There’s something about the new year that inspires us to want to make changes, to live our lives with more joy, passion and freedom. That something is most likely the noise and ‘shoulds’ we have been taught.
Every January, we are encouraged to make over our lives, “New Year, New You!” the adverts shout. But here’s the rub: It implies that we are not already enough as we are, that we are deficient in some way and with this miraculous diet / new car / beauty treatment etc. we will then be the shiny new us that can do all the wonderful things we have dreamed about.
I’m here to remind you that you are already enough. We all are. We are born enough.
Personal growth to me is accepting that you are always loved, supported and enough as the foundation, then doing the inner work to really feel and believe it. Along the journey, you may nourish your body better and feel better, you may exercise more, you may treat yourself to new things that play to your new confidence, but all of this is while you are still deeply grounded in ‘enoughness’ in the first place.
You deserve to feel it, to be happy and healthy in body, mind and soul but it all starts from within.
One practice that is consistently shown to improve our happiness is a gratitude practice. Gratitude has been a stretch recently with life life-ing like never before , but nothing makes you more grateful for what you have than the risk of losing it.
So who wants to join me in starting the new year with gratitude?
Reasons why a gratitude practice works
As the saying goes, “Energy flows where attention goes”. From an energetic perspective, the law of attraction states that we will attract more of what we are a vibrational match for. Practising gratitude will help raise our vibration, attracting more higher vibration experiences into our lives.
Practising gratitude tunes you into your heart, energetically with your heart chakra. Feeling more connected to the world around you and grateful to a higher power (whatever your understanding of that is) is only going to draw more love and compassion into our lives.
From a neuroscience perspective, we all have a cognitive bias. Our brain will sift through all of the information it receives in a day and filter out all that it considers ‘unimportant’, but really pay attention to the things that fit with our existing beliefs and expectations. So if we make it a habit to be grateful, we start looking for things to be grateful for. It becomes a habit.
Once our mind realises, “hey, this stuff is important to us now”, it will start noticing more things that fit with that belief, and you will start to find yourself noticing more and more things to be grateful for. These things would still have been there, but if your mind doesn’t know that these things are important, it will likely just filter them out and pass them by.It’s a simple fact that our emotional state affects our physical body. If we buy into the fact that we are not enough, our life is not enough, this can impact our sense of self-esteem and self-worth, potentially having a role to play in persistent low mood or depression. The science confirms that depression comes with a whole heap of physical symptoms: low energy, increased sensitivity to pain, back pain and aching muscles, headaches, abdominal pain… the list goes on. By finding ways to shift our emotional state, if we can decrease our length of stay in the lower vibration ‘meh’ emotions, then we can, in turn, start to reduce the impact on our physical body.
I’m not promising you’ll be jumping out of bed at 5am and dancing around your kitchen with your morning matcha, but I can promise you that focusing on all the good you already have in your life will make the hard things just a little bit lighter and your resilience just a little bit stronger.
So here’s to a 2026 full of things to be grateful for, starting here with pizza and cuddles on the sofa with the people I love the most.
Happy New Year!
With love & light,
Michelle x