Programming Gratitude
We often look at the world and see all the things that are wrong with it. We think about all the things we don’t have in our lives that we want. We fixate on every discomfort we feel.
It’s true that there are many things that are terribly wrong around us, but how much of what we see is because we’ve trained ourselves to be able to focus on it and filter out everything else?
Our minds are extraordinary learning machines, capable of nearly anything given enough time and practice. But our minds work with all the training we provide them, and spending each day contemplating all the things that make you miserable uses the same mechanisms that you use to learn how to read or make music.
What we focus on is what our minds eventually master.
Every day, I create an Evernote note to catalog my thoughts during the day. I always include a bolded section called “gratitudes” where I write down at least three things I’m grateful to have in my life. I’ve been doing it for a few weeks now and, even in that short time, I’ve noticed that it’s started to help me focus on the bright spots in my life–even when I’m mired in darkness.
So the next time you feel a sinking feeling sweeping over you, think to yourself: how much of this have I programmed myself to feel?