One thing that can be difficult to find when you are struggling with mental illness and crisis after crisis is gratitude. When it feels like the world is giving you so much pain and anguish, when it feels like everything that can go wrong will go wrong (Murphy’s law), it can be hard to find anything to be grateful for.
While this is true it is also the reason it is so important to train ourselves to always find something to be grateful for even when times are dark.
This may seem like toxic positivity, where you are overly positive and don’t take time to process your painful emotions, but that is not the case. There has been much research done showing the mental health benefits of approaching life from a lens of gratitude.
As I mentioned before, I was in a place in my life for a long time when it seemed like a personal attack when people told me to find things to be grateful for when I was in a very low plays mentally and emotionally, so I understand if you are skeptical of my claims that gratitude can help improve your life.
If you, however feel like what I am saying could be true, and that opening up your heart to gratitude could benefit you, I’d like to invite you to complete this gratitude challenge I found while preparing for this week’s blog post.
As the caption says I got this challenge from a list of 12 journal prompts about gratitude on the website for the organization A Window Between Worlds. This is an organization that teaches people to use art to heal from trauma.
They had this challenge that I just loved. You can answer a prompt a day for 12 days or a prompt a week for 12 weeks (privately, no need to share unless you want to).
Over the next 12 days I am going to do this challenge and by the end of the 12 days I am going to make a video post sharing how I feel by the end of the 12 days. To ensure there are no outside influences affecting the results, this journal is the only thing I will change.
I hope you all join me in this challenge. Each day I will post my answers up in a mini post to give you all some examples of what kinds of things you may write about.
Mental Health Blog | Fight4mylife | United States 