With all that is going on in the world at the moment and all the legitimate reasons we might have to worry – our health, the health of our loved ones, our jobs, the economy – and the massive restrictions that we have to endure that alter the way we live and work, our brains are in a constant state of stress. Our amygdala is firing all day long to activate the necessary resources in our body to either fight, run or freeze. If you notice that you are more irritable, more anxious or sometimes feel paralyzed even in front of small tasks, that is completely normal! Our brains are hard-wired to perceive dangers and problems first and foremost.
Since Easter is approaching and many of us won’t be able to spend the holidays with their families, which might add sadness and frustration to the mixture of negative emotions, I wanted to take this opportunity to introduce the Mindfulness practice of gratitude. Gratitude is defined as a positive emotional state in which one recognizes and appreciates what one has received in life. Research shows that taking time to experience gratitude can make you happier and even healthier because it helps our brain to turn the attention away from possible dangers and towards all that is going well in our lives.
If you practice for a little while, you can rewire your brain to be less reactive to stressors and more perceptive for all the positive things going on. They can be little things or big things. But you really have to focus on them and actually write them down or share them with another person. Two things are important: you have to practice regularly, daily would be best, and you have to “stretch your gratitude muscle” which means that you should take some time to search for as many positive things as possible. It is easy to come up with 5 things but can you name 10 or even 20 things you are grateful for at the moment? Actively searching for more and more positive things trains our brain to perceive positivity more easily.
Let’s use this year’s Easter Holidays to be grateful for all the wonderful things that we still can enjoy at the moment and decrease our stress and anxiety levels.
All the best,
Juliane