226 The Unexpected Role Gratitude Plays in Physical Recovery and Resilience

Show Notes:

Does gratitude ever feel like another “should” on your healing to-do list?

In this episode, Michael gently unpacks why gratitude isn’t about pretending everything’s okay—but about seeing what’s still here, what’s still working, and what’s still possible—even as you recover from trauma, pain, or loss. If you’ve ever felt too exhausted to “be grateful,” this one is for you.

Takeaways:

• Discover 5 easy, judgment-free ways to practice gratitude daily (even on rough days)
• Learn how gratitude supports mental and physical healing, backed by science
• Find peace in small moments of reflection that reconnect you with strength and possibility

Take a deep breath and discover what’s missing to what’s meaningful—and let gratitude become a tool for daily resilience.

Transcript:

 In this episode, you’ll discover the power of gratitude in helping you feel whole again.

Hey there, it’s Michael. Welcome to Whole Again. A show about helping survivors of physical injury and trauma reclaim their strength and resilience through the wisdom of Kazuki. I’m so glad you’re here. Today we are going to talk about something simple. But challenging to do, but profound and powerful.

We’re talking about gratitude now before you roll your eyes thinking we’re going wooo with this episode because we’re not, I get it. I know how hard it is to have a daily gratitude practice, but this practice, this daily practice of gratitude was a game changer in my recovery and so many other people I know, but I do.

I get it. Going through physical pain, exhaustion, trying to hold everything together, being that rock, all that, the word gratitude may be too heavy of a word, like it’s one more thing that you should be doing, but you’re not doing. But today in this episode, I wanna make gratitude really easy for you. It can help you see what you still have and can do, and those are building blocks to help you step into the person you’re becoming.

It can help you step into feeling whole again. But before we go any further, I do wanna take a moment to say again, thank you for being here. I appreciate you. I also appreciate that you’re a fellow survivor, so let’s get power of gratitude. I like to say it’s a great day for a great day, or it’s a great day to be grateful.

I live by this, but gratitude isn’t about pretending that we’re perfect. The Lord knows I am far from it. I am perfectly imperfect, and I have all the scars to prove it. Gratitude is really about finding the small cracks where the light can shine through. Much like how Leonard Cohen, the singer songwriter, talked about.

It’s about seeing these little bright rays of light. And yes, we can even be grateful for the tough moments, although the timing has to be so, because those tough moments when we’re in the mud, well, as the saying goes, Tek knock Khanh said this. No mud, no lotus. So let’s dive deeper into the power of gratitude.

Gratitude is simply more than a mood booster. It’s a mindset shift. There are a lot of studies, some outta UCLA, we have many more on our pause, breathe, reflect app, or at least references to the power of gratitude. But studies from UCLA showed that. Gratitude can actually help lower depression. It can ease anxiety, improve our sleep, so we drift off and rest and recover like we need to.

It can even reduce inflammation in the body, which is something we experience when we’re going through physical trauma or physical injury or illness. So gratitude is real in the spirit of you. Go where your eyes go, which was the title of my TEDx talk. Gratitude can help us see the things that are good, that are strong, that can be building blocks for future healing.

Because when we do it each day or even throughout the day, those little moments between the moments we start to train our brain. ’cause our brain is trainable. You’ve heard of something called neuroplasticity. So it starts to notice what is working instead of only what is broken, because we have a disposition to look for problems because we are hardwired for survival.

So we look at things that are working well through gratitude, and we begin to build greater resilience because of it. One breath, one moment at a time. We start to build through the power of gratitude, and I don’t have to tell you as you go through whatever you happen to be going through. Resilience isn’t a luxury.

We often talk about it sometimes like it’s a luxury. Resilience is necessary. It’s essential. It’s vital to who we’re becoming. It’s actually vital to society at large, at least from my perspective. So how do we do it? How do we do this thing called gratitude? Well, let me share with you five different ways you can practice gratitude to make it super easy for you so you can do it each and every day.

’cause that’s where the power is when we develop a way of living with gratitude. As opposed to thinking of it as this transactional to do thing that you have to do each day. I’d much rather you look at gratitude as a way of living. So here’s the first step. You can do this in the morning or you can do this in the evening.

My preference is I do it when I’m brushing my snags. That’s what we call our teeth in our household. So I simply try to recall three things I’m grateful for today, and it really helped me rewire my brain because as I got into bed before I found gratitude, I would think about all the different things I didn’t get done that day.

So gratitude helped me really celebrate my wins. Even if they were super small or those little moments where the light shined through that I was grateful for. So again, you can do this in the morning or in the evening. Some people like to write it down in a form of journaling. I simply talk them out loud to myself, or sometimes I just say them to myself.

I really don’t write things down that often, but I do know people swear by writing it out. So that can be an option for you. Here’s the second tip. Reflect when the timing is right on your hard stuff. When you’re going through the moment when the house is on fire. Sometimes it’s really hard to be reflective, but when the timing is right.

I remember the question I received during my recovery. Hey, Michael, did this accident happen to you or for you? That question came a little too early, but a lot of things in life do happen for us, which is a form of gratitude. So you can look back on the hard things in life and ask yourself, what did you discover about yourself?

What did you learn? In essence? How did it shape you in a positive way? What’s the wisdom that you’ve been able to gain? The third way to practice gratitude is to share it. We all have people in our lives that we’re grateful for that have shaped us in a very positive way. Let them know. Send them a text.

Let them know how much you love them and appreciate them. It’ll make your day, but also it’ll make their day and it’ll be a great ripple and they might do the same the following day. So if you’re grateful for someone, let them know. While I don’t write things down that often, I am a big fan of visual reminders.

These can be photos, they can be little notes, even with my chicken scratch, and once we see them, we are reminded to be grateful. It could even be a magnet or a sticker, and you can place them in a mirror or on your fridge or your phone background. For me, my phone background is the Grand Tetons in Wyoming, and so it reminds me to be grateful.

Nature. So these can be little small touchstones to bring you back to what’s good in your life. And finally, here’s another way you can practice gratitude daily when things get a little stressful, because life gets a little stressful, take a time out, much like they do in sports, like basketball or football, or your favorite sport.

Although my favorite sport, there are actually no timeouts, but one of the big major sports. They take a timeout, they pause the game, they don’t stop it. The players towel off, they catch their breath, and in a moment of reflection, the coach draws up the next play. But your moment of reflection can be a moment of gratitude.

It’s the essence of our pause, breathe, reflect, practice. By slowing down, we can see what we’re grateful for in this very moment. I have a whole bunch of practices on the app that can help support this way of practicing gratitude. So when things get stressful, when things get overwhelming, or they feel like they’re out of control, hit pause.

Take a few deep breaths, and in that moment, simply ask yourself. What am I grateful for right now? It’s a simple one minute practice that can shift your whole day. And remember, when you’re a practitioner of gratitude, it doesn’t mean you’re looking at the world through rose color lenses or you think rainbows happen each and every day.

Or there’s an endless supply of Skittles out there. You can recognize today’s chaos and where you’re hurting. You can see all that and at the same time, still find a way to see what you’re grateful for. We humans can hold space for a lot of different thoughts and emotions all at the same time. So instead of over-indexing to everything you don’t have or can’t do anymore, gratitude helps you see what you still have and can do.

It balances out your view. To help you heal in the way you need to heal. It helps you believe that healing is still possible and you don’t have to be grateful for everything, but you can be grateful for something or someone.

Thanks again for being here in this episode. You discover the power of gratitude in five different ways to practice it daily, so gratitude becomes a way of life. Thanks for being here, and thank you for being a fellow survivor.

And if you wish to learn more about creating beautiful ripples and how to prevent a bad moment from turning into a bad day, please visit my website, Michael O’Brien schiff.com and sign up for my newsletter called The Ripple Effect. And join us each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday here at Whole Again, and discover how you can heal, grow, and become more resilient and celebrate our scars as golden symbols of strength and resilience.

Until then, remember, you can always come back to your breath. You’ve got this and we’ve got you.