Daily Gratitude

Daily Gratitude: This is another concept that depends on learning to calm your nervous system. This complex system has one goal. That’s to keep you alive, protecting you from anything it perceives as danger. The key word here is “perceives”. It takes all the experiences you’ve had and stores every detail about them (especially your reactions) in its massive database. Everything goes in there. Why? So that when you come upon something, it can quickly scan that database and evaluate the current situation compared to all it finds in its previous records. You can see how someone who has been exposed to less than ideal circumstances throughout their life and especially in childhood may, in your eyes, appear to “overreact”. That is not a fair judgment, however, since you have no idea of what they experienced and how it was interpreted. “Danger” is an individual thing. What we don’t always take into consideration, though, is that it’s not the person in front of you making that determination. It’s the composite of past events, and the more influential events were those occuring in childhood. Basically, then, it’s a way younger version of the “adult” in front of you that’s deciding. What is in no way a “danger” to you and maybe most of your friends, might become a frightening big deal to that person. I say all this to, once more, emphasize how important learning to calm your nervous system is. If you’re not there yet, though, you can always ask others for help finding the way out. Once again, you can practice this with small things in your life, building your problem solving muscles on the little things. Ask yourself the “how can I solve this?” Don’t even entertain an idea that it’s not possible to work through it. Everything we do requires practice. People don’t win Olympic Gold Medals just by deciding or dreaming of winning one. They may not even be any good in the beginning. They learn how to do whatever it is they want to do. Then it’s just practice, practice, practice. That’s when it becomes “second nature.” if you think about what i talked about in the beginning of this post, that’s how your nervous system learns to react with fear. It’s usually a repetitive trauma that leads to those behaviors. Sure it can be one significant one such as a motor vehicle accident, an abuse, or a major unexpected loss. But, more often than not, it’s something that’s happened many times over. Just know that there is a way out….then, it’s easier to work to find that way.


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