You know what keeps me from losing my shit completely when everything’s going wrong?
Gratitude.
I know, I know. It sounds like something a wellness influencer would say while selling you a $47 journal with motivational quotes.
Although it’s 2026 now, but hear me out.
When January’s trying to kill me and everything’s breaking and people are acting insane and I’m one minor inconvenience away from a full meltdown…
Having to force myself to find something to be grateful for is the only thing standing between me and complete psychological collapse.
A little bit of gratitude goes a long way.
Not the fake, toxic positivity bullshit where you pretend everything’s fine when it’s clearly not. (Insert Katy Perry I’m Fine meme)
Not the “just be grateful and your problems will disappear” garbage that makes you want to punch someone or something.
I’m just talking about practical gratitude. The kind where you acknowledge that yeah, things are fucked, but there’s still something in your life that doesn’t suck.
Maybe it’s stupid small. Coffee tastes good. Your dog’s happy to see you. You’ve got a roof over your head. Someone texted you something funny. The sun came out for five minutes (lol England)
Doesn’t matter how small it is.
Gratitude is cool cause it interrupts the spiral, even for a few minutes, hours or days.
When your brain’s in catastrophe mode, it wants to find more things to catastrophise about. (Is catastrophise a word??)
It’s looking for evidence that everything’s terrible and always will be terrible and you should panic harder and breath shallower and then your chest explodes like that poor due in Alien…
Gratitude is like one of those Ginsu knives from the early 2000s, which can cut through almost anything.
It forces your brain to notice something that isn’t complete dogshit.
Small shifts are good for the soul.
Gratitude doesn’t fix your problems. Your bills don’t magically get paid because you’re thankful for your morning coffee. Your broken plans don’t un-break themselves because you appreciated a good song.
But it keeps you sane enough to deal with those problems without completely losing your mind in the process.
Like you don’t have to be “everything’s fucked and I can’t handle this” it’s more a “okay, things are rough, but I’ve got this one good thing, so maybe I can figure out the rest.”
That’s the secret sauce.
The people who make it through the hard shit without becoming bitter, angry husks of their former selves? (nearly me)
They’re not the ones who never had problems. They’re the ones who found ways to stay grateful even when things weren’t going their way.
And I’m not saying you need to be grateful for the hard shit. Fuck that. You don’t need to be thankful that January’s trying to murder you or that your plans imploded or that everything’s harder than it should be, but you can be grateful despite it.
Grateful for the people who showed up. The skills you’ve built. The fact that you’re still here fighting instead of giving up. The small wins mixed in with the losses.
If I was selling insanity insurance. That insurance would be gratitude.
Don’t get me wrong. There’s still good stuff mixed in with the garbage. But we’ve survived worse before and I’m sure we’ll survive this too.
So just do one thing a day. Doesn’t have to be profound. Doesn’t have to be life changing.
Just something that made today slightly less terrible than it could’ve been.
And in my case. Today my heating and hot water has finally been fixed cause it’s been fucked since the 25th of December.
Cool thing is. If you do this enough. The hard stuff doesn’t disappear, but it stops feeling quite so suffocating. You get a little breathing room. A little perspective. A little sanity.
Stephen Walker.
P.S. My gratitude practice isn’t fancy. No journal. No morning routine. Just a mental check in before bed. What didn’t suck today? Sometimes it’s a good conversation. Sometimes it’s just that I made it through without completely losing it. Either way, it counts. Try it. Also this Youtube video is one of the working parts that stops be from ending up in a padded cell…