The Power of Gratitude in Retirement: Cultivating a Positive Mindset

Retirement marks an important new time in life, offering freedom and opportunity to embrace what’s next. It’s an exciting era that many look forward to for decades. But for others, retirement represents uncertainty and fear. Not everyone is equally comfortable with retirement.

In the quietness of their mind, they may feel that they’re being put out to pasture, being put into a corner where their usefulness to the world has ended. Retirement may bring on feelings of grief; an abrupt end to a certain kind of life. In many ways, retirement may feel similar to when someone passes away. The grief of missing that old life, pre-retirement, can be very profound and long-lasting.

This is why it’s so vital to learn how to cultivate a positive mindset. Learning how to feel gratitude in retirement is a powerful tool to help ensure an enriching retirement experience.

Grasping the Essence of Gratitude

Gratitude is more than the surface platitude of saying “thank you.” Being thankful is one thing—and it’s an important gesture— but feeling gratitude goes deeper. Gratitude can be likened to a deep acknowledgment of how blessed you are in this life, how filled with abundance your life is.

Gratitude is recognizing that life is generous with its bounty; you are the grateful recipient of unlimited gifts. That every day, you receive blessings in life that are both small and large; that every blessing is precious.

For those who struggle in life with a lack of creature comforts, who have had to work hard for every penny earned, it may feel harder to feel blessed; harder to feel like life has been generous. But this is why gratitude matters; it is when gratitude matters. Because when you start to grasp the essence of gratitude, then you will be able to better recognize the little blessings that are in your life.

Focusing on Gratitude Brings Pleasure and Joy

When you focus on the blessings in your life, you stop focusing on your worries. As humans, we can’t focus on more than one thing at the same time. It’s inherent in the meaning of the word, focus. “Focus” is to put all your attention on one thing. And when that one thing is gratitude, it’s impossible to lose yourself in negative feelings of despair. This is how gratitude can bring pleasure to your life and help you discover joy in the smallest gifts that life brings you.

The Benefits of Practicing Gratitude

At this point, there have been numerous studies on how gratitude can yield positive mental, emotional and physical benefits. Gratitude actually rewires the brain, enabling you to more easily switch your focus from the negative to the positive the more you practice gratitude. In other words, the more practice you put into feeling gratitude, the easier it will be, and the faster you will see how many things you have to be grateful for.

As an exercise today, spend some time focusing on the blessings in your life. No doubt, you’ll find many things to feel grateful for, but here are some prompts to help begin to move your focus to feeling gratitude:

• Ponder the blessings of the weather. If it’s sunny, you may be blessed with light and warmth while you walk outside. If it’s rainy or overcast, you may be blessed with a great excuse to sit quietly with your favorite book or pastime.
• Ponder the blessings of your health. If it’s good, you may be blessed with the ability to be active and engaged with your surroundings. If it’s poor, you may be blessed with the ability to use some parts of your brain and body.
• Ponder the blessings of your surroundings. Do you have the perfect little desk set up in your home, where you can sit privately and comfortably as you organize your thoughts, work on your drawings, write your emails to friends, etc.? Do you have control over your surroundings; the ability to organize the items in your kitchen cabinets the way you like, to hang your clothes in your preferred manner?

As you ponder these things, you’ll no doubt become more aware that not everyone has these blessings. But it’s important not to compare, because there are also others with blessings that you don’t have. Feeling gratitude isn’t about feeling better off than someone else. It’s about feeling grateful for what you have in your life, including the small things.

Practical Ways to Incorporate Gratitude Into Your Daily Life

Practicing gratitude once a day is helpful, but it should become a part of your daily life to a point where it’s completely natural. Consider:

Journaling, where you write down the things you are grateful for. Occasionally, look back and read what you’ve written, as a reminder.

Verbally expressing appreciation, where you tell the people around you how you feel. This may include the bagging clerk at the grocery, the mailman, your best friend, and so on.

Being present, where you pause throughout the day to appreciate the present moment. This may be savoring the flavors of a bite of food, lifting your face to feel the warmth of the sun, closing your eyes and feeling happy to be alive, and so forth.

There’s no right way to feel gratitude in retirement; only the way in which you focus on the bounty of freedom and opportunity to participate in life in a new way. Retirement is only a “scary” unknown until you decide to become familiar with it in a way where it becomes a part of who you are, and how you feel in the world. Let that feeling be gratitude.