Focus on the Good Things Too: Tips for Gratitude and Meditation in your Daily Life

When you walk into your bedroom, your eyes don’t see the room. Instead, your brain anticipates the room you are entering and “simulates” the room from your previous experience. You are hallucinating, not in a “I’m losing touch with reality,” sort of way. Instead, your brain is using a shortcut guess, or hypothesis, to save energy. This is why we can walk into our room and completely miss that someone has moved the books from our desk to the bed. We actually did not see the change. But, if there was a pink elephant in your room, your brain would probably register that something does not match the simulation and needs to be investigated by your eyes and your body is alerted to prepare to respond in order to stay safe.

“Christopher Chablis and Daniel Simons devised an experiment called the Invisible Gorilla. They asked participants to watch a video and count how many times the people in white shirts passed the basketball to each other. At the end of the video, they ask the question, “But, did you see the gorilla?” As the people passed the basketball to each other, a person in a gorilla suite walks into the middle of the screen and beats their chest, and then walks off screen. Only half of the participants said that they saw the gorilla. How could this happen? This is called inattentional blindness. In essence we tend to see the things that we expect to see because our attention is focused on those things.

This is true for all of life, not just our eyes. Our mind is a predictor. In an attempt to conserve energy and take on all of the myriad of tasks it has to attend to and protect the person, it anticipates what is going to happen next. When a baseball player hits a ball, the person in the outfield starts to move, anticipating where it is going to land, and directs the body to put out the glove in the path of the ball. Some of us are better at anticipating its path and trajectory and moving our body to make the catch. This not only goes for sports, but in relationships. Our history with significant others informs how we engage with people in our present. For those who have experienced a lot of pain or danger in their lives, it is easier for them to see present events as situations that need to be survived and predict danger around every corner. Others who have had largely positive relationships growing up will usually experience others as positive and on the whole see their life as something safe.


When life is painful and dangerous it can be hard to see the positives that do surround us. Practicing mindfulness and gratitude are ways to help your mind see the beauty and good around you and balance it out with the painful and disappointing things that are present as well. You aren’t “tricking” your mind to think that things are better than they are. This would be an avoidant strategy of denial that is problematic for its own reasons. Instead, you are just helping yourself see the breadth of what is going on – the good, the bad, the ugly, and the beautiful. This helps you enjoy life and experience it more fully now vs seeing your present as just an extension of your past.

One helpful way to help you focus on the good things in your life is to practice using a gratitude journal. By writing down the things that you are thankful for, you help your mind take stock and focus on those aspects of your experience that are going well and that you enjoy. Studies have shown that there is association between gratitude and a drop in depression, and a 2021 review of research also finds that keeping a gratitude journal can cause a significant drop in diastolic blood pressure. You start seeing what you are looking to see.

Meditation, especially Vipassana that focuses on calming the mind, strengthens the person’s awareness of where their mind is naturally going. When you focus on your breath, it is easy to begin to think about other things. This type of meditation can help you be aware of this wandering away in thought and strengthen your mind’s focus to return to your breath. Practicing this awareness and bringing your mind back to focus strengthens your mind’s ability to catch yourself when you are stuck in a negative cognitive loop, and your ability to move it back to focus on the larger picture, including those things that are going well.

While not everyone has time to meditate, there is a quick and easy way to “micro-dose” meditation during the day that only takes 15 seconds to a minute. It is called the A.W.E. Method and can be explained further in the book, The Power of Awe. In short, a person becomes Aware of something that they enjoy or find pleasure in, they Wait and inhale slowly, and then Exhale slowly. This short little exercise can help the body and the mind reset and change to a different state.

Moving to a different state of being is something that we are all able to do if we practice. Broadly speaking, changing states is based on the idea that we are not static beings. Our emotions and physiology are malleable, and we can influence them with awareness and focus. One example of this is the cold plunge. Popularized by the likes of the Dutchman Wim Hof, sitting in a bath of ice water for 3-5 minutes can help you train your brain and your nervous system to stay calm and focus on your breath vs the cold. When your body gets into water that is below 61 degrees, the nervous system actually switches into the fight or flight mode because it thinks it is immanent danger. The practice of breathing and relaxing your body in a controlled, safe environment like this can help a person learn the skill of changing their state from anxious to calm.

In sum, it is possible to help change your experience of life and experience the present moment through gratitude and mindfulness. It will not change your circumstances, but it will change how you go about dealing with them and can help you participate in the full breadth of your existence. And, living a fuller, engaged life seems like a more enjoyable way to live.