Let me start with an admission.
Since New Year’s, I have been dealing with a lot of anxiety.
I have found it puzzling and incredibly frustrating because, on the surface,
life has been good. Work has been busy, but it is work I enjoy. My days have
purpose. There was no obvious reason why I was waking up with that familiar
feeling of anxiety. And that was the part that bothered me the most.
Let me digress for a minute.
Over the years, as I suspect many of you have, I have heard
that gratitude is a tool that can help when dealing with anxiety or depression.
I always struggled with that idea. I would try to think of all the things I
should be grateful for. And there were some. I am not convinced that my mind was
always ready to go there.
And as soon as I stopped thinking about that list, the
anxiety would return. Sometimes with a vengeance. The things I was worried
about seemed to have more power than the things I was grateful for.
A lot of gratitude advice can feel like someone is handing
you a band-aid when you are dealing with a wound. When anxiety is connected to
real pain, being told to “just be grateful” can feel dismissive.
So back to my own anxiety. As difficult as the winter was, I
kept telling myself things would get better. Spring was coming. The warmer
weather would help. I was looking forward to golf season. I knew getting
outside, being active, and doing something I loved would make a difference.
But it didn’t happen the way I expected. Every morning I
would wake up with anxiety. I often did not feel like getting out of bed, even
though I knew staying there would not help. I forced myself to get on my golf
cart and head out, because I knew that once I stepped onto the first tee box,
things would improve.
And, as I usually do, I analyzed what was happening. That is
what I do. I try to figure things out. I look for the cause. I search for the
solution. But this time, I came up empty.
There was no obvious reason. I couldn’t rationalize it. I
couldn’t make sense of it. And the more I tried to solve it, the more
frustrated I became. It even started affecting golf. Something I had always
enjoyed was becoming another source of frustration. At one point, I wondered if
I should just give it up.
Then earlier this week, as I pulled out of the yard,
something changed. I started noticing what was around me. The lush green grass.
The trees full of leaves. The beauty of the morning.
And then I started thinking about my life. I thought about
the good things. The people in my life. The opportunities I have. The work I
get to do. The simple privilege of being able to go play golf on a beautiful
morning. I found myself feeling grateful.
And the more I focused on it, the more gratitude I felt. Until
eventually, I felt a sense of peace.
The strange part?
Gratitude had never worked for me before. Maybe the
difference was that before, I was using gratitude as a tool to try to get rid
of a feeling. I was trying to fight anxiety with a list of positives.
This time was different. I wasn’t trying to make the anxiety
disappear. I was simply noticing reality. The anxiety did not need to be solved
before I could recognize the good things in my life.
I came to realize that my life contained more good than my
anxious mind was allowing me to see.
And that realization created a shift. I noticed it in my
golf swing. I noticed a healthier attitude toward my work. I found myself more
present in my relationships. I became more productive. Nothing around me had
changed. But the way I was seeing it had.
Maybe that is what gratitude really is. It is not about
looking at life through rose-coloured glasses. It is about taking off the
blinders that anxiety sometimes puts on us. The problems may still be there,
but so are the blessings. And sometimes we don’t need to change our life to
find gratitude. Sometimes we just need to notice the life we already have.
