Depression Help
Thankfulness

Practice depression help thankfulness every day for your depression help routine.

Depressed people tend to hover on the negative aspects in life. We take most day-to-day experiences, we process them through our brain, and usually assign them some negative, self-defeating meaning.

I'll term these expressions as "negative self talk."

Take Sally who is trying to reconcile her differences with her husband Joey. They are in good terms, and making progress. She turns to surprise him with a hug, but accidentally trips with Joey's shoe and hurts her toe painfully.

Her mind processes and even says it out loud, "the universe is telling me, loving Joey is painful."

The universe didn't provide that negative self talk. Her learned and practiced way of thinking did.

Practicing depression help thankfulness techniques increase your resilience and the ability to stay positive.

I do not advocate for unrealistic positive thinking. If you don't know how to swim, you can't jump in deep water and expect to start swimming just by positive affirmations...

But you can appreciate the beautiful deep blue sea, with it's colors and wonderful fresh air, and breathtaking sunsets. Learning to appreciate that, can bring you health and happiness.

Here are a few reasons why depression help thankfulness is important for anybody, and especially as a depression help tool:

• Thankfulness interrupts your thinking pattern, and learned behavior. Recognize and interrupt the ruminating and negative self talk. Even during situations of turmoil in our lives, such as job loss, thankfulness has a person shift from self-defeating thoughts into appreciative ones.
• Thankfulness generates a new pattern of generating positive outlook in life. A positive outlook is a key ingredient to true enjoyment and happiness. Positive thinking, generates opportunities in life. These opportunities (for work, relationships, new adventures, etc) tend to have a snowball effect, giving you more chances for gratefulness and more chances to enjoy what life provides.
• Thankfulness gives us permission to enjoy life. According studies(1), people who practice gratitude can cope with stress better, are happier, and benefit from greater physical health.

So we now have some good reasons to be thankful. Lets get started on being thankful.

How To Be Thankful

Here are a few tips on how to be thankful and use this as a depression help thankfulness tool.

• Keep A Gratitude Journal. Write at least three things a day that you are thankful for. Sometimes the list may be difficult to come up with. If so, just start as simple and obvious as you can, like thanking the sun for rising every day. Writing has powerful effects on our mind, body and spirit. The thoughts we create and record in writing tend to have a longer lasting effect in our minds than just thinking or talking about it. When we commit to write our thankfulness, we are forced to brainstorm... It is hard to just make a gratitude list in our minds when we are feeling depressed. Even under a neutral state of mind, just thinking and saying what you are thankful for can be too quick and elusive.
• Write A Thankful Note On Something You May Be Struggling About. This challenges and interrupts our way of thinking directly into what we are struggling against. Dig out something positive. Is your struggle teaching you a lesson in life? Be thankful that you will be more prepared to recognize the situation in the future and avoid it, or do something different about it.
• Write A Top 100 Thankful list. Doing a long list like this is a lot easier than you'd think, and it's a great practice to do once. Although you can repeat as often as you like. Here's how... Use all your senses to build your gratitude list. Write what you are thankful for that you can touch, smell, see, hear and taste. Then just let your ideas flow. Keep this list in your journal or somewhere safe where you can refer to it. Add to the list, or even make a new list in the future.

There are plenty of opportunities to be thankful. The more opportunities we do use, the healthier, happier, and more successful we will become.

If you want to turn your life around, try thankfulness. It will change your life mightily. ~Gerald Good

Use depression help thankfulness along with the treatments for depression tool kit to end depression.

Bring gratitude to the surface with as many thankful thoughts you can possibly muster. You can’t ever overdo thankfulness. :-)

REFERENCES:
(1)Dr. Robert Emmons. 2007. "Thanks! How the New Science of Gratitude Can Make You Happier." Houghton Mifflin Company. Boston. Mew York.
Image 1: Image: Phil Thebault / FreeDigitalPhotos.net


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