(Apparently I didn’t grasp the whole ‘scheduling posts’ thing correctly like I thought I had…. So this has been sitting in my drafts for nearly two months – whoops!)

When I started this blog, I decided I was going to keep a list of blog ideas saved on my laptop. One of those ideas was to write something about gratitude – I had the title ‘An Attitude of Gratitude’ saved on my list and then later changed it to ‘Cultivating an Attitude of Gratitude’ yet when I looked back over my list later, I thought it was such a cliché, cheesy title for a post and I pushed it to the bottom without much thought. However, over the last week or so I have seen SO many posts on Instagram in particular around this theme. I follow a lot of lettering, positive quote type accounts and posts have been popping up left, right and centre, and so I decided to take it as a sign that maybe the post wasn’t as cheesy as I thought it was.

There’s an entire branch of Psychology known as ‘Positive Psychology’ – and in Positive Psychology research, gratitude is strongly associated with greater happiness. It helps people feel more positive emotions, relish good experiences, improve health and deal with adversity. Whilst we cannot establish a cause-and-effect relationship on gratitude and well-being, most studies on the topic have suggested a strong link! There are other studies suggesting that gratitude can also improve relationships between people and, actually, people felt more comfortable expressing their concerns about their relationship – as well as causing people to feel happier overall about the relationship.

When we have an attitude of gratitude, we begin to appreciate everything in life – even the little things. It’s not that everything we have is great and lovely and that life is all sunshine and rainbows, but more that despite the rubbish that also goes on, they purposefully make a conscious decision to be thankful. There are so many ways that we can try to cultivate this kind of grateful attitude – and actually a majority of them are relatively small steps that we can make in our daily lives.

So, how can we cultivate an attitude of gratitude in our life?

1. Try to keep a gratitude journal – make a conscious effort to try and choose between three and five things every day that you are grateful for. They can be small things like ‘I got to read some of my book’ or ‘I went out for coffee’, or they can be bigger things like ‘I got to spend time with my family’ or ‘I had a good therapy session that really helped me’. It can be hard to try and pick out the positives when life feels crappy, but I can guarantee that there are little things in every day if you look hard enough. Sometimes my list simply reads ‘I stayed alive, opened my curtains and got dressed’ – seemingly small things that most people probably do without thinking about, but that can be excruciatingly hard when you’re struggling with depression.
2. It’s sometimes nice to write thank-you letters: both to other people in your life, but also to yourself. It’s always nice to know that someone appreciates you, and so if there is someone in your life that you don’t think you say thank you to enough, try writing them a letter – I can guarantee it will make their day! There’s something cathartic about writing, and it’s something that the recipient can keep and look back on. Once in a while it can be nice to also write yourself something too!
3. Meditation is a great way to focus on the present without being judgemental. Having mindful moments might sound like such a stereotypical mental health team type suggestion, but there is so much research that suggests that being mindful, and meditating is a great way to improve your mental health. Spend some time being mindful about and meditating on the things in your life that you are grateful for.
4. If you feel like writing down daily positives or things, you are grateful for is too big an ask (completely understand if you feel this way – I did for a long time and it took me months before I was able to consistently manage my list on a daily basis) then give a weekly list a go. Try to spend some time every week writing down the things that have happened that you are grateful for – I always do mine on a Sunday evening as it feels like a nice end to the week.
5. Making a gratitude jar might sound like an extra cheesy, school type activity but when you reach the end of a year and can look through all your moments that you’ve been grateful for, it is an incredibly humbling and positive experience. It helps you to realise that there have been more positive moments than you may otherwise have thought. Spending some time decorating a jar is also a really good distraction if you are struggling.
6. If you have children, then a fun activity for the whole family to engage in is to make a gratitude tree – go on a walk and choose some long sticks and branches that can be arranged in a jar. Then, cut out paper in the shape of leaves or flowers that can be used to write down grateful moments on and add them to the tree. Over time the number of leaves and flowers on the tree that appear will help you all to appreciate the positives in your life.

There are so many other ideas and suggestions that can help you to have a more deliberate attitude of gratitude – all you have to do is google ‘how to be more grateful’ and many more suggestions will appear. So, if I haven’t mentioned anything here that you think might be helpful for you then definitely give it a quick search to see if you can find something that fits! Keep on trying to build this into your daily routine and gradually it will become second nature – and hopefully you’ll being to feel the benefits soon too!

All my love,

Anna x 

It would appear that I’m not someone who likes to shy away from difficult topics – at least not through a screen or on a piece of paper! And there’s no sugar-coating this topic. No trying to dip my toe in gently and tiptoeing around the edges. No walking on eggshells. So, let’s go: grief and long-term illness. I have considered the topic of grief in relation to both chronic and mental illness – I think these are instances where we do experience grief but are instances where we don’t always acknowledge that we our feelings are in line with grief. 

I didn’t really ever consider what grief was until I was about 21. I knew growing up that people often ‘grieved’ after someone had died, but I’d never fully considered anything further than this. I never considered the deeper meaning. Never realised that it was actually possible to grieve for your past, to grieve for your life as you once knew it.

It took me a long time after my chronic illness diagnosis to realise that I was grieving. It wasn’t until I started regular therapy sessions that I came to class the feelings I was experiencing as grief. And that still feels slightly strange to admit, even though I’ve recognised that it’s not as black and white as I thought for some time now. In some ways we’re automatically programmed to associate grief with death – take the death of Queen Elizabeth II for example. As a country we observed a 10-day period of mourning – when you google ‘mourning’ the first two words that they acknowledge as similar are ‘grief’ and ‘grieving’. This was something that was broadcast across news outlets across the country (and, indeed, the world) and it, therefore, becomes easy to see why we make that link in our minds.

But going back to chronic illnesses – I suppose that in a roundabout way there had been death in my life when I became unwell. Just not the death of a person. My life as I knew it slowly faded out and is no longer recognisable. My social life died, as did my energy levels. My social battery has been depleted beyond recognition. So many areas of my life are now completely changed around due to my illness. 

I think it’s important to note, however, that it’s not been something that is 100% a bad thing. There are actually some things from the last five years that I wouldn’t ever want to change. I have a clear plan for a career path – if I’d stayed at university, I think I’d be working a job that I was very unhappy in now. And I’ve also met some incredible people and heard stories about other absolutely badass warriors! My closest friends are both people who I wouldn’t otherwise have met, and I genuinely couldn’t do life without either of them!

It’s definitely a journey. And a blinking difficult one at that, I’m not going to sugar-coat it and pretend that it’s all sunshine and rainbows because we all know that that’s unrealistic. But journey’s always have an end point. Maybe that’s reaching a point of acceptance that life is going to look different for the foreseeable future. But there is hope that things can feel and look different too. When we talk about grief, we often refer to the five stages that most people go through – they are denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. And the very fact that we move through stages (not always in that order!) is proof that its fluid and that things can be different. So hold on to that hope.

I wanted to finish with a quote from Greys Anatomy – it’s quite a long one so bare with, but it feels like the perfect finish to this post!

The dictionary defines grief as keen mental suffering or distress over affliction or loss. Sharp sorrow, painful regret. As surgeons, as scientists, we’re taught to learn from and rely on books, on definitions, on definitives. But in life, strict definitions rarely apply. In life, grief can look like a lot of things that bare little resemblance to sharp sorrow. Grief may be a thing we all have in common, but it looks different on everyone. It isn’t just death we have to grieve, it’s life, it’s loss, it’s change. And when we wonder why it has to suck so much sometimes, has to hurt so bad, the thing we gotta try to remember is that it can turn on a dime. That’s how you stay alive. When it hurts so much you can’t breathe. That’s how you survive… by remembering that one day, somehow, impossibly, you won’t feel this way. It won’t hurt this much. Grief comes in it’s own time for everyone. In it’s own way. So the best we can do, is try for honesty. The really crappy thing, the very worst part of grief, is that you can’t control it. The best we can do is try to let ourselves feel it, when it comes. And let go when we can. The very worst part is that the minute you think you’re past it, it starts all over again. And always, every time, it takes your breath away. There are five stages of grief. They look different on all of us. But there are always five. Denial. Anger. Bargaining. Depression. Acceptance

Greys Anatomy, Episode 6 Season 2

All my love,

Anna x