30. Unlearning Toxic Positivity & Reinventing Our Lives With the Power of True Gratitude

We all have a sense of timeless urgency. Are we running out of time? Should we be somewhere else at this stage of our lives? What’s left to do? What’s next to accomplish? An urgency that we humanly attempt to fill with more material things, and more material dreams of material things. The importance of integrating gratitude into our daily routines is something that’s been talked about time & time again. Having a gratitude journal, finding more to be grateful for, we hear it all the time - But this isn’t about ticking off an item on your daily to-do list, it's about feeling and embodying gratitude. Gratitude — true, sincere gratitude, expands your focus and retrains your neural networks to expand the scope of goodness in your life. It has profound impacts on our physical and psychological well-being. We often get tangled in the web of wants, the web of material possession & achievement, forgetting that life is transitory, fleeting, and our tendency to clutter our lives with material possessions and achievements keeps us from the feelings of true wholeness and abundance. It seems in every book or guide or how-to that complicates the simplicity of life - there is an underlying basis of shifting our mindset to the survival-state of lack and suffering, to that of abundance and light. But the shift will not happen by following steps or writing lists, attempting to emulate a wheel that has been created and recreated, time and time again. The shift happens in deep presence, where you realize - all that you have now, is all that you need, and somewhere in time – was all that you wanted. On this episode, we venture into a conceptual analysis of gratitude, and why it’s so hard to integrate fully into our lives, delving into the realms of our mindset, and evaluating our perceptions of abundance and scarcity. Uncovering how gratitude, from a psychological perspective, can forge stronger connections with others, with ourselves, reshape our narratives, and break us out of limiting beliefs. xx Episode Chapters: (00:00) - The Power of Gratitude (11:50) - Finding Gratitude and Presence in Life (18:32) - Challenges of Gratitude and Integration, Holding Paradoxical Truths (36:37) - Gratitude and the Power of Storytelling & Awareness, Building Positive Recall Bias (53:42) - Gratitude's Power in Genuine Connection With Other People (01:01:32) - Self-Realization & Limiting Beliefs PLS RATE THE SHOW ON YOUR PREFERRED STREAMING PLATFORM, & LET ME KNOW YOUR THOUGHTS ON THIS EPISODE TikTok: butterflyfountain Youtube: Vanessa Fontana FOR 10% OFF YOUR FIRST GUIDED JOURNAL, USE MY CODE: FSO10 HERE! (https://www.insidethenout.com/FSO) xx Referenced in this Podcast: On Gratitude | The Good Life Project | Anne Lamott, Janice Kaplan, & Jonathan Fields Huberman Lab | The Science of Gratitude & How to Build a Gratitude Practice The Neuroscience of Gratitude - Positive Psychology - Web Our Sponsors: * Check out Happy Mammoth and use my code VANESSAFONTANA for a great deal: happymammoth.com * Check out Happy Mammoth and use my code VANESSAFONTANA for a great deal: happymammoth.com * Check out Rosetta Stone and use my code TODAY for a great deal: www.rosettastone.com Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/figuring-sh-t-out/donations Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy