HOW TO QUICKLY IMPROVE YOUR MOOD: Gratitude

Write a list of things you’re grateful for! And really savour the feeling. Receiving and expressing gratitude releases dopamine and serotonin, the “feel good” neurotransmitters.

It works amazingly if you’ve fallen out with someone you care about and want to change how you feel about them. Listing their positive traits of character, quickly shifts feelings from resentment to appreciation. It also makes you feel great in the process!!

Also if you are not in a relationship and would really like to be coupled up, listing things you are grateful for outside of your relationship status, takes you out of the tunnel vision and allows you to appreciate your life as it is now.

I find that, with some of my single clients, all they want is a relationship, but as soon as they get into one and it’s stable, they start wanting something else. To put it briefly, if one can’t appreciate the things they’ve got now, then they won’t be able to appreciate the relationship when it comes along either, not for very long anyway. It’s not the things/events/people themselves that make us happy – it’s the interpretation we give them. If we concentrate on the things we don’t have – we’ll be forever unhappy, because there’ll always be an infinite number of things/people/opportunities we could have had, but didn’t.

If instead we concentrate our attention on the things we’ve already got, goals we’ve achieved, people we’re close with – we suddenly realise how rich our lives already are!

Gratitude works like magic every time I need a little pick-me-up, and is also quite addictive in a nice way, because it makes me remember how hard I’ve worked for all these things I now (sometimes) take for granted.