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Every year at Insight we have a Gratitude Meeting the night before Thanksgiving. This tradition has been a significant part of our addiction treatment program for over 40 years. It is the one meeting a year that the entire family is together in the same room. Young addicts and alcoholics, parents, grandparents, brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, and any other significant family members participate. While the research on gratitude and physical health is still relatively new, the consensus seems to be that the health benefits of gratitude are mediated by its tendency to reduce stress and improve sleep.
At its essence, gratitude is feeling joy for the things you have in life. This isn’t limited to material possessions, although of course you can be grateful for the things in your life, too.
These changes to the brain can be seen with medical imagery. With long-term difficult things like learning to play a musical instrument, these changes can be permanent.
Encourage yourself as you focus even more fully on your recovery. When you rise you greet the day, take some time out to pray or meditate and think about someone or something in life that you are grateful for. This really helps shift your perspective and starts to frame everything you see in a more positive way. It isn’t always apparent immediately, but the positive mindset produced by starting The Importance of Gratitude in Recovery your day off right will seep into all aspects of your life. You will start to find yourself more relaxed, resilient, optimistic, productive, social, and even see an improvement in your health and well-being. Gratitude helps develop positive feelings like happiness, positive thinking, and motivation to do better. These feelings are essential for you if you are recovering from addiction.
By practicing gratitude, you will slowly transform the way you look at life, as well as the people you interact with. These small instances of gratitude can amount to a bigger overall impact on your mental health.
If you are not intentional about it, you could take good things for granted. So, the first step is to choose to always be thankful for the blessings you have every day. It could even be a moment of sharing someone else’s happiness.
In recovery, excessive negative emotions put people at risk for relapse. This is not to say negative emotions should be overlooked or ignored, but obsessive or continuous negative thinking is hazardous to a healthy recovery. Gratitude is recognized as one of the foundational virtues in the creation of happiness.
"Give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you." "This is the day that the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it." "And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in one body. And be thankful."
Thankfully, nurturing a daily gratitude practice is simple, and it can be woven into your day-to-day life. It starts with a mindset shift, and a concerted effort to think more positively. This has been a great start in my journey of recovery, and sets me up for a great future in sobriety. Not only because the facilities are phenominal, but its an excellent rehabilitation center for anyone seeking treatment for substance abuse addiction.
It improves your self-esteemFeeling grateful for the things and people you have is an excellent way to improve your self-esteem. The trick is to pay more attention to the good things in your life. Doing this will boost your confidence and help you feel better about your everyday life.Even if your recovery does not go as quickly as you would like, gratitude will help you stay optimistic. While it is important to have drive and set goals, the inability to satisfy that need can leave some feeling empty, unhappy, or disillusioned.
For instance, if your mindset is positive, you would have positive thoughts. Therefore, you would be able to see the brighter side of things. You will also feel motivated to handle a relapse or other challenges. One thing that can make it difficult https://ecosoberhouse.com/ to feel gratitude is the need to compare your success to that of others. These comparisons are often misleading and only lead to negative feelings. Even if a person appears to be successful in one area of life, it does not mean they are perfect.
The study is an excellent example of how researchers can use recovery science to test experiential and anecdotal evidence. Individuals in the “Three Good Things” gratitude group experienced significant reduction in Negative Affect & significant increases in Unactivated Positive Affect. As the name suggests, the “Three Good Things” exercise asks participants to describe and report the cause/context of three ‘good’ things that happened to him/her in the past 24 hours. Addiction is a disease, we have addiction medicine that saves lives. The quickest way to appreciate the life you live is by sending out words of appreciation. Thank you letters give you the opportunity to share your gratitude for a particular person, situation, or thing, without sending an impersonal text message.
Being grateful to be clean and sober is motivation for someone in addiction recovery to continue staying clean and sober and thus will continue taking the actions they need to do ensure their sobriety. Being grateful allows an outlook that changes difficulty into opportunity and problems into challenges. Gratitude brings about a healthy outlook than anything can be accomplished and problems and difficulties in life can be faced with grace and dignity and faith.
