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What it takes to get through tough times

JonesCarpeDiem
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What It Takes To Get Through Tough Times

How a little advanced gratitude can change everything

By Denise Foley

When the editorial cartoonist Marshall Ramsey put together a list of things he was grateful for, his two Pulitzer Prize nominations didn't make the cut. In fact, even he admits his gratitude inventory sounds a little crazy: his first job after college as a high school janitor; the recession that forced him into part-time work; a melanoma diagnosis; all the people who didn't believe in him.

Every one of those terrible twists, he explains, was responsible for a blessing. That job led him to his future wife, the daughter of a fellow janitor; getting laid off gave him the time to launch a second career in book illustration and radio; and his cancer diagnosis spurred him to help save hundreds of lives by organizing a series of runs to raise melanoma awareness. And all those naysayers? Let's just say they were the ill winds beneath his wings.

"A good analogy is if you're canoeing downstream and you hit a rock, it can either sink you or push you in another direction," says Ramsey. "If you choose the other direction, it's a blessing."

Ramsey is a prime example of what might be called advanced gratitude: the ability to identify and appreciate the bad events in your life because of what you've gained from them. It's far from a rare experience. Studies have found that gratitude is a prevailing, if counterintuitive, emotion among breast cancer survivors, people with spinal cord injuries, and post-9/11 Americans.

Clearly, you don't become grateful for difficulties overnight (and rarely in the throes), but once you do, you're privy to some amazing alchemy that will allow you to heal what hurts and see the victory that's often at the center of every seeming defeat. It also boosts what one leading expert calls your psychological immune system, and it may even physically alter your brain so that gratitude isn't just something you feel occasionally but guides how you approach life.

And it all starts with making a habit of appreciating what you have, what you've lost, and what your life would be like if fate hadn't nudged you this way or that. Here are three steps to work your way into advanced gratitude. 

1. Establish a gratitiude baseline
Before you achieve advanced gratitude, it helps to get in the habit of being thankful for your good fortune. "If we train ourselves to look for the gifts when life is going well, it will be easier to spot them during the rough times," says Robert Emmons, PhD, director of the Emmons Laboratory at the University of California, Davis, and arguably the nation's leading gratitude researcher.

Numerous studies have found that people who keep journals or make lists of what they're thankful for are happier, more optimistic, more energetic, and nicer to other people than those who don't. Their physical health blossoms, too. In one of his studies, Dr. Emmons found that people who created weekly gratitude lists exercised 90 minutes more, on average, than a control group who tracked their hassles. And grateful people had less pain, slept an hour longer, and woke up feeling more refreshed, according to other research.

But don't overdo it. Counting your blessings via journaling just three times a week can help you build a strong, positive attitude, but doing it any more than that can backfire, according to studies by University of California, Riverside, researcher Sonja Lyubomirsky, PhD. "You just adapt to it so it's no longer as effective," she says. "It becomes boring or a chore."

2. Retrain your own brain
Tying thoughts of gratitude to the stressful events in your life may even change your neural pathways. A long-accepted concept in neuropsychology is that "neurons that fire together wire together." So when your stress neurons fire, make your gratitude neurons do so, too; this helps the two types connect with each other so that when stress hits, it will be easier for you to find something to be grateful for.

Gratitude can also counteract the many damaging effects of stress on the body, even improving heart health, found one study published this year in the journal Psychological Science. In research done at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, people who regularly practiced loving-kindness meditation, which promotes love and compassion toward oneself and others (and this one method only takes 60 seconds), improved in one measure of heart health—better tone in their vagus nerve, which extends from the brain stem to the gut and regulates heart rate, breathing, and the relaxation response.

Responding to the positive is a tough sell for the brain, which is programmed to suss out danger and avoid it, says neuropsychologist Rick Hanson, PhD, the author of Hardwiring Happiness and Buddha's Brain. "The first rule of the wild is to eat lunch, not be lunch," he says with a laugh. "But those avoidance systems are organized around opportunities and the response to threats, and they're generally more ancient than the systems that are organized around reward. We're more attentive to sticks than to carrots."

This means that to create any lasting changes in the brain—the kinds that will make thankfulness your default emotion, protect you from the ravages of stress, and increase your resilience—you need to hammer it home by practicing gratitude not only frequently but with considerable emotional intensity. "Try this as a regular practice," Dr. Hanson says: "Have an experience of gratitude that lasts at least 20 seconds, feeling it in your body, and giving yourself over to it to help it sink into your brain."

Don't just be thankful for that beautiful sunset, he says: "Sit with it for 20 seconds straight, and be open to the feelings in your body when you see it. Feel the positive emotions related to gratitude that come up—the feeling of being glad that you're alive, grateful for your connection with other people, your sense of awe. To build up neural encoding, it really helps to feel the emotion in your body—and even allow it to become intense."

3. Remember the hard stuff
If you have trouble coming up with reasons to be grateful, try the technique Dr. Emmons recommends to help remind you of what you've gained from sorrow, tragedy, and loss. "Think of your worst moments—your sorrows, your losses, your sadness—and then remember where you are now," says Dr. Emmons, who chronicles his 3-week get-thankful program in his book Gratitude Works! "You got through the worst day of your life, you got through the trauma, you got through the trial, you endured the temptation, you survived the bad relationship, you're making your way out of the dark."

He also encourages imagining a life in which you didn't meet your spouse, live in your current neighborhood, or encounter the people who became lifelong friends. That triggers what's called the George Bailey effect, after the character in Frank Capra's film It's a Wonderful Life who, with help from an angel-in-waiting named Clarence, learns how terrible life would have been for the people he loves if he'd never been born. Imagining the absence of something good, it turns out, is even more effective at making us thankful than remembering our own good fortune. In one study, participants who wrote about ways in which a positive event might not have happened and of how they might never have met their romantic partners felt more positive and happier with their relationships than people who just straightforwardly described the events.

"When we remember how difficult life used to be and how far we have come, we set up an explicit contrast in our mind, and this contrast is fertile ground for gratefulness," Dr. Emmons says.

It builds up your resilience muscles, too, so you not only cope well, but you're also able to find the good no matter how hidden it seems to be. "Gratitude is an element of resilience in that it helps us recover from adversity," Dr. Emmons says. It's part of a person's psychological immune system that helps convert tragedy into opportunity: "The ability to see the elements of one's life and even life itself as gifts is essential for this. Suffering can be a reason for gratefulness in that it shatters our illusions of self-sufficiency...and teaches us what's truly important."

In a 2013 Canadian study of 15 people with spinal cord injuries, most were grateful just to be alive. They had, after all, faced death. They refrained their post-traumatic lives as a second chance to embark on new adventures. Once they learned to deal with the practical obstacles, many of these people went on to start or finish college, launch new careers, or work as peer counselors for other spinal cord injury patients.

They also told the researchers that because of their injuries, they began to deeply appreciate all the little things they once took for granted, like the sounds of birds outside their windows and the joy of playing with their grandchildren. They realized that they were no longer self-sufficient, which also led them to appreciate the help and support from family and friends. Knowing that others are there for you makes you feel loved, says Dr. Emmons.

The ability to bounce back after trauma is what psychologists call post-traumatic growth, a positive transformation that can occur when people go through serious stress, such as a chronic illness, an injury, or disaster. "We're not talking about people being grateful for the cancer, the injury, or the disaster but for what happens in the aftermath, what they've gained from struggling through the event," says psychologist Richard Tedeschi, PhD, of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, who coauthored four books on the ways people change after trauma. "They tend to go through a process: Who am I, what kind of future do I want, and what makes sense to do with my time here on earth, now that this event has stopped me in my tracks?"

There are lessons learned and lives remade better than before.

Marshall Ramsey admits that after his ordeals, he usually threw himself a "pity party." But over time, he began to notice the pattern: Whatever he thought of as the worst thing that had ever happened to him usually turned into something positive.

"After getting a cancer diagnosis, I came to appreciate life a lot more. I've given my mortality a big old kiss," he jokes.

"So many people who've had their melanomas caught come up to me at our runs and say, 'You saved my life.' After nearly winning the Pulitzer Prize, I got downsized, but I found that when you lose your dream job, you just have another dream. There's a lot of good that wouldn't have happened if I hadn't gone part-time.

"Now, with this gift of hindsight, when something bad happens and I stop and say, 'What's the good in this?' I've found that sometimes, the worst moment of your life turns out to be the best. I'm thankful that I now know that."

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About the Author
Hello, My name is Dale. I was quit 18 months before joining this site and had participated on another site during that time. I learned a lot there and brought it with me. I joined this site the first week of August 2008. I didn't pressure myself to quit. HOW I QUIT I didn't count, I didn't deny myself to get started. When I considered quitting (at a friends request to influence his brother to quit), I simply told myself to wait a little longer. No denial, nothing painful. After 4 weeks I was down to 5 cigarettes from a pack a day. The strength came from proving to myself, I didn't need to smoke because I normally would have smoked. Simple yes? I bought the patch. I forgot to put one on on the 4th day. I needed it the next day but the following week I forgot two days in a row I put one in my wallet with a promise to myself that I would slap it on and wait an hour rather than smoke. It rode in my wallet my first year.There's nothing keeping any of you from doing this. It doesn't cost a dime. This is about unlearning something you've done for a long time. The nicotine isn't the hard part. Disconnecting from the psychological pull, the memories and connected emotions is. :-) Time is the healer.