How To Be Grateful When Life Just Sucks?

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.