A focus on gratitude for mental wellness

It's great to be back. This month, I'm focusing on gratitude. Being grateful has been a huge part of my daily mental health strategy for the last five years. 

In this first episode, I explain why gratitude is so important for me, personally.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:04

Hi there. I'm Dana Liversidge. And thanks for joining me on my notebooks box thinking podcast. Welcome back. I, he took a couple of months out at the end of the kind of major part of lockdown here in the UK because my husband and I have been focusing on getting our small businesses back up and running. And so thanks for sticking with it and waiting for my return to talk with you and share some ideas. I'm really thrilled that you did. And if you're joining us here on the blog for the first time or podcasts, sorry for the first time, then welcome. Uh, thank you for giving me some of your air time. Some of your Headspace, I hope it's something you'll enjoy and it'll get you thinking in a different way. So this month August, I wanted to focus on gratitude. Gratitude is something that I talk about a lot when I'm speaking. And also in my role as a celebrant, whenever we are talking about someone we love, we're talking about how grateful we are to have them in our world, whether we're marrying them, uh, renewing our vows to them or saying goodbye to them. It is really about gratitude for them having been a part of our lives. And whenever I talk about gratitude, people say to me afterwards, it's interesting. I'd never noticed before that when I spend time being grateful for things, I do feel better. I feel better about myself. I feel better about my life and I feel better about the contribution I'm making to other people's lives. And so I wanted this month to talk about gratitude and how I think it impacts pretty much every aspect of our wellness and as a result of that most aspects of our lives when we're truly feeling well. And by that, I mean very much a focus on mental health, uh, when we feel good and content and at peace, or we feel, um, alive and awake and aware, gosh, lots of EY words on me. Um, but when we're, when those are the kinds of words we're using about our state of being, then we are talking about mental wellness or mental health. And for too much of my 50 plus years, I'm talking about mental wellness was always either, um, seen as a little bit embarrassing or it was put on the back burner. I remember, um, a really interesting woman called Lynn folds would she was on the television, um, with her husband John's Stapleton, I think that's right. Um, and they used to do a lot of consumer programs, consumer awareness programs, um, and Lynne became very ill with bowel cancer and she was the first celebrity really well-known public figure in our country who kind of talked about bowel cancer. And I don't know if other people had said it before her, but she was the first person I heard say, you know, nobody likes to talk about poop. And so we get embarrassed and people die of

Speaker 2: 4:09

Embarrassment.

Speaker 1: 4:11

And that really struck me while I think the same is true with mental health. I think people dive embarrassment because they are made to feel like it's only them, like when you can't cope with something, that's somehow a deficiency. Uh, and that, of course, everybody else is coping. When of course they are not in fact coping, but just like you they've been told, go out, put on a brave face and crack on. And I did that for years and years and years. And then I realized that something had shifted when we moved to our little home here in Wales, I realized I wasn't putting on a brave face anymore. I was feeling

Speaker 2: 5:09

Different.

Speaker 1: 5:11

And it came from being so grateful that we had found this remarkable place. And I began to notice that on the days where I got up, and as soon as I was up and dressed, I went out of the front door and just looked at what was surrounding us. I felt instantly this overwhelming sense of gratefulness and well nurse. And as somebody who's, who's lived with illness, most of my life, it was a stark dramatic. Um, yeah, all these kinds of over the top words. I mean, it was really dramatic, the difference and the more I did it, the better I felt. So I'm not suggesting that we can overcome all of our mental health issues with gratitude. I wouldn't attempt to oversimplify things like that. What I would say is my journey has seen gratitude, improve my personal ability to manage and work through and genuinely overcome quite severe anxiety that I was left with after major heart surgery. Um, to the point, I would often start my day by getting dressed, getting ready, and then was so overwhelmed that I had to go back to bed and, and was convinced if I left the house alone, I would not return alive. Um, and that went on for nearly two and a half years. And the move here, the perfect timing of that, of a much softer space with so much nature around us and this gratitude for it that I really do feel I have a new life because of that move. Um, there's no question that my anxiety is in my past. So for those of you and new to the blog port cost,

Speaker 3: 7:40

I

Speaker 1: 7:41

Don't do hour long conversations. I do lots of short conversations, so I do hope you'll pop back again in August, um, and listen to the next one and do engage with me. I'd love to hear your thoughts on gratitude and how it helps you to be more aware and perhaps a bit kinder towards your mental wellness do join me. And in the meantime, remember no need to try and think outside that box, there really is no box.