It’s the end of week three of our November gratitude challenge. This is a great time to order any “It is Well With My Soul” Gratitude Journals you might want to give as gifts for Thanksgiving day. It would be a great house warming gift to your host or family gift to kick-off the Christmas season. Our bulk discount of $10 each if you buy 5 or more will continue through the end of the month.

The experience of deliberately pondering on and cultivating gratitude this month has been a surprisingly difficult one for me. I am “in the trenches” as they say, with three children five and under in the house and though there is much to be grateful for, there is also much that grates on me and sometimes it’s hard to see one for the other. Mostly, I just get to the end of most days and feel too exhausted to peacefully sit and write down the things I’m grateful for. But I know there are also many who get to the end of a challenging day and find it too painful or dismissive of their difficult emotions to write a list of what’s still good in that very moment.

If that is ever the case for you, if summoning the courage and vulnerability to see what was good about such a hard day is just too much, here are three suggestions of how to keep cultivating gratitude in the days that follow anyway.

  1. Think of past experiences that have filled you with gratitude.

This is different than just recording wonderful things that have happened to you in the past. Instead, reflect back and try to remember your reaction to the things that left you “surprised by joy”. What did it feel like to be so suddenly humbled and seen and given a gift literal or metaphorical that you weren’t expecting? Try to call up that peace that gratitude has brought in the past to remember that you can have it again. You might not feel very grateful for today, but try to remember what it felt like to be grateful before.

Two such moments come to mind for me: one to do with losing love and one to do with finding it.

The first was the fall of my freshman year of college. I drove with my brother to the homecoming of a missionary that I had written to and had high hopes of beginning a relationship with. But it was very obviously not to be and the breakdown my car had on the drive back left us stranded and was still nothing compared to the breakdown I was having emotionally about how everything had turned out so differently than I thought. Months went by and the bustling sociality of freshman life eased the pain considerably.

I’d nearly forgotten about that boy when I came home for Christmas and walked into my high school bedroom. There on the corkboard above my desk, where all the pictures that that boy had sent me from his mission had been, were photoshopped pictures of me with my favorite handsome movie stars instead. That brother that had watched the breakdown had found a way to make a sight that might’ve made me cry into something that made me laugh instead. It was such a thoughtful gesture, I was overwhelmed with gratitude to have a brother that would even notice the corkboard, let alone think to do something about it.

The second was a little moment on a big trip. I had graduated from college by this point and an unlikely, last minute humanitarian trip had kindled a relationship with a man I might never have met in my ordinary life. We lived far apart so our dates were exotic (someone had to get on a plane one way or another). Our third date found us on the island of Zanzibar, off the coast of Tanzania in east Africa. On one of our first days there, we rented some snorkeling gear and explored the reefs. As we were both face down in the water trying to see what there was to see, I reached out my hand without looking up so we wouldn’t get separated and he grabbed it without looking up at me. It was as if we had had the same thought at the same time.

And that harmony of thought and comfort with one another suddenly made me realize I was floating in the Indian Ocean with this handsome, unbelievable person that I was falling in love with. It’s like my mind zoomed all the way out on the earth and then zoomed all the way in to that unlikely region of the world where I usually can’t be found and then all the way into our intertwined fingers on the surface of that clear blue and I couldn’t believe it was real and I felt so unbelievably blessed to be there. (And that man has now been my husband for nine years and held my hand a bunch more times since then…)

Thinking back to those moments where I felt floored by my blessings helps me redefine myself as a blessed person and helps me remember that life will hold beauty and joy again, even if I didn’t manage to get dressed today. It might help you too.

  1. Cut out the things that are fueling your negative emotions.

In my striving for a more peaceful, grateful outlook this month, it has become more and more clear that certain things are actively holding me back from that peace. It culminated in my deleting my Instagram last week and will probably result in limited or blocking many more social media platforms hereafter.

I would not consider myself someone who desperately desires to “keep up with the Joneses”, I’m much more likely to want to prove how much more eccentric I am than the Joneses. Scrolling doesn’t bring me down because I’m comparing what I have to someone else and feeling inadequate, but I am realizing that it is disturbing any stillness I might once have been able to find in my brain. I was actually struck by the image of social media as my Grima Wormtongue. For those of your familiar with The Lord of the Rings, you’ll remember Wormtongue as the slimy, gaunt man posing as the closest advisor to a king, but actually poisoning his position all along.

Social media often does feel like my advisor, the one that can make me laugh, offer a fun recipe or a life hack I may never get around to trying. Mostly it often feels like a needed escape, but I realized that is it providing the salve for the problems it is also creating. It is both cause and cure. I don’t like to be the person that can’t put down my phone. I don’t want my children to think screens are more important than them. I don’t want my attention span to feel so splintered and have my mind only ever able to skitter across the surface of things.

A harrowing article from The Guardian provides some insight from addiction expert Dr. Anna Lembke on what unhealthy levels of digital engagement can do to our brains:

When we binge on pleasurable things, homeostasis means “our brain compensates by bringing us lower and lower and lower,” says Lembke. Each time the thing becomes less enjoyable, but we eventually become dependent on those stimuli to keep functioning. We spiral into a joy-seeking abyss. The digital world enables bingeing on a previously unseen scale because there are no practical limitations forcing us to pause. With substances, you eventually run out of money or lines of cocaine (even temporarily), but Netflix shows or TikTok feeds are indefatigable. Often you needn’t do anything: the next hit automatically loads on your screen.

As well as compromising our attention spans, Lembke says our obsession with instant gratification means we’re constantly living in our limbic brain, which processes emotions, rather than in our pre-frontal cortex, which deals with future planning and problem-solving and is important for personality development. When we’re confronted with a complex or unsettling issue in our work or social lives, our digital companions are always there to help us escape the stickiness of life with an easy distraction. (And the version of life presented on screens removes all rough edges: faces are filtered and beautiful, there are no awkward silences, and if we don’t like what we see we can simply click on another tab.)

“It’s very different from how life used to be, when we had to tolerate a lot more distress,” says Lembke. “We’re losing our capacity to delay gratification, solve problems and deal with frustration and pain in its many different forms.”

I am not saying everyone in the world should get off of social media altogether, but I found as I’ve tried to be the kind of person that looked at my life with renewed optimism and joy this month that the things coming from my phone were impeding, not helping that prospect. Your obstacle might be something different, but when you’re having difficulty moving forward, it’s worth examining what might be holding you back.

  1. Make a list of what you need and a list of what you have and see if anything lines up.

Now this one is a little unusual and I’m still discovering what it might look like for me, but I thought the process might be useful for others as well. My postpartum body is ready to be strengthened and fit again and I’ve been unsure how to move forward. I’d like to train for a half marathon, but I really struggle without external accountability. I thought about asking a mom friend to join me, but we’re all fighting a constant battle against utter exhaustion and I’m not sure that’s everyone’s first choice activity of what to do with their limited free time.

I was pondering on this issue recently as I took my dog on a Sunday walk. As I watched her excitement at being outside and wrestled with the guilt I constantly feel at not walking her enough, I realized that she is the one who would love to train for a half marathon with me. She’s a pure-bred border collie that we got from a sheep ranch and her working relatives routinely run 25 miles in a day and can easily run 100 and then wake up and do it again the next morning. 13 miles would be a joy for her.

The satisfaction I felt at realizing that I have two problems that solve each other was immense. It made me wonder if there are any other pain points in my life can be solved by something I already have.

It might be worth the exercise of sitting down and making a list of your 1) pain points, 2) desires for the near future, and 3) blessings and resources available to you and see whether somewhere there’s a match that you didn’t know existed. Maybe you already have the answer to a difficult problem somewhere else in your life and you just need a chance to realize it.

I know there are days where sitting down and listing things you’re grateful for might feel like a trite exercise compared to the difficulties of the day. If you have a day like that, try one of these three other exercises.

Whatever approach you take, I hope our “It is Well With My Soul” Gratitude Journal can be the canvas where you paint the picture of your joy.