E034 I How to transform your stress into strength using gratitude

Have you ever considered that the gratitude practices you're overlooking could be the key to transforming stress into your greatest strength?

Many individuals mistakenly view gratitude as mere positive thinking, applying it only sporadically in their lives rather than consistently harnessing its full power.

By ignoring the comprehensive approach of gratitude, you're missing out on a vital tool for conquering stress and boosting mental health. Unlock a new perspective and learn how to make gratitude a lasting impact on your emotional well-being.

Discover how gratitude can transform stress into strength and empower your healing journey. In this episode, learn how to embrace gratitude as a key tool to enhance your mental and emotional well-being.

BY THE TIME YOU FINISH LISTENING, YOU’LL DISCOVER:

- How gratitude serves as an untapped resource for conquering stress and boosting mental health.
- The personal journey of overcoming adversity through the power of gratitude and turning a life lesson into a mission.
- Practical strategies for integrating gratitude into your everyday life to foster resilience and well-being.

OTHER LINKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:

Join our free Facebook group: Embrace Your Healing Journey.  
Book - Gratitude Works by Dr. Robert Emmons
Blog - GRATITUDE- It's the little things that count
Episode 1 - How I healed my daughter’s severe health issues when conventional medicine failed
BONUS Episode - 5 simple rituals to deepen gratitude and embrace joy in the small things

Transcript

 What if the gratitude practices you've been ignoring are actually the key to turning stress into your greatest strength? Many people get this wrong and are in fact practicing it wrong. So it's time to flip the script on what you think you know about gratitude, and help it transform your stress into your strength. Welcome to the episode that's about to change everything you thought you knew about managing stress and building resilience.

For far too long, gratitude has been dismissed as a mere positive thinking, so people end up just using it in bits and pieces and in just some parts of their lives. But what if gratitude is actually the most untapped resource for conquering stress and boosting mental health?

In today's episode, I'll be discussing this and much more that will put gratitude on the top of your emotional wellbeing list to do list and show you how to truly activate it in your life for lasting impact. So it's time to rethink, reframe and revolutionize how you approach gratitude and transform your life from strength to strength. So that's all coming up right here on Embrace Your Healing Journey podcast.

Welcome to Embrace Your Healing Journey, a podcast for women with autoimmune and other chronic conditions to help them navigate the illness without fear of isolation and uncertainty and find relief from their symptoms. Your body is your guide and ally in healing. If you're ready to embrace this journey with compassion and awareness, then the show is for you. Tune in weekly as I, a Functional medicine certified health coach, deliver tips and insights that demystify the healing process, guiding you towards the relief you deserve so that you can feel healthy and happy once more.

I remember distinctly the time I felt the power of gratitude in full force. My daughter was lying in the hospital, in the ICU and her body was really tiny as she. You know, she was not yet seven years old, and she had been hospitalized just two weeks before with a life threatening infection. Her bone marrow had effectively been shut down by medication given to manage her severe eczema. You would not think that gratitude would have any role to play in a situation like this. However, we were in shock. We were in complete shock that something like this could have happened to us. We were trying so hard to find an answer to her problem of, you know, dealing with this severe eczema on a day to day basis. And we had been struggling for so long.

So when we took her to this extremely renowned, uh, specialist, uh, pediatric dermatologist in the UK in one of their leading hospitals, we thought that, you know, we had found a solution. However, that was so far from the truth that that medication put her in the hospital. Uh, it was a 1 in 1,000,000 chance that this happened, but that 1 in 1,000,000 child was our daughter. So we were in complete shock, and we were still just trying to make it from one day to another. The role of gratitude came in when she actually survived this. So it took about two harrowing weeks.

But on the seventh birthday, on her seventh birthday, which is the 4th of July, the doctors told us that she would be all right. She had survived the storm and she would survive. She is a fighter. She has always been, and I felt so much anger towards the doctor and so much anger towards a system that had failed. So we had been struggling so hard for so long. And her, you know, our team of doctors are amazing. Make no mistake about that.

But the whole system is geared up for disease management, not creation of health. And that's what we found out the hard way. It doesn't ask questions like why does this person have this disease? It doesn't ask questions like, what has led to this person, you know, getting this disease or what are the root causes of this chronic disease? It's an amazing system. Conventional medicine is amazing when it comes to acute conditions, when it comes to surgery, accidents, infections. But it fails so miserably when it comes to chronic conditions like eczema or any other chronic disease, actually.

So I was really, really angry at that time. But what happened is that that it was soon replaced by an equally immense feeling of gratitude, this feeling. I don't know how this came about, but yes, I remember at one point feeling just thankful that she was alive. I couldn't care less what had happened before. I just knew that she was going to be okay and she was going to come home with me, and that's all that mattered. And what I chose to do is rather than focusing on what could have gone wrong, uh, you know, had things not come under control, etc., etc. those were horrible thoughts for any parent to even think of.

I chose to focus on the fact that she was going to be okay, and I chose to focus my entire energy on nursing her back to health. And it took many years. And I also devoted my life. And actually, that's what led me to focus on medicine. And, uh, as a health coach today, and I'm here in front of you. But it was that incident. And, you know, I decided to just focus my energies on finding out what had happened. I mean, why is it that she was having this problem and, uh, this.

And so this attitude of gratitude helped me tremendously to not only get over the initial shock, to deal with that anger that I felt towards the system, towards the doctor, but also to realize that I had been given an opportunity I had given, given a gift of a second life in terms of my child's child. So I was not going to squander it. I was not going to, um, you know, sort of let this opportunity go. So I grasped it with both hands and I figured out and I found a way.

That's how I found, you know, stumbled into functional medicine, which finally got her eczema under control and which led me to the path of, uh, functional medicine, health coaching, functional medicine, you know, being becoming a practitioner and helping so many others who may be struggling with what we had struggle all those years ago. And gratitude helped me tremendously in that respect. So I actually want to share a poem, uh, called from the book Gratitude Works by Dr Robert Emmons. He's  done extensive research on this subject, and his books is one of those books that I, you know, read to understand a bit more about gratitude. What you know, what really gratitude is. A while it has become a part of my life. I wanted to delve deeper.

This poem actually was not written by him, but one of his readers, Clara morabito, who lived to be 92 years old. And it's a beautiful poem, uh, she had written, and it reflects her mindset, her attitude. And I wanted to share it with you,

She says.
I choose to be happy.
I choose to be grateful.
I chose to be caring.
And always be thoughtful.

I choose to be well.
I choose to be me.
I choose to be healthy all of the time.
I choose to be patient.
I choose to be strong.
I choose to be calm all day long

As she reveals, gratitude is one of life's most vital ingredients, and there is a great deal of research that actually supports her experience. Clinical trials have been done on this topic, and it indicates that the practice of gratitude can have dramatic and lasting effects in a person's life. And I want to share some of these links below. It can lower blood sugar or blood pressure. It can improve immune function, it can promote happiness and well-being, and it can spur acts of helpfulness, generosity, and cooperation. In other words, it has a tremendous benefits for all of us.

So you might find yourself waking up feeling tired, even as you know, as when you went to bed or despite getting a full night's sleep. You may be dealing with some of these things. And this relentless fatigue may make, make, make it very difficult for you to get through your workday or enjoy things that you want to do with your family.

Or maybe you're constantly worrying about things that are beyond your control, feeling as if there's always this other shoe that's going to drop at some point, and you're always waiting for something bad to happen. And this anxiety might creep in when you think that you're going to relax or some good times are coming up.

Or perhaps you might find yourself tossing and turning at night, and it will to quiet your mind and drift into. Quality sleep, this lack of quality rest and, you know, leave you feeling irritable and mentally sluggish during the day. Or you may notice your mood shifting rapidly so you're feeling fine from one moment to snapping at your loved ones the next. These mood swings can leave you feeling not only guilty, but also isolated from those you care about.

So if you're feeling anyone or you know most of them are all of them there. These are more than mere inconveniences or irritation. They deeply affect the quality of your life. And I'm sure you that, and I don't need to tell this to you. You already know that they are real, and they're not the only one who's experiencing these, because these are signs of your body asking you to pause and to care. I talk a lot about your body's wisdom being guided by your body's wisdom.

My whole coaching program is based on a framework called Body Wise Healing Method, and I'm going to share a link below. But what happens is that by tuning into gratitude, you are not just, you know, sort of glossing over these kind of challenges. You are offering yourself a tool that can help to, you know, make use of the power of gratitude and deal with this kind of situation. So the symptoms that you might be experiencing or the challenges that you might face, whether it's fatigue, anxiety, difficulty sleeping, mood swings, they are often rooted in chronic stress and lifestyle imbalances. Actually, this is the, you know, a disease of the 21st century.

Chronic conditions are the diseases of the 21st century. In the last few centuries would have been infectious diseases, which caused the maximum number of deaths. But today it is these chronic conditions and these kind of stress triggers prolonged fight or flight response, and they can lead to fatigue and emotional exhaustion. And also if you don't have adequate work life balance. And I don't mean 50/50, I mean that you find that you have some control over your work, some freedom in terms of your scheduling, etc., which many, you know, many of us don't. Unresolved emotional issues, simply because we don't take the time to deal with them, to understand what our emotions are trying to tell us. We would rather see them under the carpet.

We may also be dealing with nutrient deficiencies, because our bodies are not either getting in the nutrients through foods that we are consuming, or it may be that because of poor digestive health, uh, we are not, uh, you know, absorbing these foods, even though we may be having very healthy foods or, uh, sleep disorders, hormonal imbalances and constant mental overload, they can all aggravate these issues. So these difficulties indicate that you need a very holistic approach to stress management so that you can incorporate lifestyle changes where a health coach can come of immense use just like any other coach, like in sports, you need a coach to tell you where to, how to improve, how to stay accountable, consistent with your practice. The same way a health coach can help you do the same in this area of your life, and also to help you with nutritional adjustments, lifestyle adjustments, and stress reduction techniques. And in particular, by embracing practices like gratitude, you can provide yourself a very, very valuable tool to reframe these kind of experiences and enhance resilience.

However, you may have already tried various things. You may have tried several solutions, but you often find that they don't always provide lasting relief. So perhaps you rely on caffeine or energy drinks to combat fatigue, but, um, they may feel you leave you feeling more jittery. Right. You may also have taken some help with sleep. Um, but that may also interfere with natural sleep cycles. Right. And they don't make you feel very restful when you wake up, uh, ignoring the problem and pushing the sim through the symptom.

These are all symptoms. Mind you. These are not the root causes. Uh, they can be a temporary fix, but they actually, uh, you know, worsen the stress levels. So may whether it's binging on Netflix or crash dieting or these bursts of intense exercise, they may help us feel better for a while, but they are not really helpful or not the solution in the long run. So these are more like superficial self-care activities. So what you need to do is dig deeper and understand what your body really needs from you at this point, and gratitude can really help you in dealing with these kind of stressors. So here's what you need to do.

Focus. As I mentioned, focus on a holistic approach, which is a 360 degree approach. Understand, which understands you as a person and your environment so that you can address both the symptoms and the root causes, whether it's stress reduction techniques like mindfulness meditation. So you can use apps like Calm and Insight Time or Insight time happens to be my favorite meditation and yoga classes, whether offline or online. Deep breathing exercises, Tai chi, qigong. There is so many options that are available for you to calm your mind and your body, but it's up to you to be able to do this, whether it's also prioritizing or balancing daily routines. So starting with your morning, ending with your night, if you can figure out how to incorporate whether it's physical activity like a 30 minute brisk walk, even 15 minutes a day, right? Or just after maybe dinner or in the morning first thing, or a dance class.

And of course, either you have to add, you know, adequate sleep to this mix, right? Sleep plays a big role in this in managing your stress response. And you need a calming bedtime routine for that.

Of course, food is very important. Nourishing your body with a well-balanced diet rich in essential nutrients, or having your leafy greens, having a lot of vegetables. Having healthy fats, not seeds, uh, healthy proteins, uh, depending on whether you're vegetarian or non vegetarian, mean, uh, ensuring that you stay hydrated, uh, with water and also having enough minerals, maybe having a bit of, uh, water mixed with some rock salt in the morning with a squeeze of lime. You know, these are very, very basic things, but I find that most of us tend to miss out on doing these on a regular basis, because consistency is the key. It's not about doing one or, you know, one or a few of these things once in a while or sporadic. You need to be able to do them on a regular basis.

And uh, also, the other thing that gets missed out on is spending time in nature. And I know this is hard for many of us living in cities, but if you can take out time by visiting a local park, if you have a garden in your, uh, you know where you stay. If you can pursue hobbies like painting or gardening, any hobbies for that matter doesn't doesn't really matter. And socializing, you know, um, connecting with supportive friends and family that all these will help you deal with any kind of stressors and, uh, you know, in your life. And on top of this, if you can integrate gratitude practices in your daily routine, uh, whether it's a gratitude journal with your expressing, you know, what you are thankful for and, uh, you know, that can really add to your level of happiness.

So all of this can help you shift your perspective and build resilience against stress. If, of course, if you need to, you can always see guidance from healthcare providers or holistic functional medicine practitioners, or even health coaches who can help you to make these changes. These kind of changes that you need to make in in your life, whether it's diet, mindset, stress, all of it.

So all these areas, when you're able to address them, uh, you know, as, as a whole is when you transform stress into strength and you, uh, and you are obviously, I'm talking about, uh, harnessing the power of gratitude. And in an earlier episode, actually, I shared with you five simple rituals that you can use to deepen gratitude. And I'll share the link below. Uh, so transforming your strength and stress into strength to gratitude is crucial for achieving not just physical wellness, but also mental clarity and emotional well-being because if stress can come up in various ways, whether it's in, uh, impacting energy levels, impacting your mood, your overall health, the immune function, all of it, and if you don't really address it or manage it, it can lead to chronic health issues, fatigue, emotional turmoil.

So gratitude can help you to combat all of this, and it helps you appreciate the present no matter what you are going through. It helps you to appreciate and acknowledge what already is, and it reduces anxiety about the future as a result of that. And it also helps to lower the regrets about the past. Gratitude is a beautiful and very, very powerful tool. It encourages the positive outlook and it helps to enhance overall health by boosting your immune system and mental health issues. Emotional health, like all gratitude, has a has an impact on all of this.

So if you can incorporate holistic practices that I just talked about into your routine, and make sure that gratitude plays a big role in that, a central role, then you will see a wonderful transformation. So embracing this approach is not just about managing stress. It's about empowering yourself to live a grateful, uh, balanced life. So the so make sure. Or that you, you know, go to the resources that I've shared with you and find ways to, you know, change the way you look at stress, change the way your attitude about gratitude, as we call it, and incorporate it in your day to day life.

If you have any questions, you can write to me at anindita@aninditarungta.com. Thank you so much for joining me today for this episode of Embrace Your Healing Journey.
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In my next episode, The #1 Self-Compassion technique for lasting inner peace, I unpack another powerful tool that will help you to find lasting inner peace. Your body knows how to heal. Are you ready to support it?