What If I Have Nothing To Be Grateful For?

What If I Have Nothing To Be Grateful For?

We’ve said a lot in this book so far about how practicing gratitude frequently helps you to bring more positivity into your life. But what can you do if you feel that you have absolutely nothing to be grateful for?

Sometimes, everything in life can feel like it’s just too overwhelming. If everything sucks and you’re struggling to find even one thing to be thankful for, how do you move forward?

Although gratitude should be a simple thing to feel, it’s surprisingly difficult sometimes. That’s because we’re hardwired to overlook the good things we experience and, instead, put our focus primarily on everything that goes wrong. It even has a name – negativity bias. When we take it at its most basic level, this means we tend to pay more attention to the things that are bad because they threaten us.

We can safely ignore the good things since they won’t cause us any harm. However, bad things may be dangerous and therefore, we fixate automatically on them. This may be a primitive human response, but we don’t need to be controlled by it. Once you know that negativity bias exists and how it works, you can work on overriding your biological programming. You can choose to concentrate on the good things over the bad because, after all, there’s always something positive to think about, even when it seems otherwise.

Even in the most desperate and darkest times in your life, rest assured that there will still be something, however small, to feel grateful for. It’s especially important to focus on the good things when you feel like there’s nothing left in life to be thankful for. That’s the time when gratitude will make a huge difference. So, make a point of looking for something you’re thankful for every day and, eventually, you’ll begin to see more and more positive things around you and focus less and less on the negative.

How do you begin to find things to be thankful for if your life feels like it’s going down the tubes? Here are a few starting points to get you going....