Energetic gratitude

[00:00:00] You are listening to the Daily Five, an experimental podcast by Aurooba, where I talk about something for five minutes. So let's get to it, shall we? How do you make yourself feel better when you're not feeling good? I think that is a valuable question to have an answer for. So here is my answer. One: get sleep.

[00:00:30] Sometimes you don't feel good, you don't think well, you don't operate well, and you have reactions that are more intense than they would be normally because you haven't slept enough or you haven't slept well enough. The second thing is to make sure you are not hungry, because hangriness is a very real thing, and if you have slept well, and you're not [00:01:00] hungry, but you still don't feel very good or not as good as you want to,

[00:01:06] then – for me, I practice active gratitude. Now, what do I mean by that? When you talk to certain people about, you know, not certain people, really, everyone about what gratitude means, the answer that often comes up is, gratitude is a feeling of peace and appreciation for the good things in your life. And that is not wrong.

[00:01:35] That is definitely a definition of gratitude and it's why people, you know, talk about keeping gratitude journals and there's studies on how, you know, practicing daily gratitude is good for you and it helps you, et cetera. But that is not the gratitude, I mean, or at least that is not the form that has ever been particularly effective for me.

[00:01:58] I don't know how to will [00:02:00] myself to feel gratitude of that form. What I do know is how to will myself into active, energetic feelings of gratitude. What I mean by that is I will think about a memory or a few moments, or a person that makes me feel good or makes me feel happy, or, you know, is someone you love or as a moment you cherish in your past.

[00:02:32] And then I pick a song, I pick a song that I associate with happiness or with that person, or with the feeling that those, those memories generate in me. Because for me, and I think for a lot of people, music is very strongly associated with emotions. So if you put on a song that's related to that emotion, it's easy to get yourself feeling that way.

[00:02:58] So I put on a song [00:03:00] and then I get up and I walk, or I pace, or I dance. If I can make myself dance, sometimes it doesn't happen. And I think about those moments, those memories, or that person as intensely and as single-mindedly as I can while moving and listening to a song. And usually what'll happen is I feel a sort of energetic gratitude.

[00:03:30] It's a full bodied feeling of, hmm, happiness? That spills over and makes you wanna move even more. You know, or it makes you wanna smile or makes you wanna laugh. In the book, Eat, Pray, love, you know, there's this one quote about like smiling with your liver. It's like that: you smile with your liver. Every part of you feels good,

[00:03:53] and you can't really sustain it for a long time. It's like this really intense, natural high [00:04:00] from listening to a great song you love and remembering these moments in your life that made you feel good or thinking about someone you love and it can't last forever. But even when you come down from that high, from that feeling, you just feel better, and at least for me, you get a better outlook on life.

[00:04:23] You know, you're able to view whatever's going on in your life with a slightly more improved perspective or a more fresh perspective. And things just feel a little bit more manageable, a little bit more figure-outable, as Marie Forleo would say. And that is kind of what I've been thinking about today.

[00:04:43] Gratitude of the energetic kind. Thanks for listening. Talk to you tomorrow.