Andrew Melder

If you have pursued personal reflection activities or journaling, you may have come across some version of gratitude exercises. The idea being to focus and think of things to be grateful for in your life daily to help you appreciate what you have now. This can help in getting my mindset into a more positive space.

I’m prone to moving into a negative headspace really easily. Depression is something I have dealt with most of my adult life. Thankfully, I had access to counselling services very early on and started developing the tools to change my mindset and stop self sabotaging my own emotions with negative reinforcement.

One of those tools has been gratitude. Particularly in recent times, I’m always very conscious of how blessed I am in my life with a loving family, relative financial stability and minimal trauma in my life until now (I resisted even typing that last bit because I know it comes for all of us eventually).

But, I’ve noticed there are times when my gratitude mentality can also turn into a negative reinforcement.

If you are genuinely grateful yet still feeling down or even depressed; it’s very easy to get into a spiral of feeling down about feeling down. When you know your life is actually very blessed, so you should have no reason to feel down about any of it. When things in your life are beyond anything you could have imagined at your lowest point, so why do you now crave something beyond your happiness now?

For myself right now, it’s career. I’ve written about this previously if you are interested, but in short I find myself in a situation and career which is beyond what I ever imagined for myself and provides for my family and lifestyle; and yet I’m lacking any real fulfilment from it.

I read an article recently which referred to the “disease of more”. I won’t repeat some of the themes within it but encourage you to read it as well. In short, my takeaway was that our desire to achieve or seek fulfilment is a cycle that keeps us always wanting more instead of being truly happy with our scenarios now.

Or more more simply; how the act of seeking self improvement may actually make us feel worse.

It’s an interesting way to look at things. And while I’m not about to throw out looking at ways to make my work feel more valuable to me; I am going to add the lessons from the disease of more to my mental health toolbox.

To take some of the bitterness away from the gratitude.