Not only will this help you remember the things you are grateful for, but also it can trigger a mini-mindfulness moment in your day. It will bring you out of gratitude and recovery your head and into the present moment, giving you something to focus your attention on. However, it can be tough to get started without practical ideas.
- Gratitude for even the smallest courtesies can promote a consistent sense of thankfulness.
- Firstly, provide an explanation to the class about feeling grateful and have a discussion.
- Addiction experts agree that gratitude can strongly influence a person’s chance for a successful recovery from any kind of addiction.
- Reflecting on these life lessons and asking yourself what you’ve learned in the last week, month, or year is a great way to practice gratitude and reflect on your own personal growth in recovery.
Getting the help you need is the first step toward recovering from addiction. Many people suffering from addiction put this step off for years, and some indefinitely. You should therefore be grateful for getting the help you required, or for the people in your life who got you help for your addiction.
Five Easy Ways to Cultivate Gratitude and Appreciation
As you learn to incorporate gratitude into how you view your new life, you may find that your recovery isn’t as difficult as you once thought. If you’ve spent months or years soured by a negative outlook, it isn’t easy to swap rose-colored glasses with your current position of seeing everything as gray and stormy. The good news is that gratitude is contagious, and you can practice gratitude with others to help teach yourself to find positivity naturally. Sometimes addiction can even lead to imagined negative situations, like believing friends and family who just want to help are against you. This self-centered thought process is the opposite of gratitude, which would help you see your loved ones are trying to show they care and want to help. The holiday season can often bring added stress and pressure, especially for those in recovery.
Take time to look at yourself and your life and be grateful to yourself. If you are in recovery, you have accomplished so much just by being sober or trying to get sober. Thank yourself for showing up each day to try again, to grow, to face challenges, and to work on being the best version of yourself.
Gratitude: A Counterbalance to Stress
Many sobriety programs teach you to be grateful for your sobriety. When you are truly grateful for something, it is harder for you to do the opposite. In the case of drugs or alcohol, if you are grateful to be off them, you are unlikely to start using them again. In order to understand how gratitude affects addiction recovery you have to realize the benefits of gratitude in general and what it does for a recovering addict. Then you can learn the techniques that will allow you to use it to help you in your recovery. When stress begins to overwhelm you, take a moment to pause and reflect on what you are grateful for.
With gratitude, you can sense how far you’ve come and where you might go next. You feel a deep sense of pride and accomplishment for all your hard work and good intentions, and you look for opportunities to connect with people, the world, the moment. It’s important to understand that the relationship you have with yourself will often be reflected in your relationships with others. Many in recovery, particularly early recovery, feel guilty for past mistakes and beat themselves up.
Gratitude Helps Recovery
Gratitude is the key to finding the silver lining in a negative situation, and the thoughtful optimism and clarity that gratitude brings help keep the situation in perspective. Appreciating simple things that are going well or being thankful for small acts of kindness by others can lift your spirits while the negative situation is resolved. Learning about the forms of negative thinking can prepare you to combat them with a dose of gratitude.
Results showed that this gratitude intervention improved wellbeing via flourishing, at multiple points throughout the duration of the study. This study (Killen & Macaskill, 2015) utilized the “three good things” exercise to enhance gratitude in adults 60 years and older. This exercise involves writing down three good things you have to be grateful for each day, generally at night. Try taking a picture of one thing you are grateful for every day for a week.
Spread the Gratitude
Research confirms what those in recovery have long known – gratitude leads to a greater sense of well-being, happiness, and life satisfaction1. It is easy to understand why these traits would be important in long-term recovery. While the benefits of gratitude are clear, learning how to cultivate and practice gratitude can be tricky, especially early in recovery. A positive outlook is important because addiction itself fosters a host of negative emotions and ways of seeing the world. In the grip of an addiction, it’s easy to feel victimized, angry, and trapped. As the addiction progresses, substance abusers find themselves losing many of the things they valued in their lives, such as relationships, jobs and even homes.