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Hi, my name is Stacey Jaundoo and I am a clinician at Thriveworks Counseling in the Bethesda, Maryland area. And I wanted to just talk with you a little bit about how the Coronavirus is really impacting a lot of our lives and how we can possibly use gratitude as a way to help us to get through this time.

I know that with what’s happening, there’s been a lot of devastating events. Some of us have lost our jobs. We may have known someone who is impacted by the Coronavirus. Turning on the media, the news, social media, we’re getting a lot of negative news that’s really impacting us and leaving us feeling anxious and worried and even sad.

And so I know that having gratitude is so important during these times because it helps us to focus on, you know, the positive aspects of our lives and not so much those negative things. Usually during a crisis we tend to become anxious. And so if we can shift our mindset from those things to thinking about things we are grateful for, it does help us to feel better. It helps us to have a different outlook. It gives us a sense of hope for all of the unknowns. It will lift our spirits, the way we feel. It keeps us encouraged.

And so there’s so many benefits to having gratitude or showing gratitude. It just really shifts our perspective and our outlook on what’s happening in the world and around us. And so I believe that having gratitude is such a positive thing. It helps to reduce our anxiety and to really help bring a little joy in our lives. And so when we think about being grateful, being grateful that the sun came out today, or being grateful that now during this time we can spend more quality time with our family members and our loved ones.

Maybe someone connected with you, an old friend that you hadn’t heard from in a while and you were grateful just to hear, hear from them or being grateful to maybe take a walk one day when the sun is out. And so we can really think about those things. More and less of the things that do make us anxious.

One of the things that I tend to do is to write down each day one thing that I am grateful for and what I’ve done is created a gratitude jar. And so I listed, you know, the things that I’m grateful for. I decorated mine with the beach and with seashells because I love the beach. But as you can see, I am trying to fill it up with a grateful thing each and every day. And I’d like to encourage you to do the same.

If you can think of one thing that you are grateful for or maybe you don’t want to do a jar, you can always do a gratitude journal where you can write an entry of one thing that you are grateful for that day. I guarantee you it will change your mindset. And so these are just some ways we can we can think of to help uplift our spirits just by exercising gratitude. I hope you find this to be helpful.