And if I asked you to name all the things you love, how long would it take for you to name yourself?

I found this quote on my Facebook page one day and it really made me sit up in my seat, stop for a moment and seriously ponder this question.

Over the last few years I have started to practice self-compassion either during specific meditations facilitated in professional development trainings or by facilitating my own self-compassion workshops. Sometimes I even manage to be kind and compassionate to myself during difficult times in my life.

However, this quote made me realize that my basic attitude towards myself is still one of ‘taking myself for granted’, even if I am not as critical of myself as I used to be. I realized I am still trapped in my negativity bias – this automatic mindset of looking for the negative first and disregarding the positive. And I am still using this mindset with the outside world as much as when looking at myself.

This also highlighted again to me that in our society our usual way of looking at ourselves and specifically our body is through the lens of ‘how does my body look’ and not ‘what is my body doing for me’. I personally have found that if I change the lens I am looking through by changing the questions I ask myself, I have a very different appreciation for my body. Asking myself what my body has done for me and keeps doing for me every day to make me function the way I do immediately changes my attitude from judgment to gratitude.

One definition of gratitude is that it is ‘an emotion that expresses appreciation for what one has’. Studies have shown that practicing gratitude can have positive effects on well-being and happiness. Sheldon and Lyubomirsky (2006) for example proved that practicing gratitude decreased negative affect and had some benefits in increasing positive affect. The researchers also discovered that in the long term practicing gratitude was not necessarily improving mood, but was helping as a buffer to prevent negative moods and therefore appears to be a good tool to improve resilience. Practicing positive psychology interventions such as gratitude have also shown to be effective in alleviating depressive symptoms for some individuals (Layous et al., 2011).

Coming back to the quote at the start of this blog, I realized that in order to practice self-compassion and self-love maybe we need to practice gratitude as well. And in order to do that we need to be mindful of the way we look at ourselves and others. We need to be aware of the lens we are looking through when we look at ourselves. We have to pause and ask if this is the conversation we want to have with ourselves.

My own challenge this month – and I invite you to join me – is to be mindful of the conversations that are going on in my head and to shift them to a conversation where I can practice gratitude with myself.

References;

Layous, K., Chancellor, J., Lyubomirsky, S., Wang, L. and Doraiswamy, M. (2011).         Delivering Happiness: Translating Positive Psychology Intervention Research for Treating Major and Minor Depressive Disorders. The Journal      of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, Volume 18(8), pp. 1-9.

Psychology today https://www.psychologytoday.com/basics/gratitude,          12/10/2015

Sheldon, K. M. and Lyubomirsky, S. (2006). How to Increase and Sustain Positive      Emotion: The Effects of Expressing Gratitude and Visualizing Best     Possible Selves. The Journal of Positive Psychology, 1(2), 73-82.