The Gratitude Hack to Overcome Anxiety

I have an experiment for you. It’s super easy but the best solutions usually are. 

Next time you feel yourself getting anxiety about anything or nothing at all, just start quickly naming as many things as you can think of, that you’re grateful for. 

Just do it any way you can. Whether it’s saying it aloud to yourself if you’re alone in your house or in your car. You can say it silently if you’re around others. You can even write it down if you feel you need an extra bit of grounding into this flow. 

Now I know this sounds overly simplistic, but I challenge you to experiment with it yourself. Try it for 30 days and see what happens. Because when you do this, you’re actually replacing or transmuting the energy, which is actually your own life energy that you were allowing to be used against yourself. But now through this practice of using gratitude in place of anxiety, you will actually be transmuting that energy from a lower to a much much higher frequency. A frequency of divine love, because gratitude is love. And once you anchor yourself in this feeling, you will no longer be aware of, hence no longer experience anxiety in the moments that you are experiencing gratitude. 

The first thing this will accomplish is a sense of grounding yourself into your present moment. You will feel the relief wash over you as you open yourself up to this higher frequency. As you consciously remind the outer personality of all the amazing things that it has been gifted by life itself, such as life, the body in which you experience this reality, every single good thing in your life. You will literally be tuning into the channel, like a radio, you will be tuning into the channel that brought you all good and will bring you more good. And at that same time, you have also tuned your frequency away from the channel that gives you anxiety. It is not so important to think of the why or what behind anxiety. Because that tends to only feed it more of your life energy. Which is the opposite of getting away from it, it’s actually moving closer to it, inviting it in. In order to know another state of emotional and mental health and well being, we must tune ourselves to that frequency or channel that those things exist on. And the easiest way to find our way there is to start with gratitude. 

Another important key element is the use of the power words, “I AM”, because whenever those words are spoken, it gives life to whatever follows them. So take care in your use of the most powerful words known to man. But once you understand their power of creation, you can begin to use to help yourself and stop using it to hurt yourself. In this case, we are using it to access the higher frequency of gratitude, on which the return current will always bring you more things to be grateful for. The easiest formula is to simply state; 

“I AM SO GRATEFUL for ……”

Fill in the blank with anything you can actually feel grateful for. It could be your health, your pet, your partner, your money, your intelligence, your talents, anything in your life that makes you happy. Just start naming it. Out loud if possible, silently works too. Make it a bit of a game even, by seeing how many things you can see around you that you are grateful for. If you’re really having a hard time with anxiety that day, try to write down the things you’re grateful for. If you already have a gratitude journal, perfect, use it! Use it every time you feel anxiety or depression trying to take over, stop it in its tracks by using gratitude to take it’s place. Literally substitute gratitude for anxiety. It takes your conscious effort to do this, but you’re the only one who can ever fix this for yourself. We can benefit from outside help to get us through tough times, but there always comes a time when we realize, it’s up to us to stand up, face a thing and overcome it. This is one super easy way that I have found works and I continue to practice it. Because I too have a very long momentum on letting anxiety take over, but not any more. 

Try it and see what happens to your thoughts and your emotions. This is a bit of a hack, to get yourself from a state of anxiety, which is a constriction of energy, that is why it feels like the walls around you are closing in. It moves from this state of constricted energy that is literally strangling you, to a flow state. Now if you aren’t familiar with flow state, I suggest you google it or watch a couple Youtube videos on it because the flow state, is where you want to be. Because when you’re in the flow state, you are not anxious or worried or depressed. But instead you feel this energy, this pure life force moving in and through you and all about you. This is not just a trick, flow state has been shown to correlate to increased frontal theta and alpha rhythms in the brain. Its actually the ideal state to be in when you’re working on a project or trying to learn or create something new. Which means you move from a state of being incapable to deal with whatever real or imagined threat is before you, to an empowered state, where you are more than capable to deal with anything. The act of giving gratitude to God or the Universe, or nature or others, is your open door to this highway of energy, known as the flow state. 

What do you do if you’ve listed a few things you’re grateful for, but you still feel anxious? 

Keep going, list more. Increase the feeling behind it. Think of what you’re grateful for and how it makes you feel, and than amplify the feeling of gratitude. You can even just tune into a single thing that you can really feel love towards. For me sometimes, that’s my little dog. No matter what else is going on, I know that if I think of how much I love him and how grateful I am that he’s in my life, I can instantly connect with the feeling of gratitude. You can stay there with that one thing that really triggers that for you. But more often than not, not too long after you’ll just naturally begin to think of more things you’re grateful for. 

This is just one of the easiest ways I have found to really move out of a state of anxiety and into a calmer state where I feel relaxed and more capable of facing the day ahead. I hope that you will try it and see if it works for you. 

*Photo by Elsa Tonkinwise on Unsplash