Video: Podcast #23 Gratefulness

Intro:
Thanks for clicking on Conversations with Crosswinds Counseling, I’m Curtis Smith, and I invite you to subscribe to our podcast and to like and share it as well. I hope you enjoy today’s episode.

Curtis: Hi everyone, and welcome to Conversations with Crosswinds Counseling. I’m Curtis Smith and joining me today is Tina Grzesiek. She is a counselor in Indianapolis for Crosswinds. Has been for about a year. Tina, welcome to the podcast.

Tina: Thank you. Grateful to be here.

Curtis: Very nice, because we are talking about gratefulness today. It’s October. We’re not we’re not all that far from Thanksgiving, which is the season I think a lot of us start thinking about being intentional. About being grateful and thankful. But it’s a topic that probably deserves more attention than it gets. When I say the word ‘gratefulness’ to you, from a therapist viewpoint, what comes to mind? What does that mean to you?

Tina: Well gratefulness is being thankful for what we already have. It’s not something that you want to have, or will have. It’s for what you have now. So it’s not anything you have to really think too hard about, actually. A lot of us don’t practice it, but for me gratefulness in the therapeutic is a process another tool to use to help with lowering anxiety and depression.

Curtis: Yeah, so tell me how you use it then. I mean it seems I have kind of a natural idea that comes to my mind from a non-clinical non-therapist viewpoint, but from your viewpoint, how do you use it? How do you employ it?

Tina: So, there’s been a lot of studies on gratefulness and I’ve noticed even more recently. But this one study was from neuroscientists who conducted a study with two groups of people that aren’t taking any like psychotropics, no medications, or in any kind of counseling or any other processes. So one group was assigned to write five things you’re grateful for every day and the other group was not. So over a period of time, I’m going to say like three months. Oh, first he did brain scans – sorry let me back up a little. He did brain scans for a baseline and then after the practice of gratefulness and not gratefulness he did brain scans again and he found that the area of the brain that like Prozac and anti-depressants work on – the feel-good area of the brain had increased naturally in those who had written the gratefulness. And the serotonin levels had increased – dopamine and serotonin levels had increased naturally.

Curtis: Simply by writing five things that they were grateful for once a day.

Tina: Once a day.

Curtis: And this exercise probably took 30 seconds right.

Tina: Exactly. It doesn’t take a lot of time, and I tell my client – and the group that did not do it just stayed the same. I guess I should put that in there. But I found that extremely interesting.

Curtis: Yeah.

Tina: And I practice it myself and even – it’s one of the first things I assign in a therapy session because most people do come in with some kind of depression, or anxiety, or anger. And anxiety and anger come from the same part of the brain, the amygdala at the base of the brain. Once that is intensified that’s where your cortisol is released and you’re put in fight or flight and the prefrontal cortex of the brain shuts down completely and you don’t have any reasoning ability. So you – that’s why in arguments we get nowhere very fast if we don’t take a break and calm ourselves down. Get that amygdala calmed down so that the prefrontal cortex can open up. Gratitude does that same thing because it works in that part of the brain, the medial prefrontal cortex.

Curtis: Yeah, so that’s the scientific reason. That’s the science behind why gratefulness works. When you see your clients start to use gratefulness, when you start to talk about it, when they start to think about it, exercise it, use it every day, what are some of the practical changes you see in their life with someone who’s become more grateful?

Tina: Yeah, it’s interesting because even after one or two sessions people say, ‘I feel a little better.’ They don’t have like any specific thing to report other than, ‘I feel a little better.’ And so that’s not even like three months long. Or six weeks long. So I found that interesting as well. So they are – it trains them to use the part of the brain that kind of doesn’t stay in that, ‘Poor me. This is happening to me.’ – kind of state that will escalate into that anxiety. And you become more hopeful with gratitude.

Curtis: Is it possible that rather than just like a fight or flight mentality, that when we get stressed, when we have anxiety, when we find ourselves normally, maybe reverting to a fight or flight kind of mentality – when we’ve exercised gratefulness as a regular kind of training of our brainm using a muscle. Does that becomes a fallback? Does it ever replace the fight or flight or does it become a third option that our brain can go to?

Tina: I don’t think it’ll ever replace it. When you find your healing from any process, I feel like it’s duration and intensity. So if you can decrease the duration of your state of fight or flight, or decrease the intensity and the duration of that, that’s when you know you’re healing. I don’t think we should look for an all cure of because certainly that fight or flight is necessary to have when we need it. We just don’t need [it] to be there every time.

Curtis: Right. Right. You don’t want to completely shut off but it shouldn’t necessarily be a part of your daily life.

Tina: Yeah.

Curtis: Yeah. How easy is this for people to get if someone comes in with no history of practicing the habit of being grateful, and you start to employ some tips for them you start to employ some tricks for them to become more grateful. Even if it’s this, just writing down five things you’re grateful for every day, does that take a week? Does it – the study was three months. Do you start to see impact and difference right away, or is there a little bit of a lag time there?

Tina: Well, I tell people, it’s not difficult. Doesn’t cost any money. We don’t have to have any kind of tools to really do it – to even think about gratefulness. We don’t really need anything. You can be anywhere at any time. The most difficult part of this exercise is to remember to do it because it’s need a habit. It takes 22 times to change a habit.cThat’s not even a 75 hard. So it like anything we want to instill in repetitious habit, we have to do it over and over again. So obviously the more we do it, the more natural it comes to us. I try to also incorporate it, you know, families are busy, so maybe you want to do it with your children before you go to bed have them do it. To name things you’re grateful for at the dinner table. You can go around like we do at Thanksgiving you know. We can do that on other days as well. To just say what we’re grateful for that day. The other way of practicing gratitude is just also being a little more intentional. We tend to say ‘thank you’ if you handed me something/ I you know it’s like I could be more intentional and say, ‘thank you for getting me that cup of coffee.’ ‘Thank you for holding that door for me.’ You know things like that. We can practice in our lives a little better but I’ve noticed for me with my general practice I don’t stay in a state of distress as long. I can look at the bright side of things because I do know that no matter how bad a situation is, how dark a situation is, there is always something to be grateful for.

Curtis: Yeah I was – that was my next question. So great tips there on how to exercise the muscle of being grateful. What do you do when you run into somebody who says, ‘I, just… life feels terrible right now. I’m overwhelmed. You’re asking me to be grateful, and I can’t come up with anything to be grateful for.’ What do you say?

Tina: That’s a great question because I guess it’s important to state what gratefulness isn’t, and gratefulness is not minimizing your problems and your worries. You know there are devastating things that happen to us and people every day, and it’s not to just discount that whole process. It’s to look at the hope in it, and even, I mean the fact that you know we have salvation every day is something to be grateful for.

Curtis: Yes.

Tina: And it could be just as little as you know the sun is shining today, or something, you know, it doesn’t – there it doesn’t have to be anything in particular. It doesn’t have to be anything specific. It can be very general, and I just ask them to keep trying. Most people find some benefit to it no matter what. They can start with even thinking about things, like thinking about the situation differently, and of course coming to – even though this study was done without therapy, coming to therapy is definitely something that can process all of that and handle that better.

Curtis: Yeah.

Tina: So you’ve got more tools by doing it that way. It’s just your therapist isn’t with you every day, or you can’t always get access to medications you know, it’s important to have something that you can use even when you’re stuck in traffic. I can give you an example, I was stuck in traffic one day and I was just frustrated so I was like, I just gotten through like um road construction and stuff and I went like this – and then I saw the most beautiful sunset, and I was like you know had I not, had this not had happened to me had I not put my head back and taken that breath I would not have seen this I would have missed it in all God’s glory so um I was very grateful for that.

Curtis: It’s a great reminder. There will be days, and even seasons of life where we don’t find gratefulness easily. We have to work to think about it and to find it but it’s always worth spending that time and energy into that.

Tina, thank you. Some great thoughts. Tina Grzesiek, one of the wonderful counselors here at Crosswinds Counseling you can find them all at crosswindscounseling.org and we will see you next time on Conversations with Crosswinds Counseling.

Tina: Thank you.

Outro:
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