We have all been there at
one point or another in our lives. Situations and circumstances get so crazy
twisted that sometimes you sit and wonder what else can go wrong? Sometimes it
feels like there is no way out of the mess.
Many people tend to stress
out and get depressed. Others try to
deal with it by seeking distractions, such as drinking, partying, or turning to
media in hopes that the problem miraculously goes away. Some just go on with their lives pretending
the situation never happened while letting it escalate to monstrous size,
creating much bigger problem than it was in the beginning.
My tendencies are to get tunnel
vision and get depressed. Tunnel vision
means that all I see is the problem, which grows bigger and bigger until I can’t
see anything else in life. The problem
grows very fast and the more I look at it the bigger it gets until I see no way
out of the situation, I feel doomed, trapped and depressed.
In moments like this it’s so hard to not only see the good in life
but also be thankful.
Only recently I have been
in such situation. It was getting
progressively bad until it reached rock bottom, and became just impossible to handle. I lived in the
smallest room in the world (literally 5 steps by 5 steps), so small I was tripping
over my possessions. I was renting a room from an older couple that not only
lived on the premises but also were mentally challenged, which made living there
difficult. It made me feel like a prisoner in my own cell, I mean, my own
room. I was pretty much stuck there with
no options of moving out, mainly because I was unemployed with no proof of
income. Things got so miserable and I started
feeling depressed.
So how do you see the good
in your life and stay grateful in situations like that?
One thing that I do to help
me out is I keep Gratitude Notebook. I
have been writing in it semi-consistently since the end of 2015. On each page I write down 10 things that I’m
grateful for today. It’s not as easy as
it may seem. Sometimes it's quite hard
to come up with a list of 10, and I end up with only four or six. And sometimes I'd write pretty simple things like “I have food today” or “it’s sunny outside today”.
When you feel down and depressed, coming
up with all ten can be quite a brain workout. But that’s the point. You force your brain to focus on something
else other than your problems. You force
yourself to find the good among the bad.
You work hard on breaking through the dark to see the light. This is such an important process to get out
of depression and begin thinking positive thoughts.
Another thing I do is I
play the ‘worse case scenario’ game in my mind.
I imagine a situation that is worse than mine. For example, I imagine NOT having a
place to live and living out of my car, or in a storage room, or being
completely homeless.. This immediately helps me become grateful for a place of my own. It may be faaaaar
from perfect, but I do have a roof over my head and access to a bathroom. Imagine living out of a car and having to pee
at Starbucks or in bushes. Nightmare! After
all, there are so many homeless people to whom this problem is a reality.
Many of those grateful moments from the 'game' make it into my Gratitude Notebook.
Some of the entries may look a little odd, because I’d write things like
“I’m grateful that I’m not homeless”, or “have access to a bathroom, was able
to take a shower”. It may sound a bit
extreme, but in essence this is what appreciating even the smallest blessings
looks like.
And I strongly believe that
if we don’t learn to appreciate the smallest things first, then we’ll never be
able to appreciate and be grateful for the big things in life.
