Being grateful is related to feeling good. How good are you feeling right now? Do you resent what you have in your life or are you happy with what you have? If you are angry with the world and with people around you and that which fills your day you can become very unhappy. It is then important to shift your focus and being grateful is one such shift that can help you live with more contentment from day to day.
Gratitude
Gratitude deals with being mindful of the positive things that happen in your life. You are aware that the positive things in your life are not just there, but came about because of something. You are then aware of the cause of your happiness and grateful for that cause.
This also allows you to choose to be the cause of your own gratitude. This gives you great resilience and makes you feel positive[1].
Being Grateful
As mentioned, there is a correlation between being grateful and feeling happy. Positive emotions affect what you think and what you do. Having your mindset such that you generally experience positive emotions can help you in (future) stressful situations.
Being grateful, for example, makes you feel more connected to the people in your life and also makes your life feel more meaningful. These are two important factors that contribute to how good you feel[2].
For example, research shows that people who care for people with dementia who use gratitude also use more positive techniques to feel better about dealing with difficult issues. These include, for example, using acceptance, thinking around, humor, seeking emotional support and using religion
Be happy with what you have
There are a number of techniques that will help you increase your gratitude making it easier to be grateful on a daily basis.
List of things to be thankful for
One such technique is to make a list of everything you are grateful for, for example:
I am grateful for...
- My Partner
- My children
- My work
- My team
- My Computer
- Companies that help me with my business
- My Parents
- My brothers/sisters
- My car
- My House
- Decorating my home
- The coffee I can make every morning
- My Health
- That I can go on vacation.
- Etc. etc.
If you do this and grab that list from time to time when you're in a slump and think you have nothing you'll find out you have quite a lot after all.
Daily gratitude
Another way to strengthen your gratitude is to write down 3 things each night that you are grateful for that day. You write down 3 things that went well and why they went well.
When you do this for a week it already has an effect on the amount of gratitude you experience and how happy you are.
Using these types of techniques, even if you are in a really bad situation right now, can do an awful lot to, for example, suffer less from depressive thoughts[4].
By being more grateful you are more likely to have positive emotions and start behaving socially more often, feel a connection, become less materialistic and the relationships you have will improve.
In the process, gratitude helps you reflect on what you do by evoking positive emotions. With a negative emotion, such as fear, you can really only think of a few options to deal with a situation such as flee, fight or freeze. Whereas when you have a positive emotion in a given situation you think of many more options to turn the situation into an opportunity for something better.
Fun, for example, makes you want to play, be creative, discover or stretch your limit and so on.
Curiosity makes you want to explore certain situations, learn new information and develop yourself.
Gratitude is often the basis for such positive emotions[5].
Showing gratitude
Showing gratitude is also very important for strengthening your social ties. For example, research shows that leaders in organizations who take pride in their work are also more likely to stand up for their employees and show gratitude. In addition, it makes you more selfless. So you are more likely to want to do something for someone else without expecting anything in return[6].
Changing your mindset to be more grateful
Sometimes it is still very difficult to be grateful. Suppose a loved one of yours has died, it's hard to see the positive in that. If you've just been laid off, it's also sometimes very difficult to think "gee, I have more free time," because how do you spend it when you know you won't have any money in your account next month?
It is then very important to interpret an event in a different way. The way you interpret events and how you feel and behave in the process all depends on your beliefs.
Your beliefs are say your opinion of how the world works and how you function in it. Hypnosis can help you change those beliefs. For example, the first step is to find out where the belief originated and whether it has created a pattern in your life where you find it difficult to be grateful for what you have.
This is done with regression. In regression, while you are under hypnosis, you go back to the moment when the belief that you don't need to be grateful arose. For example, you may have suddenly figured out that you just deserve certain things or that being grateful doesn't help anyway. These are often moments from your childhood, because that is the period in your life when your beliefs about how the world works and what you do in it arise.
Because this is often in your childhood, the results of a regression can be quite surprising.
You then go on to do something with that moment while under hypnosis. This might include imagining how another person must have felt at that moment or how that person might have behaved as well.
This often helps you get rid of limiting beliefs very quickly, making it easier for you to be grateful.
Suggestions for more gratitude
Regression is one of the many ways you can gain new beliefs that will help you be more grateful. Another way is by using hypnotic suggestions to place new beliefs deep within you that will more quickly make them part of how you think about the world and how you will behave as a result.
Because you repeat or hear those suggestions while under hypnosis, it works better than reading them off the screen now. In addition, the suggestions are personalized for everyone because they depend on the limiting beliefs you have.
A few examples:
Hindering belief: I deserve to have a job.
Hypnotic suggestion: You are working hard to get a job.
Hindering belief: If I show my gratitude I come across as weak.
Hypnotic suggestion: Showing gratitude strengthens bonds with people for whom I am grateful.
Showing gratitude with hypnosis
So if you have the beliefs that help you be more grateful, hypnosis can also help you show that gratitude. In fact, hypnosis can help you perform desired behaviors with guided visualization and hypnotic suggestion.
In such a guided visualization, the hypnotist helps your imagination about how to show someone your gratitude. How do you do it at work? How do you do it with friends and/or family? Do you do it very casually or do it with a bunch of flowers? How do you make sure it is somewhat fluid and what do you do if the person reacts lukewarmly to your gratitude?
Visualization doesn't just address what you say. You also visualize how you feel and what you hear. Depending on your imagination and to what extent you can use things from your senses, the hypnotist can make use of them.
After the visualization, you often receive a post-hypnotic suggestion. This is a kind of assignment of what you will do when you are no longer under hypnosis, such as:
"From now on, when you notice that someone is helping you and you are happy with that you say thank you to that person," says the company.
So hypnosis can help you be grateful by addressing your mindset and behavior. Hypnosis helps you shift your focus from what you are not happy with to what you are happy with.
Want to know if you can be hypnotized and if you can hypnotize people? Then come to a hypnosis playshop.
If you want to learn techniques right away that can help people, with more gratitude, for example, then sign up directly for one of our training courses or check out another event.
[1] https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/53ba/46cd0043ef898a3c0b8ce9808f7e2ec338e2.pdf
[2] https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2018-16017-010
[3] https://watermark.silverchair.com/igx004.2913.pdf?token=AQECAHi208BE49Ooan9kkhW_Ercy7Dm3ZL_9Cf3qfKAc485ysgAAAl4wggJaBgkqhkiG9w0BBwagggJLMIICRwIBADCCAkAGCSqGSIb3DQEHATAeBglghkgBZQMEAS4wEQQMt7djozvZnSr4k_BCAgEQgIICEQlhS8FJUahUKQR1ODXNYQDwBGm6xGUVJRgCsEzvWSVIxcA_HSroim79F5ZHyGiZZO9lAuYaI7rgywRnrJw8PheCF0N50qCOw09sXAfznoYVAjHV_8CFNte9_23Cz0WH3vClfQW1KUsY8a6MiW23CYg9nzX6Hsjh3SfsmrlZY4jdYiJ9rdYERgQgroe_dRVzGeBRfT_UicYoBklHpAt9qGpaFAoBHzgFH_4wRwBb-yynj1Qv7IjnnvduPsEtq3XxH_ACJtQPXSqpq5VcheRM-jLPH1NiSFndDLQVD15oVc1vCuHzwkk3H9ph7jbMYSG4VeBVuEXzLk2pBKDpX6x_scKVwfEMRKO2SJM4QsDgJk8Yc33DI3p-6AS28fEPJPtB3EM7NPngxH9uQTXiG5u1zWUWermMEbVpaziz2-BLd_ImOBY1jCmqHJ2G6eVP2krVt6x5ZmGgYe-C72pFqV014NSabCUNurl4qL1m0C30KraI49YvLvvC8b3DP8FGFTOJKOxnIKGX7M8VQm8PRnYIH5wAXuAcKiQoJeHwcX777xbIBv-MAilUeKNDdkJGtkWvdolVYhzaLi1wSeCpQ0T6E0fssOU0DCM4yb3oXEj5ZiMjqiwv4x_L6FYFFEnD6f3Ifojo8cwucGaKcOueCPEv47XH0Ex-wnMFhJX6w_fjXLWuAofuVEJa-MD1BlN5pTzsh0Y
[4] https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/53ba/46cd0043ef898a3c0b8ce9808f7e2ec338e2.pdf
[5] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02699931.2011.595393
[6] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1548051809333338
