Last year during my AP Precalculus class, my teacher would post notes down on our desks every day, and for the first twenty-one days of class, we had to list three things we were grateful for and stick them on the door. To my teacher’s credit, most people believe it takes twenty-one days to form a habit due to an online internet myth. But after the twenty-one days ended, so did the habit. I found myself not as grateful
as I had been.
That changed during the winter. I found myself overwhelmed by Junior Year of high school, and between my Speech and Drama competition season, schoolwork, and applying for summer programs, I found myself completely overwhelmed. My days felt like a constant repeat of chores and tasks to get through. Somewhere along the way I stopped appreciating the life I was so busy trying to build.
So, I started the habit back up again; instead of listing three things I was grateful for, I started naming just one thing. Sometimes it was something ordinary, like my cash tip I got at work that would fund my next coffee expedition. Other times it was small acts of kindness, like my friend who noticed that I was having a bad day and bought me a pack of chocolate covered almonds. Sometimes I would write them down on a post it note, but other times I would just speak them aloud into the universe.
I realized that having gratitude doesn’t have to stem from something grand. All it takes is a good conversation, the perfect song on the radio, a funny lecture at school, or the feeling of getting into bed after a hard day.
When life gets hard, it becomes easy to overlook these moments because they don’t seem important or deserving of our attention. But this new practice gave me a reason to stop taking in the world around me with a new sense of appreciation.
I’m not perfect; sometimes I forget days and sometimes I struggle to find positivity within a bad day. However being perfect is not a requirement to form a habit. Taking five minutes to pause and reset my mindset won’t erase a bad day. But, it does give me a moment to take a step back and move on to something more positive.
Being an over-involved student, there are days where I’m only at my house to sleep and shower. There is always another assignment, another competition, another application, another responsibility. When everything feels like a to-do list, my challenge to myself to stay grateful keeps me grounded. It reminds me that life is still going and to take a few moments to live in the moment. I don’t want to spend the last year of high school focused on what happens next.
So, how long did it take to form a habit or gratefulness? In all honesty, I’m still working on it. As I’m coming up on one year of trying to find things to be grateful for, I still don’t know if there will ever be a magical switch that will go off where everything in my life will feel perfect. I still have bad days. I still get overwhelmed.
But what I have learned is resilience. Not the kind that means that nothing ever bothers me, but the kind that reminds me I can go through hardships and not let it consume me. Possessing gratitude isn’t pretending that everything is okay, rather being grateful makes sure that bad days won’t be the only part of my day I ultimately remember.
When something does go wrong, I am better at recognizing that one bad moment doesn’t have to represent my entire day if I don’t let it. And one bad day won’t represent my entire life. I’ve learned that even bad days can contain something of note.
Maybe that’s why I don’t think it takes only twenty-one days to form a habit. A habit isn’t something that happens automatically after a set amount of days. A habit is something you continuously choose to work towards. For me, my choice is gratitude.
For someone else, it might be journaling, meditation, meeting for coffee, weekly pilates, listening to music, or a breathing exercise.
Mental wellness doesn’t have to start with a major adjustment to your routine. I know that most people, myself included, don’t have more than ten minutes to spare. Sometimes it means taking five minutes for yourself to reset and relax. Sometimes you have to recognize that despite the feeling of everything going wrong, something will go right.
Being a teenager can sometimes feel like constantly preparing for the next version of yourself: the next test, the next milestone, the next advancement in your life. It can become very easy to become so tunnel-visioned onto who you might become that you forget to appreciate who you are now; I’m still learning how to do that.
And maybe that’s the point. Mental wellness isn’t about being a perfectly happy, balanced person. It’s about learning how to take care of yourself when things are imperfect.
For me, this started with one question: What am I grateful for today?