A relationship fractures. A job disappears. Health falters.
The future, which once felt solid beneath your feet, suddenly feels like fog.
In those moments, I try to avoid negative thoughts and instead reach for three things. Three things I’m grateful for, no matter how dark it feels. It sounds almost too simple to work, yet it helps almost every time.
Here’s what I’ve come to understand after repeatedly living through my own storms: pain narrows your vision.
In other words, when you’re hurting, your mind behaves like a spotlight. It illuminates only the problem, only the loss, only what’s missing. Everything else falls into shadow.
Gratitude helps widen that beam. It doesn't erase the problem. It doesn't pretend everything is fine. It simply reminds you that the problem is not everything. And that small shift in perspective can make the unbearable feel, just barely, bearable.
What Those Three Things Might Look Like
Your three will be your own, but for most of us, they tend to orbit a few timeless truths:
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The miracle of being alive and healthy
Take a slow breath. Feel your lungs expand. Notice the hum of the world through your five senses. Feel the warmth of sunlight, the sound of rain, the smell of coffee, the roughness of a familiar surface beneath your fingers.
These are not small things; for someone, somewhere, they are everything.
Good health is so ordinary when we have it, and so extraordinary when we lose it. Nothing — not wealth, not success, not achievement — holds its value when the body falters. Which means if you woke up this morning with your health intact, you are already richer than you may realise.
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The people who love you without condition
Think of the person who picks up on the first ring. Who shows up without being asked. Who tells you the truth even when you don’t want to hear it, and still stays, not despite who you are, but because of it.
If you have even one such person, you have something that money cannot buy.
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The ability to show up for others
There is a quiet dignity in being the one who provides not just financially but also emotionally and practically, in ways large and small. If you have the capacity to protect, nurture, or support the people you love, that is a form of power worth recognising. It is a gift, and also a responsibility.
Both make it worth being grateful for.
The Truth About Difficult Times
Here's something that got me thinking the first time I heard it: gratitude works well not just when life is good, but also when it isn't. When things are easy, gratitude is pleasant. When things fall apart, gratitude becomes medicine.
There’s a reason for this.
Psychologists call it relative deprivation — our tendency to measure our suffering against what we’ve lost or what others have.
But the reverse also works. When you deliberately compare your situation to how much worse it could be, something softens. Consider this: you’ve just received news that shakes you — a financial setback, perhaps.
Your instinct is to catastrophise, to imagine the worst.
But pause: Do you still have your health? A roof? Someone who cares?
If yes, then the loss, as real as it is, exists within a larger container of abundance. The setback is a chapter, not the whole story. Because most of us, most of the time, are simultaneously facing something difficult and holding something precious.
Gratitude refuses to let the difficulty crowd out the precious.
From Scarcity to Abundance
There are two lenses through which we can look at a life:
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The scarcity lens asks: What do I lack? What have I lost? What could go wrong?
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The abundance lens asks: What do I have? What is still here? What is still good?
The facts of your life don’t change depending on which lens you use. But how you feel about those facts changes completely.
Think of it this way: two people stand before the same half-filled glass of water. One sees what’s missing. One sees what remains. Same glass. Yet an entirely different experience of it.
The only difference is where they choose to look.
The good news is that this is a skill, not a personality trait. It can be practised and it gets easier. The mind, like a muscle, grows stronger in the direction you train it.
When the Milk Spills
Life will knock things over. That’s not pessimism — it’s just the honest truth of being human. There will be missteps, failures, and losses that cannot be undone.
On those days, resist the pull toward self-recrimination and endless replay.
The spilt milk is gone. Staring at it changes nothing. What matters is this: What do I do now?
Not how bad is this, or why did this happen to me, or what does this say about my worth.
Just — what next? One step. Then another. Gratitude doesn’t mean you don’t grieve what’s lost.
It means you don’t lose sight of what remains while you do.
A Practice, Not a Platitude
I want to leave you with something practical.
The next time life feels too heavy, try this: Stop. Take a breath. Name three things you are grateful for, as specifically as possible. Not "my family" — but "the way my mother still calls to check if I've eaten." Not "my health" — but "the fact that I ran up those stairs without thinking about it." Specificity is what gives gratitude its grip.
Do this daily, and especially on the hard days.
You will be surprised how quickly it quiets the noise, how the same situation that felt crushing begins to feel not easy, but manageable.
The Thought to Carry With You
The storms of life are not optional. But drowning in them is.
Remember the three-thing rule. Hold onto them when the current is strong. They won’t make the water calmer, but they will make you a stronger swimmer.
And sometimes, that’s exactly enough to get you to the other shore.
This blog is part of an ongoing series sharing life lessons from lived experience. Not theory, but truth earned the hard way. The hope is that something here finds you at just the right moment.
About Me
I am a thinker at all times. I see, I think. I hear, I think. I read, I think. Every weekend I write. I would love to know what you think.