There is one tip that you hear over and over again and I know how easy it is to roll your eyes at how obvious it is. 

 Gratitude. 

Stay with me here. 

I know you've heard how effective it is, but let's just do some highlights:

• A gratitude practice has been correlated with increased happiness, in those with and without mental health conditions (Source)

• The benefits of gratitude have shown to last after the practice and can actually change in your brain (Source)

• Studies of gratitude have shown that consistent practice are connected with not only higher happiness scores but exercising more and fewer visits to the doctor (Source) - note: it's not necessarily that practicing gratitude makes you exercise more but when you're the type of person who's regularly practicing gratitude, you're also more likely to be the type of person who's making healthy decisions in other areas

• Brene Brown cites research that people who experience more gratitude have higher levels of self-regulation (our ability to do the hard thing now for long term benefit)

If you still need more convincing, just literally google “scientific research on gratitude” and then let me know if you're still skeptical. But if we're in agreement that gratitude has far reaching positive effects, why aren't most people doing it? 

I think it's because it sounds too simple to be effective or we like to stay in our struggle.

So many of us look for the hack, the trick, the solution for why we're not happy and we assume because our dissatisfaction feels so big and complex that the solution must also be big and complex. But we all understand that in terms of our physical body, the solutions are often simple - drink more water, move your body more, eat more whole foods - and yet we're skeptical of this simple solution for the mind. 

So in short, when I look at this reason I say - what do you have to lose? Adding gratitude into your routines is one of the easiest things you can do. I jot down 3 things I'm grateful for every night before I go to bed, aiming not to repeat and my favorite thing I've noticed about the practice is that the challenge of not repeating has forced me to look at tougher days and find the learning opportunity, or the resilience or calm under pressure that I'm grateful for, which then helps me be more openminded to gratitude on good days.

Now let's talk about wanting to stay in our struggle.

Focusing on the things in our life that aren't what we want yet gives us a sort of hall pass to powerlessness. “My office is difficult and nobody appreciates my contribution at work” becomes a really easy reason not to ask your boss for new opportunities. “I never get asked out on second dates and I'm starting to worry it's something about me” is a really simple story to tell yourself as a reason to delete the apps. 

Because when we commit to gratitude, even in a small but consistent way, we commit to seeing the ways that things are working out for us even before we don't have what we fully want. It creates the type of cognitive dissonance that we subtly know - “If I'm grateful for my life today, I can't pretend that nothing is working in my favor and that means I don't have as good as an excuse to not try.” 

Trying is scary, it's vulnerable and it's within our control. But it also moves us forward.

Whereas staying in our struggle doesn't ask very much of us, but it also keeps us stuck. 

So if you've read this far in this email and you know that you might be minorly enjoying staying in your struggle (if the idea “I don't have that much to be grateful for” came to mind at any point in this email then this is you, my friend), then I'd challenge you - we do not create change in our life by hating or ignoring where we are now. 

(Imagine trying to convince a pilot that you really want to be airborne but you can't accept that you're currently on the ground and how can they help you get in the air?!?! They will not be able to explain the mechanics of how a plane takes off until you accept that you are currently on. the. ground. and that without the ground, there's no runway that allows us to takeoff and so forth.)

The fastest way to change our life is accepting where we are now and taking responsibility for the ways we can change it.