Religion has actually convinced people that there’s an invisible man… living in the sky… Who watches every thing you do, and he has a list of ten special things that he does not want you to do. And if you do any of these ten things, he has a special place full of fire and smoke and burning and torture and anguish where he will send you to live and suffer and burn and choke and scream and cry for ever and ever ’til the end of time.
But he loves you. And he needs money!
~ George Carlin, from “You Are All Diseased”
Every morning I wake up and push back the anxieties and frustrations and the never-ending things-to-do list. I awakened to the struggle of coping with these pressures for years until I found a positive psychology intervention that was, beyond a shadow of doubt, the most powerful tool in changing my thought process: Gratitude.Â
I began the day with flooding my mind with the gratitude I had for events, people, experiences and conditions in my life. I’ve written elsewhere about how this struggle evolved. But I never gave where I was sending my gratitude toward any thought. I just sent it out into the ether. Just doing this every morning changed my attitude about life and allowed me to look forward to the day (for the most part) with less angst and more hope. Not a bad deal. Two minutes in the morning and the day brightened up.
There was good reason for me to begin doing my morning gratitude list.Â