May these quotes serve as an inspiration and a motivation for you to face each new day with a grateful heart. All of these benefits have the potential to contribute to lasting sobriety by addressing some of the underlying issues that may have contributed to the development of your substance use disorder. One of the quickest ways to get in touch with gratitude is to help people in recovery who aren’t as far along in the recovery process.

Maybe you’re a musician; why not write a song for your family? If you’re an artist, why not paint your loved ones something?

Gratitude Journal

They look at the role of positive emotions generally and especially the value of “thankfulness”. Don’t stop when you start noticing results! Although counterintuitive, it can be tempting to stop any practice once you start seeing the benefits. Make sure you are committed to your practice, whether it feels beneficial in the current moment or not. While you may be writing these things down at the beginning or end of the day, make sure to notice all of the things for which you are grateful as they pop up throughout your day. Allow yourself to be in the present and to fully appreciate each thing you are grateful for as it arises.

The gratitude group reported feeling more optimistic and positive about their lives than the other two groups. In addition, the gratitude group was more physically active and reported fewer visits to a doctor than those subjects who wrote only about their negative experiences.

Definition of Addiction

Produced by Allina Health, this sheet looks at ‘overlooked blessings’ and reflections on positive things about the individual’s health and body, activities they enjoy, and relationships they are grateful for. Allows you to actually enjoy the ritual and experience positive emotions while your eating beans that tend to last throughout the whole evening. The results of this study are quite straightforward. If you wish to increase your gratitude and happiness levels then intentionally script letters to inspiring people in your life. This might be the most powerful gratitude exercise. Write a hand-written letter to a person you are particularly grateful to have in your life. It has health benefits like increased endorphins that decrease stress, increased heart health, and circulation in the body, decreased lethargy, and decreases in blood pressure.

• For this exercise, we invite you to have a meal of a can of beans.
• To start, focus on the positive improvements that recovery has brought into your life.
• That’s why using the holiday as an opportunity for reflection and self-care is vital!
• During 2020, when many of us are more worried, anxious, and stressed than we have ever been, a simple practice of gratitude is proven to improve our circumstances, our health, and how we approach and handle situations.
• You could even write down hopes, dreams, or goals for the future—after all, hope helps us meet each day with the future in mind.
• This simple worksheet helps you find things you are grateful for, complete with prompts to get you started.

Consider this your master list of the best gratitude exercises with a quick and easy explanation. The following video shows the results of a USC study where students kept a gratitude journal for 10 weeks. Watch what happened when the https://ecosoberhouse.com/ three groups had different prompts—and results. This is similar to the gratitude journal, except you are going to take pictures of all the things you are grateful for. This gives you the opportunity to visualize your gratitude.

Does an Attitude of Gratitude Affect Recovery?

So when we reach a point where the pain grows to be too much we either, die or live an amazing new life of recovery from addiction. This sounds like a harsh statement but it is the truth. French Creek Recovery Center provides quality residential treatment for substance use disorder. Having a plan can keep you from having to make difficult decisions in the moment when your emotions, cravings, or anxiety are running high. In this way, your Thanksgiving plan-making is another thing for which you can be thankful.

It not only makes you feel good, but it also makes others feel good. Embracing the message of recovery allows me to pass that message on to others. During Thanksgiving, it’s natural to reflect on gratitude. The holiday has its roots in hardship — fully half the Pilgrim settlers died of disease and starvation that first winter. The same is true of gratitude in recovery — we are thankful and ready to do the work to solidify our relationships with ourselves and others. Return to this page whenever you need a reminder about why gratitude is important to practice, or suggestions on how to boost your own sense of gratitude. Visit the section on developing gratitude in children to encourage your own children, clients, or students to commit to a lifetime of gratitude and happiness.

Importance of Gratitude in Recovery

We don’t expect someone in recovery to have mastered the art of gratitude. Making conscious efforts at practicing gratitude is a good way to get the benefits of this principle of recovery. And the more you practice, the more natural it might become. Remember, you’re training your brain to avoid the negative thinking patterns developed during active addiction to drugs or alcohol.

With gratitude in recovery, however, you can learn to move past them. You can be grateful for the opportunity to change, to heal, and for the immense support around you. With gratitude, you can regain the strength and momentum needed to work towards your goals. gratitude in recovery Turnbridge operates leading mental health and substance abuse treatment programs throughout Connecticut. This blog is a resource for people seeking addiction and mental health recovery information and inspiration, and the latest Turnbridge news and events.

Knowing what we lost can help us appreciate what we have. The pain of losing loved ones hopefully inspires us to grow closer to the loved ones still with us. The increased risk of health problems hopefully reminds us to appreciate our health if we’re lucky enough to be healthy.

The following day, bring in some of the fruit that the students selected and ask them to think of all of the properties of the fruit and reflect upon all the people involved in its production. Ask students to open their eyes and share what they visualized. Then, ask students to draw a picture of what they visualized and write a caption to go with it. Alternatively, students could write a short paragraph about it. To read about these examples and learn how to measure gratitude, you can read the paper here. The group focusing on things they were grateful for reported significantly higher wellbeing than the other two groups.