Spring activities have begun, end-of-school-year craziness is starting to fill your calendar, and your family’s long-sheltered immune systems are struggling to keep up against the season’s usual bugs. All of this is piling on top of the usual stressors: the house is a mess, the weekend grocery haul already ran out, there’s another note from school, the mail’s stacking up, and you have to make dinner again. You’re pretty much running on fumes.

Just for fun, let’s add one more thing to your list. You’ve probably been encouraged for the thousandth time by yet another blog or a well-intentioned friend to also “practice self-care”. The phrase is as overused these days as “unprecedented times” and “new normal”. But please try to hear me out as I join the bandwagon – because I’m about to propose a gratitude exercise.

Seems like a ridiculous suggestion when you can’t even shower without interruption, I know. I’m the first to admit that it feels impossible some (most?) days. Yet gratitude remains one of the most overlooked tools that we all have access to every day, and the benefits are enormous.

Dozens of studies tell us that feeling gratitude has a wide range of perks, including reducing stress and improving relationships. Scientists at Indiana University even found that it can change your brain, making you happier and less prone to depression. Maybe even more importantly, they discovered that it makes you more receptive to gratitude experiences down the road. In other words, it can kickstart a positive snowball effect.

So how can we realistically get more gratitude into our stressful days? Here’s a fairly easy trick to try out. The next time something makes you smile, just make note of it in your head, but start with the words, “I get to.”

Begin with the easy observations:

“I get to watch my son shine on the soccer field.”

“I get to enjoy a fun evening out.”

Once you have that nailed, do the same thing with the less obvious stuff:

“I get to have some alone time at Target”

“I get to savor this sip of coffee.”

Finally, the real challenge - apply the words to the moments that make you want to escape:

“I get to practice patience while stuck in bad traffic.”

“I get to help my daughter navigate this tantrum.”

No one can do this successfully all of the time, or even always believe the words in the moment (I’m looking at you, tantrum example). But those three little words – “I get to” – are deceptively powerful, because they lend you an important, subconscious shift in perspective. The word gratitude is derived from the Latin word gratia, which means grace.  Even the tough stuff means that you get to experience life in all its beautiful and ugly splendor. And acknowledging that simple fact is the true essence of gratitude.

Back when my husband and I were first dating, he gave me a book entitled, “The Art of Doing Nothing.” At that time, I was a full-time college student with two part-time jobs plus a 3-times-a-week rehab course as I recovered from an accident earlier that year. Curiously, my mom laughed when she saw the book. “It seems like you’re really good at that already,” she chuckled.

Despite my hectic schedule, I found myself agreeing with her. It was true. I could spend forever on the porch swing just listening to birds or reading a book. I was also pretty good at saying no to plans and having quiet evenings staying in to do, well, pretty much nothing. The 42-year-old me now understands that the ‘nothing’ time I instinctually build into my day was refueling and protective…but the 20-year-old me simply felt shame over my mom’s comment.

It was another reminder that as a newly-minted adult, I was expected to productively fill my day – not to let the day fill me. No more slacking, I told myself. Nobody gets to where they need to go by staring out a window in the middle of the afternoon. As I buckled down, I came to regard my downtime (now mostly relegated to the late evenings) with alternating consternation and relief.

Like many people, I learned to stay focused on getting through my to-do list in order to reach some imaginary daily finish line. If I was able to get to the end of a sufficiently-long list, I could then get to my ‘indulgences’ – the things that called to my introverted soul. But instead of picking up a book or watching the birds with my precious extra time, I often found myself filling the extra time with ever more demands.

Unless I was intentional, I easily defaulted to habit. Even though I knew better intellectually, I still fell prey to the imagined expectation that quantity (checking off tasks) was more important than quality (fueling my soul). Finding one more to-do item from an endless list was somehow easier to justify than quietly listening to the wind rustling through the trees.

Becoming good at handling busyness begets ever more busyness, it seems. There’s always another task, always another email popping up, always another text awaiting your reply. Parents of young kids have to manage a particularly intense 24-hour influx of demands. It’s exhausting.

Yet we often wear our busyness as a strange badge of self-worth. We bond and commiserate with others by airing and comparing our lists. We might even feel an impulse to hide, account for, or explain our unstructured minutes and hours instead of simply relishing them. Oddly, refueling and self-care become secret indulgences.

Here’s the truth of it: we’re continually gifted 1,440 minutes with each rotation of the earth to fill as we see fit. What if we chose more stillness at the expense of productivity? Would those minutes expand and become more enriched by pausing often enough to completely absorb the people, activity, and environment around us? At the end of the day, the minutes I always treasure most are the ones I slowed down enough to notice.  

It’s hard to find someone who doesn’t want to improve. Even when it’s uncomfortable, most people spend time in private thinking about the parts of themselves that could use a tune-up. Learning something new, finding a better job, working on a healthier body, abandoning a questionable habit…there’s usually some renovation calling.

Fortunately, we’re wired to view our personal futures with hope. The vast majority of us have a tendency to overestimate the likelihood of positive things happening while simultaneously underestimating the potential for negative ones. The phenomenon of “optimism bias” has an evolutionary function since it allows us to see possibilities and approach our days with both courage and imagination.

This taps Carol Dweck’s fixed versus growth mindset work. Nearly every human endeavor is influenced by how we think about our talents and abilities. When a person’s mindset is driven by a belief in the ability to grow, they are more likely to grow. The view you adopt for yourself profoundly affects the way you lead your life.

Future optimism is obviously a useful trait, but here’s the rub: favorable events don’t just happen by magic. The best outcomes are usually the result of deliberate attention and action. Parents know this intuitively; it’s a primary reason for the time, energy, and resources funneled into children’s development.

We don’t dispute the benefits of devoting effort toward helping our kids develop in the best way possible. Yet somehow we fail to apply the same concept to our own lives. Why? Just because we’re done growing physiologically and we’ve found ways to function in the adult world doesn’t mean we’re done facing new changes and challenges.

The answer might be that because, as adults, we don’t always see ourselves as “becoming.” There’s a perception that once we reach a certain threshold (stage of life, milestone, etc.) and check off certain boxes, we’ve “arrived.” We learn to take small disappointments and unmet goals in stride with quiet resignation and accept our lot in life.

On the other hand, maybe you know someone who is a shining example of striving to improve but it’s at the expense of other areas of their life. Perhaps it’s the friend who directs all of their focus toward building a career but leaves their health on the backburner. Or the mom who throws herself into raising a family with passion, but forgets important parts of herself in the process.

Whatever the case, it’s never too late to find better balance and shift things into a forward gear again. The potential for the generous cultivation of oneself is always right there; it merely takes some deliberate, self-focused TLC. Unlike a pitch for selfishness, this is a call for investment. Positive change is always possible and follows a very simple equation:    nourish = flourish.