Written by contributing blogger, Daniela Forte.

Over the holiday season, I experienced immense anxiety, so much so that I could not get a handle on anything. And it was at that moment where I came a cross a quote on Pinterest about cutting anxiety with gratitude.

Now, at first I could not figure out what it meant to do that. How does one help the other? And then I began writing.

I began writing “gratitude emails” (if I had stationary I would have hand written letters and mailed them, but let’s be real we live in 2016 now.) Anyway, I wrote letters to each person in my life, expressing how grateful I was to each person, and why I was grateful for them.

While my anxiety was still present in the first or second email, I began finding that I was calming down the more emails I wrote. I actually felt better, because I wasn’t focusing on what was making me anxious, but rather the gratitude I felt toward each person. It made me happy knowing that what I had written each person was making them feel better about life.

Last year was such a difficult one for me with so much going on, but what I remembered most were the people that were there for me, the people who took the time to care for me, and understand me, and talk to me and just be there.

With each email I also told each person that if “I could grant each of them one thing for the year ahead it would be….” I based it on what I knew their struggles were, what they hoped for, what we had talked about through the year. I wanted them to know I was there.

I wanted to make each of their lives better in some way by expressing my gratitude toward the love and support they had given me. I was feeling so bad at the moment, but I wanted to make someone else’s life better, does that make sense? We are all going through something, each and every one of us and so often we get stuck in our own shit that we don’t realize how much we need one another for love and support. We need each other to lift our spirits on our darkest of days, when life seems to be closing in and we can’t see the light at the end of the tunnel.

We all need someone to recognize our efforts and understand who we are as people, to grant us what we need each moment.

This is a practice I totally recommend doing, if you can make it even more special by handwriting the letters and mailing them, I think it would be even better. But if not, it’ okay, the emails will still do the trick.   Do it randomly, you don’t need to do it around a holiday, the ones I sent happened to fall around the holidays, but it doesn’t have to be that way.

Know that no matter what you are going through, you are not alone.

#radiatedaily