"Managing Stress and Anxiety with Gratitude: How to Press the Stop Button on Negative Thoughts"


My mornings typically begin with meditation, spiritual reading, and a listing of what I am grateful for. This made answering the question “ What or who are you grateful for easy. Gratitude is a habit. A habit of managing stress and anxiety. Gratitude is not a cure. I wish I could be thankful enough to never feel stressed or anxious, but that is unrealistic, and it would be carnival-barking. Yet today, I was very anxious and stressed by various circumstances. I had a choice to make. I could sit in the circumstance and continue to allow it to circle my mind. All that does is turn my mind into a factory that produces anxiety. So instead, I need to press the gratitude button and list off my wife, son, two brothers, and various friends. They go into the who I am grateful for. My job, my home, my possessions, my content creation. These are those things I am grateful for. If your mind is a factory producing anxiety, press the stop button and begin to generate gratitude.

Steven Thompson