going well, and for what you have in your life... but you may not be thankful that you feel anxious or stressed out, or that things suck. But you can be grateful that you have a roof over your head and a bed to hide in for the day. Being over the top happy and positive all the time is not being grateful. It's not even real. It's just fake, isn't it? Pretending that things are all unicorns and rainbows and all of that and ignoring the parts of your life that you want to improve keeps you from improving. Not only is it pretend and Fantasyland, it also keeps you from improving! If everything was so wonderful all the time, you wouldn't even have a reason to stretch yourself or to go after more because you just stay in your bubble of everything is wonderful and ignore the feelings that don't feel good. We don't like to not feel good but you have to remember that life is 50/50 and that's how it's supposed to be. This is why finding gratitude and being thankful is so important. You need the bad stuff in your life to balance out the good, and you need the good to balance out the bad. The happiest, most grateful and thankful person in the world still has shit days. Period. That is the truth.
13:38
So maybe by now you're wondering how gratitude or even being thankful fits into this whole idea of anxiety, or stress or anything else. So first, I want you to remember that when your brain... or when you tell your brain to start looking for things that are going well, you are intentionally redirecting your thoughts to what you want to see, instead of letting the fearful thoughts or the scary feelings in your body, or the things that are stressing you out that are always there, take the front seat of the bus. You are literally switching drivers and changing the route of your bus. So your brain when you do this is actually rewiring itself to find more of what is going well, regardless of the things that cause you to feel anxious. It is rerouting the bus. It is taking a detour. It is creating a new trail. It's like off roading in a bus and finding a new way to feel good, even if you still feel stressed out and anxious. This is intentional. When you're grateful. You open yourself up to compassion and understanding of who you are. Let me say that again... when you're gratefu,l or being grateful opens you up to self compassion and understanding. It guides you towards showing kindness or understanding, and support and compassion toward yourself when things don't go your way, or when you experience stress, or when you blame someone else for what's going on in your life. It's about getting to know yourself and filling yourself up with allowance for the good stuff, along with the not so good stuff. It's the balance, it's the 50/50. Gratitude is important, because when you're viewing the world with more hope and compassion, you can refocus your brain on how you see yourself.
15:32
So if you listen to Episode eight, you might remember me talking about the words "I am" or "I should". I am is always a statement of fact about yourself, whether you like what you're saying or not. If you say "I am stupid", Congratulations, you've just told your brain you're stupid, and now it will believe it. Or if you say "I am the princess of Indiana", you've just told your brain that You are the princess of Indiana, and why not tell yourself what you want to believe? "I should be more grateful" Should you or should you not? I'm going to tell you, you should, but you have to decide for yourself. "I should get up out of this room and clean my house." Should you? Who says? Episode eight... go back and listen to it because the words you say to yourself and the words that you say about yourself matter. Remember that your brain believes what you tell it when you refocus on what you want to see instead of your fears, or your negative beliefs through gratitude, when you do this, you'll start finding yourself feeling less stressed and less anxious because your brain is actually connecting the little neurons in there to find... "Oh, remember yesterday when this good thing happened!" "Look at This good thing over here!" It will start reaching out because it likes the feeling of being grateful. It likes that it makes it feel better. It feels posituvem and you're teaching your brain what you want it to see. You're not telling it the other things aren't there, you're telling it that in the middle of all these other things going on, you can also feel grateful.
17:09
If all of that is starting to click with you, you probably are wondering how the heck you can dig yourself out of an anxious rut or a negative rut. So there are some really simple ways that you can do this. So to start being grateful when you still feel anxious, or negative, or stressed out, or depressed, you have to be intentional because gratitude is a choice! It is a conscious decision. It's not something that just happens out of nowhere. It takes focus, and it takes intention. I would recommend setting an alarm on your phone and saying, Oh, I see... I just woke up in the morning...my alarm goes off in the morning and this is when I when I start my gratitude. I make my coffee. This is when I get gratitude.
17:53
Okay, so you can create an anchor on your cell phone and what I mean by an anchor is something that reminds you to do something. So when I hear this alarm, it tells me I need to write down three things that I'm grateful for. When I walk to the kitchen, and I make a pot of coffee, the coffee reminds me it's time to write down three things that I'm grateful for. You have to make it a scheduled habit first thing in the morning and the last thing you do at night before you go to sleep. Start your day finding things that are already going well before you've done anything because remember, gratitude is not tied to an event, it is an attitude. And when you create the attitude, you are setting yourself up for a good day, not a perfect day, not a day where nothing goes wrong, but a day where you are grateful, and that shifts the way you feel and the way your brain thinks. Schedule it out. Choose a time and make it happen.
18:47
The third thing you can do that will help you feel more thankful, grateful and blessed is to pay it forward. If you've not watched the movie Pay It Forward, you should totally do that. It's very sweet and very good. It will break your heart and fill you up and do all the things. But in this season of gratitude and thanksgiving, helping people is powerful for you, and also powerful for the person that you're helping where can you step outside of your mood, or your comfort zone or you're normal, and show somebody else how to feel incredible. Because when you do that, you get to feel good too. You are blessing them. You are grateful for what you have. You're creating thankfulness that you could help them and they are thankful that you were able to help them. That is powerful change in your brain.
19:37
And of course, finally, talk to me about how I could help you. Gratitude is incredible and it's so simple! This is something that I have intentionally done for so long, without even knowing how it worked. Once I figured out how it worked. I did it even more because I already already knew that it felt good and was working, I just didn't get it. I work with so many people who come to me during our first coaching session, and they tell me how negative they are, and how nothing is going well. That's why I'm here! "I'm so negative." "Everything's bad." They literally tell me they are negative, and that they don't want to feel that way anymore, but they don't know how to change. I promise you, it isn't difficult and you can shift your mind to anything you'd rather feel with intention and practice. You can schedule time to talk with me about working together. If you go to my website, it's just Megan Deito first name, last name, www. megandevito.com/workwithme. Or you can just click the link at the end of the show notes. This is big stuff!
20:48
And again, if you are listening when this podcast airs, I hope you have a Happy Thanksgiving if you live in the United States, and if you don't, I hope you have a really happy Thursday outside of the United States. But regardless, I want you to really enjoy your week to do something with the intention of feeling grateful. And I will be back next Tuesday to chat with you again. Take care. I hope you've enjoyed This episode of The more than anxiety podcast. Be sure to subscribe and leave a review so others can easily find This resource as well. And of course when you're ready to explore coaching with me, jump to the show notes. Click the link and schedule time for us to talk to you soon.
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