A “fake it till you make it” attitude won’t get you real gratitude – but self-love will.
A few weeks ago, a client came into my office—let’s call her Allie—who was trying to practice gratitude, but feeling like she was failing at it: “I keep seeing all these people online raving about their life-changing gratitude practices,” she said, “but no matter how hard I try, I just can’t get there. I know I have a lot to be grateful for. But I can’t actually feel grateful when there’s so much other stuff I’m unhappy with in my life. What’s wrong with me?”
Thinking about gratitude vs. feeling gratitude
First, let’s be clear: There was nothing wrong with Allie. Her struggle to feel grateful is something a lot of us experience at one time or another.
Like Allie, on an intellectual level, we know we should be feeling grateful for certain things. At the same time, it can feel difficult, even impossible, to make the emotional leap into real gratitude. To make matters worse, we go on social media and we think, “Clearly everyone else has this figured out. I should have this figured out, too.”
There’s a reason gratitude is getting so much buzz in the self-care world. But simply writing down three things you’re grateful for every day isn’t enough for many of us to experience real gratitude at an emotional level.
Why?
Because we’re not making the connection between our heads and our hearts. The result: even if we manage to write down what we’re grateful for, the impact is fleeting, and we tend to go right back to obsessing about what’s not working in our lives.
So what can we do instead? How can we set ourselves up to feel genuinely grateful?
Cultivating authentic gratitude
Ultimately, we can learn to experience real gratitude by developing more love and acceptance for ourselves. And how do we do that?
1. Understand that feeling grateful for things is swimming upstream.
Our minds are designed to keep us alive – constantly assessing danger and looking for what’s wrong. Feeling gratitude goes counter to our emotional instincts. I explore this idea in more depth in my blog post about our two selves.
When we understand that our brains are not wired to be happy, we can have more compassion for ourselves when it comes to cultivating self-acceptance and gratitude. When we recognize how hard it can be at a physiological level to embrace positive emotions like gratitude, we can stop judging ourselves for not doing it “right.” Instead of beating ourselves up for not being able to feel grateful, we can look at cultivating gratitude as a challenge, as a practice, as a new way of relating to our emotions.
2. Accept that we’re learning as we go in cultivating gratitude.
The awareness that we have choice when it comes to our emotions is still pretty new. For the most part, the families we grew up with weren’t exposed to the emotional coping skills we’re trying to adopt now. This makes it more difficult to cultivate gratitude than if we had grown up learning these types of practices.
On top of that, our parents’/caregivers’ generation had very different ideas about what it means to live a fulfilled life (job, house, family). So we don’t have a frame of reference for how to build a fulfilled life based on our own values. When we recognize that we’re breaking new emotional ground, we can have more empathy for ourselves as we do the work and strive for feelings of fulfillment and gratitude.
3. Cultivate self-love first. Gratitude will follow.
Gratitude is a great practice, and I highly recommend it. But here’s the problem: it focuses on the external. It tells us that in order to be happy, we need to be grateful for things outside of ourselves.
Before we can experience real gratitude, we need to learn to accept and love ourselves. We need to focus on the things inside of ourselves that are working in our favor.
We can do this through the practice of self-appreciation, which I discuss in my TED talk. Instead of asking ourselves, ‘What are 3 things I feel grateful for today?’ the question becomes ‘What are 3 things I did today that I feel good about?’
For example:
“I feel good that I opened the door for the elderly man trying to walk into the store.”
“I feel good that I made myself a healthy lunch.”
“I feel good about helping my friend with a problem.”
“I feel good that I took time to take a walk.”
At first, the self-appreciation practice can bring up resistance similar to the gratitude exercise. But if we stick with it, we start to shift the focus from the external to the internal—and we lay a foundation to build on and open up space for real gratitude.
Which is exactly what happened with Allie. By practicing self-appreciation, she learned to focus on the things within her power and control. Rather than reaching for things to be grateful for, the practice of self-appreciation allowed her to see more of who she was and who she had the potential to be. In the process, she learned to find validation from within.
Instead of asking herself “What’s wrong with me?” and judging herself for not feeling grateful, Allie learned to cultivate self-love through self-appreciation.
Little by little, as she began to feel better about herself, it became easier for Allie to feel genuinely grateful. In other words, she didn’t have to force herself to feel grateful. When she began to appreciate who she was and what she was creating in her life, gratitude came more and more naturally to her.
Do you want to learn more about how to cultivate self-love? In my book, Life Launch, I write about how to cope with negative emotions like anxiety, depression, and anger even as you develop a more loving, accepting relationship with yourself. Download a sample chapter here.