90. Is Gratitude Just Toxic Positivity? No - and It Will Change Your Midlife

Why Gratitude Advice Annoys Us

Has anyone ever told you, or maybe suggested to you, I should say, to write down three things that you're grateful for every night or every morning? Did you resist that idea or did you love it? I ask that because I resisted that idea for quite a while. And we need to talk about why this is a common suggestion and how you could do it in a way that works for you. I can't believe we haven't done that before on the podcast. Let's talk about it. Welcome to Mind Your Midlife, your go-to resource for confidence and success, one thought at a time. Unlike most advice out there, we believe that simply telling you to believe in yourself or change your habits isn't enough to wake up excited about life or feel truly confident in your body. Each week, you'll gain actionable strategies and, oh my goodness, powerful insights to stop feeling stuck and start loving your midlife. This is the Mind Your Midlife podcast. So when I first learned the power of gratitude, I got it. And I'm going to share it with you today. Never fear. And at the same time, I have this quirk about my personality. And my daughter and I were talking about this actually recently, and she has the same quirk. So whether it's just an innate thing we have, or I've rubbed off on her, we'll never know. I resist following my own calendar. Let me explain to you what I mean by that. I will set up for my day what I'm going to achieve during the day, how I'm going to do it, when I'm going to do this, when I'm going to do that. And whether I do it in the morning or I do it the night before, I look at the calendar at the time I'm supposed to do things and I don't want to do them anymore. And I pick something else. Or I do them in a different order. So I don't know why. I just, I, it's like my own little rebellion against whom myself. It doesn't make any sense. I tell you all of that because when I learned about gratitude, what I learned was the power of it, which as I said, we're going to talk about, and also how important it was to be very diligent and to do it regularly. So it was explained to me that I needed to have a notebook by my bed and I needed to be writing down three things I was grateful for every morning or three things I was grateful for every evening. And if I wanted to, I could use a note in my phone. It didn't have to be a notebook, and then occasionally read back through, which by the way is one of the most powerful pieces. And I think we miss that.

Glimmers As Everyday Gratitude

So how do we work with this? Because I did see the power of gratitude. And if you've heard me talk about glimmers, this is why I glommed on to the powerful concept that glimmers are a real concept. I did not make up the word or the concept, because I could mix glimmers into my life at any time. And as a reminder, if you haven't heard me talk about this before, glimmers are little moments of joy, which means basically little moments of gratitude. It's when you have just looked out your window and the sky or the trees just look gorgeous. Take a minute and feel that, experience that. Maybe that's how they're the best neighbor. It's when you put on a pair of pants that you haven't worn in a while and they fit perfectly, and you feel fantastic. Sitting in that moment and feeling that feeling is what a glimmer is, and that is gratitude because you are feeling good about something that is happening, and that extends really fast into feeling grateful. So that's my little method that I started rewiring my brain and adding this into my life. There's a lot of ways you can do it, and I'll come back to that after we talk about why we would bother. Now, if you listened to episode 89 last week, Christina and I talked about how hard we are on ourselves and how often we believe things about ourselves that aren't even true. We believe we're bad at something, or we're, you know, we can't do this or that. She is doing amazing work helping women to move through that and change those subconscious beliefs through hypnotherapy. And one of the things she said was, let's start by being more kind to ourselves. And so I'm gonna run with that and say, let's start with gratitude. We can do it anytime, we can do it any day, we can do it as often as we want. And it is powerful. And I promise I'm gonna tell you why and how.

Gratitude Myths That Block Change

So, what is it that makes us resist besides my calendar thing that maybe you have as well? You should find me on social media and tell me if you have this resist your own calendar thing. Let's talk about the myths because there are some myths about gratitude, and I just sort of want to bust them first because that's really important. So, number one myth about gratitude is that what we're doing is we're just talking about toxic positivity. Okay. I don't even know if people always know what they mean when they say toxic positivity. What I think people mean generally, and what I think toxic positivity is, is always being like, I'm thinking Tigger as a character, but he's a little kind of ah in your face. But always being like this happy bunny hopping through everyone's life, not allowing them to have a bad day, not allowing them to vent, happy, happy, happy, happy, everything is good. Not even allowing ourselves to see the hard stuff, not allowing ourselves to feel it, just glossing over, moving on. That's toxic posity. And that is toxic. And it is unhealthy because let me tell you this those those hard things, those sad feelings, the hard, tough, frustrated feelings, if we don't experience them and move through them, they stick in there. They're in there, even if we don't recognize them. Better to recognize them, move through them, work through them, and it clears it. So this is not what we're talking about. We're not talking about toxic posity. I promise you. Gratitude doesn't deny that there can be pain, there can be grief, there can be anger. We're not saying none of those things exist. We're saying, what can we see alongside the hard stuff? And my friend always says this, and I and I I really want to add it in here. So there's a quote from Mr. Rogers, what whose name I can't pull out of my head now, except for Mr. Rogers. Hopefully you'll recognize this. He said that he learned as a child, whenever a tragedy happened, I think maybe his mom taught him this, to always look for the helpers. And one of my friends says this all the time and says how much it has helped her when she's in a tough situation to look at the helpers. And so, in a in a major tragedy, there are always people trying to help. And it helps us restore our faith in humanity. And in a minor tragedy, a hard day, a minor situation that's not fun or frustrating, I bet you can find people that are helping too. And that's also kind of a form of gratitude. But you're not denying that there are hard things happening. Okay, so we've busted the toxic positivity myth. This is not what it is. Gratitude is not that. Next, if we are grateful, it will make us complacent. Meaning, if I'm grateful, let's say, let's say I'm playing on a sports team. This example's a little hard for me because I've never played on a sports team in my life. But maybe you have. So let's imagine we're playing on a sports team and we're struggling in whatever this sport is. And I'm saying to you, be grateful for the good things that are happening. And sometimes we tell ourselves, well, if I'm grateful that I have friends on the team, even though I'm playing like crap, then that's probably not going to make me work harder. And I'm just going to stay playing like crap all the time. I'm not going to try to get better. Not true. That is not true. That is a false understanding of what gratitude means. Research shows that gratitude actually fuels purpose, energy, and thus helps us achieve our goals, helps us move towards our goals. Because if you go to your sports team practice, I should call it sports ball, I'm such a sporty person. If you go to your practice and you feel happy that you have so many friends on the team and you feel proud of yourself when you do one good thing, even though you're struggling maybe in some other areas, that burst of positive emotion, that ability to appreciate the good parts, is going to make you want to come back. And it's going to make you want to make it better. And you're going to want to put more energy toward it. It's not going to make you say, oh, I'm good. Like I'll just sit here and hang with my friends. That's not how it works. So that's the second myth. Busted. It does not make you complacent. It does not mean you're not going to work towards your goals if you're happy right now. Okay. Third one. Sometimes we think that gratitude diminishes our own work. And let me explain what I mean by that. Because you may have some of these myths stuck in your subconscious brain, and you may not, right? Some of these might not make sense to you, and that's okay. Sometimes we think that if we are grateful for things surrounding what we're doing. So let's say you're doing a project at work and you've worked really hard on it, and you finish up and you do a presentation and you get lots of feedback that that was amazing, and you feel so good about it. And you're also practicing gratitude, and you're thinking, I'm so grateful for the team that helped me, and I'm so grateful to work for this company, and I'm grateful that blah, blah, blah. Sometimes we tell ourselves that we shouldn't feel like that because that's taking away from the work we did. We need to focus on the work we did, and I am all about that. Celebrate what you have done because too often we don't. And gratitude is not taking away from that. In fact, if you are practicing being grateful more often in your life and acknowledging support from other people and being grateful for the situations you're in, you are going to come across in a more empowered way to other people, which only can help in terms of your professional life. Just taking that example. Okay, three myths busted. Now we know what gratitude is not. Now let's talk about what it actually does. What are we talking about? Gratitude. It's a buzzword. Gratitude is taking a minute or taking multiple minutes on a regular basis, and thinking and feeling happy, thankful, grateful, appreciative about something that that has happened to you, or something that you have, or someone. It is active love and appreciation. There's emotion and there's appreciation. And it's the feeling, the action of feeling that that's the gratitude. And we can practice it a million ways, right? We can focus on glimmers, we can write down things we're grateful for. We can tell people things we're grateful for. It's kind of fun to go around the table. Why are we just doing that on Thanksgiving? We can write down slips of paper and put them in a jar and then read from the jar every now and then. I actually did that a couple years with my kids when they were growing up. It was more of a celebration jar with some, it was like gratitude and celebration. If you haven't tried this and you still have younger kids, oh my gosh, it was fantastic. We had a jar on the mantle and little slips of paper sitting next to it. And any of us who wanted to say something great about someone or say what they were thankful for wrote it and put the slip in the jar. And we read it towards the end of the year. I can't remember exactly when. And it was so much fun. It was so much fun. I'll have to ask them if they remember that. Okay, that's what gratitude is. How in the heck is it this powerful? Why why am I making a big deal? The Center for Neuro Wellness put out an article about what gratitude does in terms of brain chemistry and brain science that I think will help us to answer this question. Why is this a big deal? What is it actually doing? This is pretty fascinating. So gratitude hits the brain's reward center. And what is happening is it's triggering when you are feeling and thinking about gratitude, it's triggering. I'm not gonna say this right, fair warning, the ventral tegmental area, let's call it the VTA, and releasing dopamine and serotonin. You recognize

Brain Science Behind Feeling Grateful

those, I'm thinking. Dopamine, that feels good. We we we all try for it all the time. Serotonin, that's the happy hormone. I'm saying that in quotes, but really, that's an immediate mood boost, those hormones being released. Gratitude also quiets and calms the amygdala. The amygdala is like your brain's alarm system where it's going, fear, help, anxiety, worry, stress. Gratitude calms that and it fires up the prefrontal cortex. And so that enhances your emotional regulation, your focus, your rational decision making, and it helps you respond versus react. That's probably a whole nother discussion. Respond versus react is really powerful. So there's a lot going on inside your brain. And then if we come at it from a mindset perspective, that was our brain science. Now let's mix in mindset along with brain science. We have a negativity bias. You have it, I have it, all humans have it. Your brain is focused 100% on keeping you alive. And that means it's looking for threats to keep you safe from. And scanning all day, every day for threats and things to be scared of and things to be worried about is kind of the default. So if we can add in gratitude, what we're doing is we're gradually, let me let me say that again, gradually teaching our brain to look for wins and look for good things mixed in amongst looking for threats, because it's never going to stop doing that completely. So we're creating more of a growth mindset. And we're using, here's a big word for you, neuroplasticity. So it used to be, and I've talked about this before as well, it used to be that doctors and brain scientists thought that there was a certain age at which all those neural pathways, all the connections in your brain, meaning all your kind of subconscious beliefs about everything and your ability to learn anything new was set, done at a certain age. You really couldn't learn after. Now, is it easier for young kids to learn? Let's take languages for an example. Yes, that doesn't mean we can't. We can look at how many people are using language apps nowadays or trying new games like mahjong. We're learning all kinds of things. So neuroplasticity means that your brain absolutely can rewire the pathways and connections inside there, and that changes the way you think. Absolutely can change the way you think and even rewires the whole default of the way you think over time. And I'm convinced this has happened to me. If you heard me talk about complaining recently, I do not have conversations in the same way I used to. And it's wild to even think about. And it took time, but I rewired that. And you've probably also heard me talk about the reticular activating system, which is kind of the windshield of our brain, let's say. It's what do you notice? Because there's a lot of stuff that your your eyes and your other senses are taking in in terms of input from your environment. The reticular activating system is what decides what you'll notice. So you can rewire what you notice. That's the power of gratitude. And let's not leave all the nervous system. I'm just giving you a big list. So your body, and of course, my body, functions properly and functions well when your nervous system is in a parasympathetic state, as opposed to sympathetic state. Sympathetic is riled up, stressed, anxious, angry, the adrenaline's pumping. A parasympathetic state is what we call rest and digest. You're feeling calm, you're feeling good, you're able to think straight, you're able to get some tasks done. But your body needs that state a pretty good chunk of the time in order to stay healthy and be well and function properly. And wouldn't it be nice if I could just say to you, well, just calm down. Calm down. Does it work when I tell you to calm down? Laura Ramoso, who is one of my favorite comedians, does a character who always says, Calm down. She's an Italian character. Calm down. It doesn't work, right? It doesn't work. Somebody tells you to calm down, the opposite is likely to happen. So how do we how do we how do we do it? I want you to try gratitude. You can't hold on to these, these oh, I hate to use the word negative, but I think I have to here. These negative emotions like anger, worry, stress, frustration, sadness, you can't hold on to them at exactly the same time as you're focused on feeling thankful, loving, happy, appreciative. Try it. When you're having a bad day, when you can find something little to really feel grateful for, they the both do not exist at the same time. The bad day is still there, but you flipped your emotions, even just for a moment, it will matter. Because gradually we will rewire. Our brains. And the way we learn, meaning the way we rewire the neuroplasticity, is emotion and repetition. So a little bit over and over and over and over with emotion is gonna change everything. It's that simple. Simple, but not necessarily easy, right? Because we have bad days. Let me tell you what, I freaking have bad days somewhat often lately. And I'm dealing with it. And gratitude still helps. It's possible that your life feels like a mess right now. Either you have kids in college and now they're home and everything's all crazy. You have kids who are completely out of the nest and you kind of wish those days were back and you miss them. You have health changes and body changes going on. You have aging parents, you're not sure about your job, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. The economy, blah. There's a lot of stuff in this period of midlife. And we know that there's hard stuff coming, right? My parents are living, my in-laws are living. I know that they won't be living forever. I know that hard things are going to happen because that's life. Hard things do happen. And yet, focusing on worrying about that does us no good. Gratitude will help. So I hope for you, because I'm not the boss of you. I hope for you that this has resonated and that you will try it. And the two easiest ways to try it are number one, to create a habit where you're writing down, I don't care if it's one or two or three or five or ten, it doesn't matter. Writing down regularly something you're grateful for. Even if it is the weather today is nice. In my opinion, that is a great thing to be grateful for. And the weather today, as I'm recording this, is really nice. Write down your gratitude on a regular basis. And then maybe once a week, I don't know, once a month, go back and read it. Whether it's a notebook,

Simple Ways To Build The Habit

a note in your phone, or whatever, and feel the good feelings coming from that. And if you have a day where you just can't do it, then don't do it. Don't beat yourself up. Just go to the next day. Or maybe it's glimmers. Maybe it's starting to look for these little moments of joy and make them bigger in your heart and your mind. Just because your coffee tastes good doesn't mean that's a glimmer. I want you to pause, appreciate it, feel so good about it. That's a glimmer. And it will help you appreciate yourself more. It will help you appreciate your family and friends more. It will help you build emotional resilience. You're going to see your inner strength. You're going to feel that you can do great things. And it might even deepen connections with others as you're feeling grateful for them. You're looking for the good parts. So sometimes when I talk about being calm and taking rest and kind of recalibrating, one of the things I hear from people all the time is that they're not good at that or they don't do it well. So if giving yourself a moment to rest, a moment to just chill and recalibrate is something you don't do often or don't do well, we're all in this together, right? This is the truly the number one thing that I hear from women in our age group. So I made you a resource. I want you to go to CherylPFischer.com slash self care menu. And I'm sharing a self-care menu for you. There are some ideas on there that take a minute to do. There's some that take five minutes. There's some that take more time. Pick something depending on the time you have. Print it out and keep it next to your desk or next next to the sink in the kitchen, wherever you need it, so that you can go pick something and just recalibrate when you have a moment. Grab it, it's free. Cherylpfischer.com slash self care menu. And make sure you've hit the follow button because next week we're continuing with something you all know is powerful and you maybe

Free Self Care Menu Resource

wonder if you can do, and that's meditation. I'll see you then. And keep remembering, midlife is your time to take just a little bit better care of yourself on the outside and on the inside. Just a little bit more care makes a huge difference.