Recently, I saw the Broadway show Every Brilliant Thing, starring the incomparable Daniel Radcliffe. Radcliffe plays a man whose mother has a longstanding history of depression and suicide attempts. As a child, he starts making a list of every brilliant thing he can think of, from the mundane (“the smell of an old book,” “water fights,” “the color yellow”) to the profound (“realizing that for the first time in your life someone is occupying your every waking thought, making it hard to eat or sleep or concentrate, and that they feel familiar to you even though they’re brand new”). He hopes this list will help lift his mother out of her depression. Ultimately, the list becomes helpful to him as he navigates his own struggles.
For years, I’ve been talking to patients about practicing gratitude, regularly and deliberately noting what’s good in their own lives and the world. I truly appreciated Radcliffe’s performance, not just because it underlined a core cognitive-behavioral therapy principle (I am a CBT nerd, after all) but because it underscored the point that you can still find things to be grateful for even in the midst of great sadness and darkness. And that, while gratitude isn’t a cure-all, it can act as an important counterbalance to all the ugliness.
Perhaps it goes without saying that given everything going on in our world, we need this counterbalance more than ever. Here are four strategies for practicing gratitude:
- End or start your day (or both) with Three Good Things. Each night, write down three specific things that went well during the day. For each item, answer the question: “Why did this happen?” or “What was my role in this?”
- Make a point of thanking someone each day for something they’ve done for you. Your spouse for schlepping your kid to a soccer tournament on Long Island (You’re the best, Chris!). Your kid’s teacher who went above and beyond to help your kid with a tricky assignment. Or even the smartphone customer service rep who FINALLY answered your question about why your phone is beeping like that.
- Pick out one activity/habit you engage in regularly and enjoy (and have therefore gotten used to), and choose to savor it. I am very deliberate each morning about savoring my cup of tea and the NYT Puzzles (I’m looking at you, Spelling Bee). You can savor meals, or walks outside, or beautiful drives.
- Allow yourself to feel grateful for certain things even if you feel very angry/sad/resentful/worried about other things. For example, you can feel grateful that you have a healthy child while feeling distraught over said child’s refusal to go to bed at night. On a larger scale, you can feel grateful that things are going well in your job/personal life while feeling utterly gutted about the state of the world.
Spoiler alert: practicing gratitude didn’t save Daniel Radcliffe’s character’s mom. And it won’t stop you from feeling sad, or angry, or anxious. But it will remind you that there is so much good in the world, even in the midst of all the ugliness. And that’s something worth savoring.
