When thinking about your recovery journey, there are likely some influential figures likely come to mind. These individuals may be close members of your support system or someone you admire from afar. Either way, the individual or individuals that come to mind likely helped you reach the point of success that you are at today.
Whoever these people are and whatever they did to inspire you may be unknown to them. Oftentimes, we are unaware of the ways we inspire and influence others. One way to ensure they are aware of the impact they have made in your life is to express gratitude.
What Is Gratitude?
Gratitude can be defined and expressed in various ways. It is commonly considered to be the appreciation and thankfulness for what is meaningful to us. When an individual helps us in some way, we feel a sense of gratitude or gratefulness toward them and their actions.
Expressing gratitude is a great way to show others that you appreciate their actions. It is also a simple way to repay the kindness of one person to someone else. Gratitude is not always expressed in the same way from person to person, but often portrays a similar meaning.
Why Is Gratitude Important?
You have likely heard about gratitude and have been told to implement it in your interactions, but understanding its importance can help you further your knowledge of when it should be utilized. The benefits included with gratitude expression can positively impact your sober living experience, influencing success in recovery overall.
Improved Mental State
Expressing gratitude is important for your well-being. If someone is consistently lending a hand to you and you are always on the receiving end, you may begin to feel you are taking advantage of that person. While that may not be your intention, receiving so-called “hand-outs” can create a negative mental state. Taking the time to express gratitude to those who have helped you can help diminish this feeling of guilt.
Letting others know that you appreciate their actions or character can help to boost their self-esteem. Better yet, show your gratitude by doing something for them. Being kind to others can also fill you with a sense of satisfaction. Knowing that you contributed to the positive emotions of someone else, your mental state can improve. This benefit is great for the recovery process, as it encourages you to be confident in yourself and share a respect for those who have helped you along the way.
Building Emotional Resilience
Emotional resilience can be built by the expression of gratitude. Emotional resilience refers to the ability to adapt to situations of high stress and regulate your emotions through them healthily. This level of emotional resilience can be built by engaging in positive interactions, fighting negative thought patterns, and maintaining a solution-focused perspective.
Having a solution-focused perspective can be highly influential on sobriety maintenance and overall success in recovery. This level of resilience and the skills that are gained from expressing gratitude can help you engage in positive thought processes throughout your treatment. It is a great way to manage conflict and alter your thought patterns to influence your recovery rather than hinder it.
Improve Relationships
While in recovery, many individuals work to improve their interpersonal relationships. While relationships rely upon a multitude of factors to remain strong, gratitude can help these relationships thrive. Think of a time you helped a friend through a rough patch. Did this friend express gratitude?
If not, you likely felt like you were being used or lacked a form of mutual support within the relationship. If you fail to express gratitude to your friends and peers, they may develop these same feelings. Ensuring you express proper gratitude toward your friends can help strengthen the level of mutual respect. Making the best out of your relationships in our sober living home can help ensure you are surrounded by a system of support.
Celebrate Gratitude
November is recognized as the official month of gratitude. Thanksgiving is a holiday celebrated by many Americans during the month. The Thanksgiving holiday is often viewed as a holiday where people tend to enjoy a large feast with freshly cooked turkey, but the holiday stands for much more than that. Thanksgiving is meant to represent gratitude. Having a feast encourages us to be grateful for the food we have available to us, as not everyone can celebrate in this way.
Many families have the tradition of each individual verbalizing what they are grateful for before enjoying their feast. This tradition has been implemented among many families to remind their loved ones to express a sense of gratitude before celebrating.
The month of November is a perfect time of year to implement practices of gratitude into your own life. You may need to express gratitude throughout recovery, which can benefit you and others who have supported you through this process. Use this season to further understand gratitude and determine how you can implement it into your everyday lifestyle.
Along with learning to express gratitude yourself, you can also help to influence others in early recovery. Teaching them the importance of gratitude and helping them understand the proper ways to express this can help them in their recovery process as well.
Your family and friends can also benefit from learning about gratitude. This practice is beneficial to everyone. It is not restricted to individuals in recovery. Allow this holiday of gratitude to spread joy, respect, and appreciation around within your sober living home.
Expressing Gratitude
To include gratitude in your own life and interactions, it is important to understand how to appropriately express it. Implement these strategies to help you learn how to express gratitude. These can be done as frequently as desired, as they can rarely be overused.
Mental Thank You
When you think of expressing gratitude, you likely picture going out of your way to do something nice for someone, often involving a great deal of effort and planning. While gratitude can be expressed this way, it also can be expressed with very little effort at all.
While a mental thank you should not be used as a regular form of gratitude, it can be a practice that you can regularly implement. Expressing gratitude through a mental thank you simply requires you to think of something or someone you are grateful for and state that in your mind.
This practice may seem irrelevant, but it allows you to receive the positive mental benefits of expressing gratitude. It is a great way to introduce yourself to thinking of ways to express gratitude without any fear of judgment involved, as the practices all take place within your mind.
Practice Makes Perfect
If you are unfamiliar with expressing gratitude, it may take practice to achieve. Just as any recovery skill takes practice to properly implement, expressing gratitude works the same way. Start your practice by thinking of things you are grateful for. To remember them, try writing them down in a journal. Then, think of things that someone has done for you that you are specifically grateful for. Ponder how you could express this gratitude to them. Before you express this to the individual, you can contemplate what to say so the conversation flows easily.
Celebrate the month of gratitude by learning techniques to express gratitude while in a sober living home. Learn why gratitude is important, how it benefits you and others, and how it can impact your recovery. You can apply gratitude techniques while engaged in a sober living environment to express gratitude to your housemates, family, support system, friends outside of recovery, and your treatment team.
Share Your Gratitude
After thinking about specific individuals, actions, or situations that you are grateful for, it is time to express them to the individuals involved. You can utilize the outlined conversations you contemplated beforehand to tell them in person and show your respect.
If you are nervous about expressing gratitude in person initially or the induvial is not available to reach you in person, you can express gratitude through a letter. Writing is a more efficient way to express thoughts and feelings for some people. If writing is your preferred method of communication, a letter may be the appropriate form of expression.
Write down the key moments that impacted you and how they played a role in your success. A letter provides you with room to outline the full aspects of how they helped you and why you feel a sense of gratitude toward them. The receiver of the letter can refer back to it in moments of hardship and use your gratitude as a motivating factor for themself.
Start a Gratitude Journal
Expressing gratitude to others is critical, but it is also important to express gratitude toward yourself. While there may be many individuals who have positively impacted your recovery, you are the key individual responsible for your success. It is essential to share an appreciation for yourself and the contributions you have made to get where you are today. We all know that recovery is not an easy journey. You deserve credit for making it this far along in the process.
Keeping a daily gratitude journal is a great way to express your self-gratitude. Set aside some time each evening to reflect on your day. Think of moments when you did something positive for yourself or are proud of an action you engaged in. If you can’t think of any particular action or moment, think about an attribute you have obtained that you are grateful for. Take a few minutes to reflect on the gratitude that comes to mind and write them down.
If you are ever feeling high levels of self-doubt or lacking confidence in your abilities, reflect upon these moments of gratitude. This reflection can remind you of the positivity you have found in yourself in the past. Knowing that you found all of these reasons to be grateful for yourself can help you appreciate everything you have to offer.
Life really is about the journey and the small moments that got to where you are. Gratitude is a great way to express appreciation for your life in recovery.
Expressing gratitude is a practice that is often overlooked but is of great importance to engage in. In your sober living home, the expression of gratitude can be used to help build relationships, show respect, and improve your self-esteem. The benefits that you can gain through expressing gratitude can contribute to your long-term success in recovery. Not only will these expressions benefit you, but they will also benefit the individual you whom you are expressing gratitude. This action is a simple way to spread kindness and positivity. Utilize this month to engage in practices of gratitude and learn techniques to properly implement these expressions. To learn more about the benefits of gratitude, contact Real Recovery Sober Living at (727) 290-9156.
