Michael Mashkevich and a co-host share five gratitude practices that helped the latter recover from a severe car accident and coma. They cover naming three things you're grateful for before meals, daily journaling, morning and evening meditations using Insight Timer, quality time with loved ones, and time in nature. All five, they say, activate the parasympathetic nervous system and improve both emotional and physical healing.
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I used to wake up not being able to walk, not being able to move my arms, and not even remembering what day of the week it was. It was scary. But these 5 helpful mindset shifts and gratitude practices that I do helped me turn things around and start feeling better. So I'll go review them here and let's go.
So to give you a quick summary of what happened, I was a passenger in the front seat of my friend's car. The car went off the road and smashed into a tree. I was helicoptered to a near hospital and I was in a coma for 10 days. My right leg was broken, my right arm was shattered, left arm was broken, the pelvis was shifted, so my urethra was torn. My recovery was difficult to say the least, but these gratefulness practices really made life definitely more livable, and I still practice them today because they make life easier.
So the first hack I want to give you, or trick, to being more grateful about life is saying what you're grateful for that day before a meal. We used to do this when we did a yoga teacher training, me and my wife, before she was my wife. The teacher would have us say 3 things that we were grateful for that day. One of the typical things was who cooked that meal. It takes love to cook a meal to make it good. If somebody put love into it, you feel it, how wonderful the food is, and you're grateful for them. And then we'd be grateful for maybe something that we learned that day that we didn't know the day before, or how wonderful the weather was, or something new that we just didn't know. And just thinking about stuff to be grateful for before you eat your meal, I believe it triggers your parasympathetic nervous system. And your parasympathetic nervous system is in your body that automatically happens. For example, your breathing, you don't control that, it just happens automatically. And when you trigger your parasympathetic nervous system with gratitude, you start calming it generally down more. You start feeling better about life. So that's kind of a little, little hack to kind of get it better about feeling better. So when you're grateful for anything that happened that day, you start feeling better overall because your life is better than you thought it was. It makes your food taste better too. So that was hack number 1. So another thing I am Grateful to have in my life is I started journaling since I had my bad stuff happen. Somebody told me to keep journaling, and originally I just journaled in a notebook. I'd write it out. But now I have an app on my phone and that allows me to add pictures and kind of keep track of it virtually so I can access it from other places than my phone. But by writing stuff down, It triggers that activation, that parasympathetic nervous system of like, maybe I should be grateful for this stuff because today, just today, I went somewhere that I didn't know I would go, or I got like a really awesome new thing that I didn't get that I'm really grateful for having found it, or that my daughter went to school or like a playground and she met new friends and then she had so much fun. And when I'm writing these things down or when I'm typing these up on my phone, I'm really grateful because it triggers that parasympathetic nervous system to kind of be aware of things that I am aware of that I need to be aware of in my life. And that helps me be happier throughout the day, happier to be alive because these things happen. I write it down and I'm like, oh yeah, I didn't remember that and now I do. And when I do remember it, it's like, ah, I feel better. And I can sleep better. So I usually do it before I go to bed. I just write down what I did that day. And some days you forget, that's okay. You just make it up the next day. Just keep in your to-do app or however you keep track of things you need to accomplish. But writing journal entries is one of the big hacks of how to be grateful for everyday life. The next hack I have, tip, is meditation. So I typically like to do a meditation in the morning. I use an app called Insight Timer. It's free if you wanted to get it yourself. There's also a paid version that has courses you could do and you can download the meditations. But the free version, you can still play all the meditations that they have except for the courses. Meditations, they help a lot in the morning when I'm not feeling good, when I didn't sleep well or something happened. It just gets me in the right mindset to be happy to be alive or whatever the meditation that you find. There's always a reason to be happy that you can breathe. Maybe that the sun came out, or just it's amazing that today is where you are. You are where you are. The other meditation that I do is in the evening. Maybe before going to bed, if you're not feeling good, I like to turn on a sleep meditation. Again, about gratitude. What do I have to be grateful for that day? What's been going on. And then as you're about to fall asleep, again, it triggers the parasympathetic nervous system to just maybe calm down, be okay, and then it's so much easier to fall asleep. It's just a nice little hack to practice meditations any way you can. Or even if you don't want to do a guided meditation, there's a timer in there because the app's called Insight Timer. Or however you want to do meditations, to just put a clock on to meditate for a certain time and you use Focus on your breath. In and out. And just being grateful for being able to breathe, being able to walk, to talk. All the little things. Because there's so much in life that we have to be grateful for. We can be grateful for. We don't have to always be worried about stuff that we don't have or we want to do. Because just being alive here is a miracle. It's amazing. So I encourage you to try meditations morning, evening. Any way you want, any way you want, anytime you want. But it's amazing. Makes me feel better all the time. Another thing to be really grateful for is spending time with friends and family. Just to be grateful that you went to do something with your friends and family, that you spent time with them. It makes me feel good for being alive, for being there. And when you think about it, that you got to spend time with With your friend, maybe playing pickleball for me, or playing catch or football, or any which way, you just start feeling better for the day. Just being grateful for having what it is and to having those people in your life. It's just amazing. I love spending time with my friends and my family, and in a way they make you feel good because they sometimes make you smile, make you laugh. And that's like the kind of parasympathetic nervous system making yourself feel better. Because when you're sad, when you're feeling down, you feel worse. But if you're happy, if you smile, I think just by smiling, it starts to trigger like a happier mood in yourself. Even if you're not feeling happy, just by smiling, you start to feel better. And I encourage you just to try it. You're not feeling good?
Fake smile.
But when smiles, it's You start to get laughs. And sometimes I even watch a movie, I'm not feeling good, and I watch something that, that is funny in that movie. It just starts to trigger like a giggling, laughing kind of thing in me going, and then I start to feel better. I start to feel happy, and I start to forget the problems that I'm dealing with. And it's just a nice way to be grateful for what you have in your life that you might not be thinking about all the time. But it's amazing that we have that in our lives. Another thing to be really grateful for Is nature. I'm getting a little annoyed by nature right now because it seems like flies around me, but I'm grateful for it because without me being here, without me being alive, I wouldn't be able to swat at flies. And they are annoying, but they're amazing. And just appreciating what nature is, how a little fly could be like buzzing around my face and annoying me, is just amazing because without Being alive, I wouldn't be able to appreciate that. And what's amazing about that is just— it's amazing because that is life. And I used to go on hikes behind my house. They used to have like a nice little park. And just walking through it, like even barefoot— I love going barefoot too because it speaks to like— it gets the grounding stuff going. If you are interested in that, look up grounding. Just to feel better about everyday life and just Feeling like the grass between your toes or feeling the sun on your skin and hearing the birds sing or whatever animal you have around you. You hear some insects flying around me, or not flying around me, but doing some stuff here. It's just amazing what life is. Let's just be grateful that we have this life, that we can share this beautiful earth and everything that there is. The wind, The sky, the air, to be able to breathe, to be able to do everything that we do. It's just amazing. It makes life worth living because it's amazing. Let's be grateful for that. In summary, 5 things to be grateful for. Before meals, doing a little gratitude, thankfulness, what happened. 2, journaling every day. That's helped so much. 3, doing morning and evening gratitude meditations. 4, spending Spending time with friends and family always makes you feel better. And 5, being grateful for nature and beautiful places. So let me know below what has worked for you, what else you've tried that has worked maybe that I haven't tried and I want to find out. And also check out my mindset shifts video that's helped me so much in getting over the hump and getting feeling better for the day. And take care.
