Living in gratitude helps you focus your thoughts on the positive. Positive thinking doesn’t mean ignoring the difficult emotions or challenges ahead of you. Ignoring these problems doesn’t fix them.
Instead, positive thinking and gratitude helps you choose what it is you focus on despite any struggles that you might face.
Making a Gratitude List in Recovery
A gratitude list is an activity that you can do every day to list one thing for which you are grateful, and from there, start to build so that your list contains three things at the end of each day and even five things. This can include:
- People you are grateful for
- Experiences you are grateful for
- Opportunities you are grateful for
- Things you learned that day
- Things that were shared with you
- Things that others said to you
- Things that you saw
- Things that you felt
This can be a list that you share with a spouse or trusted family member. It can also be a list that you write down in your journal.
Depending on your treatment, your list might be something that you share as part of group therapy sessions.
Why a Gratitude List in Recovery Matters
The joy you feel in life has very little to do with your circumstances and almost everything to do with what the focus of your life is at any given moment.
If you focus on your fears or your insecurities, you won’t feel much joy, but if you focus on the things for which you are grateful, you can choose to live with gratitude.
When things are difficult, making a gratitude list in recovery might be a very small action; it might be one good thing per day like:
- Having a good meal
- Something nice that someone said to you
- Being able to walk around outside when the weather is good
Over time this practice of making a gratitude list in recovery will magnify your joy and give you the opportunity to collect positive moments as something to be treasured and to see each day how thankful you can be no matter the hardships or difficult emotions that you might be facing.
The difficult parts of your life won’t disappear when you make gratitude lists, but they won’t hurt as much.
Choosing Gratitude
In recovery it’s easy to get caught up in the things that you can’t control but that means it’s easy to forget the things you absolutely can control.
When you choose to focus on your gratitude and moments of peace, laughter, inspiration, or joy, you’ll realize that you can choose to create more of them, and this might look like this:
- Helping others
- Spending time with people who support you in your recovery
- Exercising
- Listening to good music
- Meditating
- Developing a new skill
- Reading a good book
- Being in nature
- Participating in fun activities
You can continually exercise your power of gratitude and make a big difference in your life in terms of how you feel when you are struggling. Making a gratitude list will also help you know when to slow down if you are tired, when to ask for help from a support group, or when to get professional treatment.
100 Things to Be Grateful For in Recovery
Sometimes the hardest part of a gratitude list is knowing where to start. If you’re searching for a “100 things to be grateful for in recovery” list, or even a “500 things to be grateful for in recovery” list, the goal isn’t really to hit an exact number — it’s to build a habit of noticing the good, however small. Here are examples across a few categories to help get your own list started.
People
- A friend who checks in on you
- A sponsor or mentor who believes in your recovery
- Family members who show up for you
- A counselor or therapist who listens without judgment
- Someone who forgave you
- A stranger who showed you kindness
- Coworkers who support your recovery
- Support group members who understand your struggles
Health and Body
- Waking up clear-headed
- A full night’s sleep
- Being able to breathe easily
- Legs that let you walk or run
- A body that’s healing
- Taste and smell returning to normal
- Energy to get through the day
- A clean bill of health from a doctor
Everyday Comforts
- A warm cup of coffee or tea
- A roof over your head
- Clean clothes
- A favorite meal
- Sunlight through a window
- A comfortable bed
- Music that lifts your mood
- A quiet moment alone
Recovery Milestones
- Another day sober
- A chip or token marking progress
- A hard conversation you didn’t run from
- A trigger you managed without using
- Making it through a difficult holiday sober
- A relationship you repaired
- Trusting yourself again
- Feeling proud of your progress
Nature and Surroundings
- A walk outside
- The change of seasons
- A clear night sky
- Rain on a rooftop
- A favorite park or trail
- Fresh air
- Sunrise or sunset
- Green space near your home
These 40 examples span five categories, but the pattern can keep going — continue noticing people, moments, and small comforts across other areas of your life, and you’ll find it’s entirely possible to build your list toward 100, 500, or more over time.
Gratitude in Recovery Worksheet
If you prefer a more structured approach, a gratitude in recovery worksheet can make the practice easier to stick with. Try answering these prompts once a day or once a week:
- Three people I’m grateful for today, and why
- One challenge from this week I’m grateful I got through
- Something my body did for me today
- A moment today that made me smile
- One thing about my recovery I’m proud of right now
- Someone I want to thank, and how I could do it
Keep your answers in a journal or notebook, and revisit older entries when you’re having a hard day — seeing how far you’ve come can be its own source of gratitude.
Making a Gratitude List in Recovery with Atlanta Recovery Place
At Atlanta Recovery Place, we provide a range of treatments where you get the chance to practice making gratitude lists and focusing on the positive. Mental health challenges can be barriers to how you employ gratitude and positive thinking and in these instances it’s important that you choose to seek professional help like our depression counseling services.
At our facility, you can participate in a range of evidence-based, holistic therapies like:
- Art therapy
- Music therapy
- Family therapy
- Yoga therapy
- Animal-assisted therapy
- Cognitive behavioral therapy
In all of these you have the opportunity to focus on things for which you are grateful whether it’s learning new skills through cognitive behavioral therapy, having the chance to work with animals with animal assisted therapy, or working with your family and family therapy.
When struggling with mental health challenges or addiction, feeling that level of connection to the inherent joy that you have the opportunity to find and build in your daily life is important.
Depression can bring about feelings of hopelessness and make it difficult to see the positive, but these symptoms can’t just be willed away no matter how hard you try. With the combination of therapy, meditation, lifestyle changes, and, in some cases, medication, you can combine things like gratitude lists to make a big difference when you are struggling.
Let our team help you today. Call Atlanta Recovery Place at 1-866-718-6024.
