Dear Agnes,
Lately, I’ve been so caught up in my work deadlines and personal responsibilities that I’ve lost touch with feeling grateful. I know I should appreciate the good in my life—my health, my family, my career—but it feels like I’m always focused on what’s next or what’s missing. How can I slow down enough to truly recognize and savor the gifts I already have?
Sincerely,
Too Busy to Be Grateful
Dear Too Busy,
I’d invite you to consider that being continually focused on what’s next or what’s missing isn’t a function of busyness per se. We tend to assign responsibility for what’s going on in our inner worlds to our external circumstances, but it’s entirely possible to be busy while also grateful, peaceful, and even joyful at the same time. A mentor of mine once referred to the state of being that allows us to do this as “going fast on the outside while going slow on the inside”. It took me a long time to understand what she meant by this. In essence, she was referring to getting things done while maintaining a relaxed state within our nervous systems.
I often ask clients if, when they were growing up, there was an adult in the home who would fairly consistently notice when they were upset, and come to offer comfort. It’s surprisingly rare that I hear an emphatic “yes.” When clients answer “no,” I then ask them how they coped with their big feelings. Some say they turned to the imaginal world, some acted out, but one of the most common responses I hear is that people became very responsible, and turned to achievement. In other words, they got busy.
For many people, being in a stress response has been paired, in the Pavlovian sense, with achieving for a very long time. This is particularly true for people who grew up in somewhat chaotic and/or emotionally negligent homes, where there were few options available for regulating chronic stress. In adulthood, it’s not surprising that many of us naturally fall into a “survival mode” nervous system state when we get busy. It’s in this state that preoccupation with what’s coming next and general discontent with what is, are quite likely to prevail. Gratitude is a nervous system state dependent feeling. We don’t easily feel it when our systems are in survival mode.
All this being said, there are essentially three approaches for getting your gratitude groove back:
The first is to reduce our levels of doing such that we can stay in a relaxed nervous system state (colloquially known as “stress leave”).
The second is to retrain our nervous systems to stay in a more relaxed state while we are busy doing things.
And the third is a combination approach.
While I’m all for cutting out unnecessary “doing” in periods of overwhelm, I also recognize that sometimes it’s all necessary, particularly for working parents. This can be a blessing in disguise because learning to maintain a relaxed nervous system, regardless of circumstances, is probably the single most valuable skill a person can master.
Breathwork is a foundational practice for doing this, as are all forms of mindfulness training. The single most effective practice that helped me begin to tame my nervous system was to observe where my mind was throughout the day. Was I out in the future, back in the past, or in the present? I discovered I was mostly living (mentally) in the future or past, and that this was creating patterns of tension in my body. So hundreds of times a day, I would bring myself back to the present, relax my shoulders, and take a few deep belly breaths. I slowed down my mind, and began to focus more on sensations instead of unnecessary thoughts. Even when I had to engage my “thinker”, I tried to keep some focus on the sensations in my body to keep me more present. I slowed down on the inside. And not only did my mood improve, but I was able to accomplish much more, while expending significantly less energy.
In loving support,
Agnes