The Science of Gratitude

Practicing Gratitude & Starting a Gratitude Jar

Woman picking out notes from gratitude jar

This post is as much for me as it is for the mother or person who reads it. This is an area I still struggle with, especially when I’m exhausted, overwhelmed or overstimulated.

It was my son’s birthday this past weekend. His name is Caleb-Nazir, which means Faithful-Set Apart One. Nazir is short for Nazirite in the Bible. He turned two. My husband sang ‘Happy Birthing Day’ to me. I built a cake ( I’ll explain why I used the word ‘built’), we sang ‘Happy Birthday’ to him, took pictures and videos and made memories.

I spent the days before thinking about the past year. When he was 11 months old we moved to Sao Paulo, Brazil. The transition wasn’t the easiest for him but he adjusted. I was heavily pregnant with my daughter and feeling inspired being in a new city and country so I vlogged quite a bit. I had no idea what I was going into as a mum of two under two at the time, so little did I know that vlogging would come to a halt as soon as the little one came into the world. Overwhelm, lack of support and exhaustion wouldn’t let me continue.

With the few vlogs I managed to produce I watched us, a family of three, fresh on new soil, with hopes and dreams, not knowing what this new journey would bring. I took note of our physical changes - my husband has cut his locks now and I am no longer pregnant. The one with the most transformation was my son. He had just started tottering around. He still had to walk with his arms in the air for balance and his steps were a bit unsteady. Still cushioned in his baby fat with chubby kissable cheeks and an afro. Now he’s a boisterous skinny toddler who is always on the move, speaking two languages(as best as he can) with his hair laid back in cornrows. I watched these videos and all I felt was one thing.

Gratitude.

The baby in that belly is almost a one year old. For the past year I’ve been so buried under motherhood I don’t believe I have spent enough time in counting my blessings. In gratitude. Much to my regret, I may have spent more time dwelling in my exhaustion and overwhelm, complaining and sometimes grumbling than in gratitude to God. I read about the story of the exodus of the Israelites in the Bible and I scoff at how ungrateful they are. *side eye* I’m not so far off myself.

In all things give thanks: for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus concerning you.

I have learned many times over that when God asks or instructs us to do something it is more for our benefit than His. Gratitude is one of them. Gratitude has been termed a ‘natural anti-depressant’. It changes the neural structure of our brains, creating new positive neural pathways that are cemented the more we practice gratitude. Being grateful, intentionally seeking out things to be grateful for is powerful.

It doesn’t brag of an absence of hardship or hard times, neither is it being in denial. It is simply an act of choosing what your mind’s focus is regardless of the hard times and watching God use gratitude to lift us out of murky waters.

A few ways gratitude benefits us:

1. Gratitude releases toxic emotions

2. Gratitude reduces pain

3. Gratitude improves sleep quality

4. Gratitude aids in stress regulation

5. Gratitude reduces anxiety and depression

There are many ways to practice being grateful. My favourite is having a gratitude jar. I have had gratitude jars in the past and fallen off the wagon many times but I always pick it up again when it comes to mind.

A Gratitude jar is simply a jar that you fill with little notes of things you’re grateful for. You can write these notes daily or weekly, taking stock of the things you’re grateful for in the day or week. At the end of the week or month you take out all the notes from the jar and read through all of them. This is a MAJOR mood boosting activity.

Enter into His gates with thanksgiving, And into His courts with praise: Be thankful unto Him, and bless His name.

A Gratitude jar will set you up for this. I am grateful for so much. If I listed all the things the list would be unending. I have learned to ‘read between the lines’ of the things I wouldn’t typically be grateful for because even in those things there is something to be grateful for. An example is being grateful for how despite the exhaustion of motherhood and lack of ample support/resources, much creativity has been birthed from my already creative self. I thought I had reached the limits of my creativity but these two things have made me realize I’m just scratching the surface.

I took on a creative challenge of ‘building’ my son’s cake. This is something I would’ve never done before. Although, if I feared it would be an eye sore I would’ve have outsourced it nonetheless. But the creative in me decided to take on the challenge. I bought two cakes, made a chocolate ganache for the filling and placed one on top of the other. I bought some cream, whipped it up(to be fair my husband

Matthew Watchman

did most of the whipping) til it was solid and added a few drop of food colouring. Slathered the cake with it and added characters from my son’s favorite show, The MotherGoose Club. I printed out the characters from the internet, cut them out, glued them to cardboard, attached tiny cardboard legs and inserted them into the cake.

It certainly wasn’t an eyesore and most importantly my son loved it.

My son’s two year birthday cake

I shared that example because it isn’t an obvious thing to be grateful for. We are rarely grateful for hardship or things that don’t bring us joy on the surface but if you read between the lines, you’ll find something to be grateful for. What are you grateful for?

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