Thanksgiving has passed but hold on, don’t stop giving thanks just yet.

It’s the holiday season, so you’ve probably seen a thousand cheesy posts on the internet, by now, about choosing gratitude or having a grateful heart and the like. Sometimes that does feel like a lot of woo-woo talk when you’re facing the daily difficulties of life, doesn’t it? But guys, we’re here to tell you, those cheesy posts are actually on to something.

Science backs this up so roll with us for a moment. This isn’t about some fake sense of positivity. We don’t want you to go about life NOT feeling what you experience. BUT, here’s why gratitude is so important:

 It actually HELPS you deal with the negative.

Here’s the thing: we go through life picking and choosing what we notice and what we take in. Once you start noticing what you want to be grateful for, you'll start noticing more and more of them. It’s like this upward spiral that you create for your brain. And guess what? When you are living that way, you have more capacity to deal with the negative things that DO hit you in life.

When you’re aligned with all the good that's happening in your life, when something bad happens, you're just starting at a point that's so much stronger and so much higher up than if you were constantly focused only on the negative. Listen to this episode for more on the science—and the balance between feeling what you feel but shifting towards gratitude anyway.

To celebrate the launch of the Women Rewriting the Rules podcast, we want to pamper you with the BEST holiday giveaway we could think of! Click here to join.

"Give yourself the grace and space to sit in the reality of life and to fully express it and not force yourself to be grateful or feel happy. But then, with time, look for ways that you can potentially turn some of those negatives into a positive."  ~  Sumi Krishnan

In This Episode:

- Don’t just feel your gratitude; express it

- We give negative feedback and reviews so easily but rarely speak about the good

- Gratitude takes intentional effort; it’s not just a feeling that happens

- How Oprah’s gratitude journal is backed by science

- Bad things do happen, and there is no denying that. Feel it. But there’s a way to find gratitude through it

- Find, Remind, Bind

- Habits we perform to practice gratitude

- When things get tough, use these tips to remind yourself about gratitude

Resources:

- The study on Gratitude Ashley mentioned -  Counting Blessings Versus Burdens: An Experimental Investigation of Gratitude and Subjective Well-Being in Daily Life

Connect with Sumi Krishnan:

- Instagram

Connect with Ashley Baxter:

- Website