How to practice gratitude after a grim and hellish year

It might not seem like there’s much to feel grateful for as we transition into 2021. 

The pandemic destabilized virtually everything we treasure and may have taken for granted. COVID-19 put our health, jobs, and lives in peril. And common ways to relieve stress, like socializing with friends at home or eating out at a restaurant with loved ones, can spell illness or even death. 

Yet, people flocked to gratitude this year. In a blog post, Twitter explained that users had a “renewed sense of gratitude and support for our communities,” pointing to how, in 2020, tweets expressing gratitude increased by 20 percent globally. 

Kristi Nelson, the executive director of the nonprofit A Network for Grateful Living, also noticed a turn toward gratefulness in 2020. She says unique visitors to the network’s website this year, which provides free programs and practices to help people live gratefully, have increased from 97,800 in February to 172,200 in April. Now, there are about 144,000 unique users every month.

Nelson defines gratefulness as a sense of appreciation that emanates from within. While she notes certain circumstances (like praise from a colleague or boss), can inspire a sense of gratitude, these instances, and the resulting feeling, can be fleeting. For her, true gratefulness requires you to be present in the world to notice the good things in your life, which in turn helps you withstand difficult situations.

Nelson learned to cultivate gratefulness when she checked into a hospital in Manhattan in 1992. She was 32 years old and her doctors suspected she had cancer. Less than a year later, Nelson started chemotherapy after being diagnosed with stage IV Hodgkin’s lymphoma. She spent about four months at the hospital, confined to a small room. When she left, Nelson felt as if she was coming out of a coma and reawakening to the privileges of civilization. 

“The sound of birds, the feeling of air on my skin, the beauty of a tree, of being able to walk on the Earth, being able to have the agency to get into a shower, everything was radical,” says Nelson.

Glenn Fox, a neuroscientist who studies gratitude, says research has shown that it can improve general wellbeing by helping you sleep better and reducing stress. 

He experienced its transformative power after his mom was diagnosed with stage IV ovarian cancer. During her dying years she kept a gratitude journal, which Fox says helped her live in the moment and appreciate the time she had left. A few months after she died, Fox started his own gratitude journal. 

Fox defines gratefulness as recognizing that we sometimes get more than we deserve, which author and podcaster Brené Brown told him. 

“That’s a really hard pill to swallow sometimes,” he says. When we’re attached to the narrative that we deserve everything good, and we don’t get it, this creates incredible suffering and cynicism, Fox thinks. 

Like Nelson, Fox believes that in, 2020, a year full of suffering, gratefulness can help shine a light during dark times. Good times we’ve had in the past, like going out to eat, feel more positive when we’re grateful for them, which provides comfort. As he learned while grieving his mother, gratitude didn’t make his grief disappear. Instead, it helped him feel grateful for the time he had with his mother, which in turn helped him better manage his sadness. In a year defined by grief, as people hunker down in isolation and mourn the deaths of loved ones, he thinks gratitude can help people celebrate small victories, like trudging through the day when you’d rather stay in bed, when bigger ones are largely out of grasp.

Coping skills like practicing gratitude aren’t enough to deal with stress compounded by the pandemic. Systemic and racial inequalities have meant that some disproportionately experience job loss, lack of healthcare, and more. To address that, we need adequate government policy around things like quality healthcare and a stronger safety net. As such, not everyone has access to the resources that allow the freedom to even feel grateful.

Still, incorporating the practice could prove useful for some, at least in the short term. For Nelson, it can help her pay attention to what’s right in the world as much as it can help wake her up to what’s wrong.

In a year fraught with difficulties, gratefulness reminds her to be in awe of the way we live. For instance, Nelson compares our circumstances in this pandemic versus those who lived during the 1918 flu pandemic.

“We have the ability to, even in isolation, be technologically connected to each other,” she says.

Gratitude might not come easily at first. Both Fox and Nelson think gratefulness is a skill. It takes practice, discipline, and commitment. But this doesn’t mean you have to do anything fancy.

Start off by giving thanks for each individual breath, suggests Nelson. COVID has reminded us that breathing without medical help is not something everyone can do.

“The breath is the connection to all life and you are breathed into being every single moment,” says Nelson.  

Nelson then recommends writing down what you’re grateful for in a gratitude journal. This can help you shift your attention to something more positive when you’re in a bad situation. 

You can do this in the evening but Nelson says this practice may be more effective first thing in the morning.   

“That’s really where gratefulness lives, before anything happens. What are you already grateful for when you wake up in the morning?” says Nelson.

Beyond that, Nelson advises not only relying on a gratitude journal since it can limit your practice to a single time of day. Instead, integrate other ways to practice gratefulness throughout your daily life, like noticing and being grateful for an individual body part that works well. Continual practice is the only way you can “get better” at gratefulness. 

For Fox, a key way to appreciate what you have is to increase the number of things you’re grateful for. This can include anything from something as minor as the sandwich you ate for lunch to a long-lost relative reaching out to reconnect.

“It primes us to feel that sense of humility, that we have more than we deserve,” says Fox. One thing that should prompt our humility and appreciation, Fox says, is the great effort it took to create the  COVID-19 vaccines.

By expanding the things you’re grateful for, you can learn which acts of kindness deserve a big display, while others can be more quietly acknowledged and, perhaps, with less effort. That way, you’re not forcing yourself to feel gratitude. There should be joy when you practice this and that emerges, in part, from allowing it to spring naturally, says Fox. For example, it’s nice if someone lets you go ahead in traffic, but you don’t owe the driver a thank-you card. A more organic response is a friendly wave, which still allows for gratitude without it feeling unnatural. 

Still, Fox advises against pressuring yourself to feel grateful during your lowest moments. For example, you probably won’t be able to easily access this feeling when you’re in the throes of grief. Similarly, it’s also OK to say something sucks, says Fox. 

Gratitude applies to people, as well. Tell family and friends you appreciate them and why, suggests Nelson. Research has shown expressing gratefulness can act as glue that bonds people together, especially in romantic relationships.

For Nelson, nature inspires gratefulness. She strives to get outside frequently to connect with nature’s beauty and remind her of what she appreciates in the natural world, like a tree or the first snow of winter.

While Nelson says gratefulness didn’t cure her cancer, it’s helped to heal her life. 

“I have so much more energy, I feel so much more alive when I’m grateful,” says Nelson. ” [And] I’m so much more grateful to be alive.”

Although we don’t know what awaits us in 2021, Nelson believes the next year is full of possibilities.

“We are facing now a year that offers the possibility of opportunity… with a vaccine coming, with a new administration coming in, but it won’t be perfect,” says Nelson. “[Part of gratefulness is realizing] things aren’t great right now. But what is the opportunity?”