Coronavirus has swept the world. We are grieving. Grieving over the loss of life as it was. There was a lot to like about life as it was. Life as it is isn’t so bad either. Gratitude can show us why.
You don’t know what you’ve got ’till it’s gone
Many songs, poems and people.
Life has been interrupted. You can’t go into the office. Friends are not coming over on the weekend. Professional footballers sit at home idly on weekends, just as you would to watch them.
I pose to you this question: Were you really there for all those activities?
Gratitude
Gratitude is an interesting emotion. We have an intuition for what it means, but when you begin to define it you begin to question whether it is really an “emotion”. It seems more a pattern of thinking. However, you can think of it a bit like anxiety. Anxiety is an emotion often caused by particular thought patterns.
In positive psychology research, gratitude is strongly and consistently associated with greater happiness. Gratitude helps people feel more positive emotions, relish good experiences, improve their health, deal with adversity, and build strong relationships.
Havard Health
Gratitude is hard to feel in the bad times, because, “everything is bad”. It’s hard to feel during the good times because “everything is well, and it will stay this way”.
Gratitude Now
With this in mind, we can attempt to improve how we feel in this moment by conjuring some gratitude.
Thank you, coronavirus, for the opportunity to write this blog post.
If you control your thoughts you control your life. We can focus on the opportunities the current circumstances have provided rather than the adversity we face.
I’m grateful I’m saving time and money on my commute. Perhaps you finally have no excuse to postpone reading that book you’ve always wanted to read but “never had time“.
You may still be thinking “how can I possibly be grateful for something that has killed so many people”. I’m not advocating you should like the virus or that you should actively spread it because of all the opportunities it is creating. I’m saying the circumstances are out of your control and you can think about it in more nuanced ways.
You may find comparisons a more natural way to do this.
What would life be like if this virus were twice as lethal? We can be grateful for the fact it’s not worse. We would trade quite a bit to be put in our current situation if it was worse.
You can always think of a situation that’s worse than your current one. Use that to your advantage.
Gratitude Later
We’ve seen we can feel grateful for our current situation, however hard that may be. But what will be truly remarkable is the peak of world gratitude levels after this is all over.
You might have dreaded your morning commute to work every day. But when you’re able to return to work you might reconsider this dread. You will look upon the opportunity to work at all with grateful eyes.
It would be naively hopeful of me to think the coronavirus inspired gratitude will continue indefinitely. However, the deadly virus needn’t continue to inspire. We can use a psychological hack from Stoicism to catalyse the flowering of warm and fuzzy feelings of gratitude in our day.
Negative Visualisation
Close your eyes (not actually, or you can’t read the next part). Bring to mind the last time you had a drink of water. Now imagine this was your last drink of water ever. Had you known this would be your last drink, would you have savoured the moment a little more?
The Stoics called this “Premeditatio Malorum” which translates to “premeditation of evils”. It’s pretty self-explanatory. Imagine terrible (but within the realm of possibility) events with all your senses, as vividly as possible, and notice how it makes you feel. Now recognise how good your current situation is in comparison.
In a way, this is the same technique as the comparison method described earlier. The only difference being, in this case you are making comparisons of your current comfortable situation to a dreadful one, rather than a terrible circumstance to a worse circumstance.
(Side note: This is utilising the same neuron pathways social media does, just in the opposite direction. Social media creates an environment to make comparisons between your life and the best part of other people’s lives)
You can use this idea in the present moment. This could be the very last blog post you read.
Thanks for reading.
