Dwelling Way Too Long?

 

YES YES Yowwww, can we STOP DWELLING way too long?  True, our brain ISN'T that wired for happiness BUT surprisingly, experts tell us that gratitude can change all that.  Even as our brain naturally gets fixated on the negativities of life, they claim that gratitude can help retrain it to focus on the positivities instead.  BUT things get much more complicated WHEN even negativity bias makes sobriety harder by amplifying stress, self-doubt and even our cravings📗📙📘

I once attended a teambuilding event WHERE our resource speaker, one of the more famous life coaches I am honored to have sought for guidance in the past, once spoke that a simple gratitude practice can drastically change our life in just 10 weeks!@#$%?  Of course I kind of rolled up my eyes and I even assumed then that he was exaggerating [WHICH I did bear witness in him in the past]💦💦💦

Of course, I knew exactly HOW I would have responded a year prior to that teambuilding.  I would have still rolled up my eyes so hard such that they might have gotten stuck, ouch.  Given my Asian culture, from our childhood days, our parents always reminded us to be 'THANKFUL FOR WHAT YOU HAVE' and more importantly, 'NEVER BE UNGRATEFUL'.  In short, like it OR NOT, gratitude always felt like a 'forced cliche', something we were supposed to do and nothing less than that💚💛💜

Honestly, in the past, I always [wrongly] thought that gratitude seemed that 'overrated' because I remember those 'guilt feelings' I had to overcome WHEN some of my setbacks sent me into a downward spiral, think of that confluence of events of self-pity, frustration numbing it all with that bottle, seriously.  BUT alas, to my surprise, I met up front those past disruptions with something else and that was G-R-A-T-I-T-U-D-E💧💧💧

Our takeaway:  WHAT I can humbly share arising from my own past challenges, instead of fixating on WHAT was falling apart, I started to focus on WHAT was still holding me up, LIKE my boss at work WHO never lost confidence in me, LIKE my small coterie of friends WHO talked me through my options no matter WHAT.  Looking back, I could have easily spiraled into self-victimization, replaying myself through those loops.  BUT the point is, let's CUT & CUT CLEAN WHEN DWELLING WAY TOO LONG😗😗😗