Two Steps to Improving Your Emotional Health This Thanksgiving

Step # 1: Go looking for the good

Not long ago, I wrote about a crucial neuroscientific principle: What you focus on is what you will see. This truth has a profound impact on our mental and emotional health, our relationships, and pretty much everything else in life.

Here’s why it matters for thankfulness: In a broken world, we have to train ourselves to see and focus on the good stuff. Because it is easy to see the bad stuff. That comes at us every day. If we wanted to go through a depressing exercise, we could easily list the negative things that occur in our lives and world around us.

Yet the good stuff is there, too: We just have to be purposeful about lifting our eyes and looking for it. Every one of us have dozens – hundreds! – of things we can be thankful for, big and small: The encouragement from a friend, the roof overhead, the care of a pastor, our ability to earn income, the freedom to attend church without persecution. When we go looking for those good things, we will see them much more often and much more easily. And as we focus on the good, it actually blocks the negative, depressing emotions – envy, resentment, etc. – that could have so easily filled us if we weren’t careful.

As one leading gratitude researcher, Dr. Robert Emmons, put it: “This makes sense: You cannot feel envious and grateful at the same time.”

So going looking for the good gives us our starting point. But to create a long-lasting feeling of thankfulness, we need an essential Step #2.