I came across the phrase “Our brain serves back our most practiced thoughts” and it just struck me.

We hear so often that practicing gratitude can help with mental health overall. I have a hard time with that. It gets a bit too touchy-feely for me. However, if I analyze where my mental energy goes, there’s a very clear direct correlation to how I am feeling mentally, and often physically, and what kinds of thoughts and information are circling around in my brain.

When I let social media and sensationalized news stories be the primary things fed into my brain in a day, I become more tense and anxious and have a hard time finding positivity in the world at large. When I spend the day in my garden or around people enjoying themselves, it’s hard to find reasons to be anxious at all.

Our mental energy dictates our mood more often than not. When we give our energy to negativity whether about ourselves or the world or our work, we get lost in that quagmire of negativity. But when we take the challenge to find the good, we are much more resilient to the negativity to which we’re exposed.

The negative is easy to focus on, I totally get it. And social media makes disasters ever-present in our lives, one after the other. It is hard to focus on the positive. But if that’s where your mind spends its time, it is easier to find positivity and balance in your life.

Where your attention goes is where your energy goes. I was reading a book recently (Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver) and one of the characters who is a born and bred city-dweller is explaining how you survive in the city to the main character who is from a small town and gets overwhelmed and overstimulated by the city and all the things coming at him all day long. The city-dweller says that you can’t give them your “juice”. You only have so much juice all day long and you’ve got to save it for the things that you need to get through the day. You can’t spare your juice for the random people you pass in the street or the disturbances as you walk down the block or anything that doesn’t directly impact you.

Spare your juice. Be intentional with your mental energy and where you spend it. If you focus in on the positive things that are happening in your own life, you’ll be able to stay positive despite all the terribleness going on in the world.

So apparently we’ve got to practice gratitude after all.