I was feeling pretty sorry for myself last Saturday night.

As if I don’t have enough things to handle in my life, I’ve recently been diagnosed with sleep apnea accompanied by severe sleep-related oxygen desaturation, which means that the oxygen level of my blood drops to dangerous levels while I am sleeping.

If you don’t know what sleep apnea is—I didn’t until someone told me about it who suspected that I was suffering from it—it’s a condition that causes you to stop breathing when you fall asleep. All night long as your body begins to starve for oxygen, your brain wakes you up to get you to start breathing again, although rarely to the point of full consciousness; you wake up just enough to disturb your otherwise normal sleep patterns.

Sleep apnea can be dangerous. Consider what could happen if just once your brain fails to wake you up when you’ve stopped breathing. The more common result is that people with untreated sleep apnea fail to get adequate levels of Stage 2, Stage 3, and REM sleep, each of which is essential for complete rest of the body and mind. Some experience serious side effects from this sleep deprivation. Long-term effects can include severe heart problems.

In my case, I’m awakened an average of 45.13 times per hour! As a consequence, instead of the optimal 2+ hours of REM sleep each night, I am averaging about 35 minutes. The Stage 2 and Stage 3 sleep results are just as bad.

I know these statistics because I underwent a “sleep study” about four weeks ago to analyze my sleep patterns. During the study, sensors and electrodes were placed on me just about everywhere to record the activity of my heart, lungs, brain, and muscles. Air flow from my nose and mouth was continuously monitored as was the oxygen level in my blood.

The combined report and diagnosis that resulted was both comprehensive and frightening.

The sleep study itself was not pleasant. Strange environment, strange bed, and then I had more wires and sensors glued, taped, strapped, and clipped onto me than I have had cumulatively in a lifetime of medical procedures! Although I slept enough for the technicians to get the data they needed, it was extraordinarily uncomfortable. I found myself needing to crawl into my own bed when I got home the next morning and “sleeping” the entire morning away. Even with that, it took me a couple of days to fully recover from the experience.

Saturday I was back at the same facility for a second night. This time I knew what was coming and I knew it was going to be worse. Having already been diagnosed with sleep apnea, the purpose of this visit was to calibrate the air pressure necessary for the CPAP (Continuous Positive Airway Pressure) mask I will wear while sleeping to keep my breathing going, most probably for the rest of my life. For this night at least, the face mask was going to be in addition to all the previously mentioned sensors.

Like I said, I was feeling sorry for myself and that feeling was erupting into a combination of frustration and anger—with myself and others—creating a downward spiral.

There was a moment when everything shifted—when I remembered something that changed everything.

It happened while I was returning to the car to get my medical card. I had already given it to the facility receptionist the last time I was there, but they said they needed to photocopy it again. (Can you tell I was annoyed about having to go get it?)

At that moment I remembered what I constantly tell clients and audiences: you can change everything about your circumstances by moving into gratitude. No matter how dire your circumstances, there is always something to be grateful for. Find that thing for which you can experience true gratitude, no matter how small it might be; feel genuine gratitude for it, and everything will start to shift.

I started by hesitantly acknowledging that, no matter how difficult the treatment was going to be for this life-long condition, the diagnosis might very well have saved my life.

At that instant I saw something else: I had left the dome light in my car on when I arrived and was gathering things to bring into the sleep facility. If I hadn’t gone out for that insurance card, I would most likely not have been able to start the car the next morning—after what I was expecting was going to be a very difficult night.

It was a very little thing, but it was all the confirmation I needed.

I immediately started looking for other things to be grateful for. They showed up—in a torrent! Everything from Fred, the technician assigned to me that night who was terrific at explaining things, calming my fears, and making me as comfortable as was possible in the circumstances to waking up the next morning feeling surprisingly well-rested for the first time in years to the realization that I’m in the 1% of people who don’t have significant problems getting accustomed to CPAP therapy.

It’s amazing what focusing on gratitude (and a few extra hours of REM sleep) can do!

Choose to have a great day, Ace!

[Note: I first wrote about using gratitude to harness the power of The Law of Mind Action (now, more commonly, “The Law of Attraction”) in my book, Your Authentic Self: Be Yourself at Work in 2002. That chapter is included as a separate blog here (”Chapter 2: Apply the Law of Attraction”), although I’ve changed the references to The Law of Attraction, since the success of The Secret has made that nomenclature more popular.]

The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.

—John Milton

The Law of Attraction originated thousands of years ago. As a universal principle it is timeless. One of the earliest articulations of it is “Like begets like.” Another way of putting it is that things held in the mind create after their own kind. Whatever you focus your attention on, you will get more of it in your life. This is so because our words and our thoughts have power. The Buddha says, “The thought manifests as the word; the word manifests as the deed.”

Even if you don’t subscribe to the metaphysical belief that our words and thoughts actually create the world we experience, you must acknowledge that our thoughts and words create our experience of the world. And certainly they influence how the world responds to us.

Have you ever noticed how bad the traffic looks and how many people cut you off or perform other breaches of commuting etiquette when you are traveling home after a particularly bad day at the office? It always seems worse than usual, doesn’t it? What you are experiencing is an example of the Law of Attraction in full bloom. You’re upset about your day. Your mind is filled with images of the outrages that have been visited upon you. And what you get are more outrages.

And it doesn’t matter whether you believe in the Law of Attraction or not. Like gravity, it works either way. Not believing in gravity won’t save you if you jump off a building. Similarly, not believing in the Law of Attraction won’t prevent it from affecting your life. Given that this is so, you might as well understand the Law of Attraction as best you can and begin consciously directing its power toward creating the life you want.

How does this law apply to your daily life? Remember that the Law of Attraction says that you will get more of whatever it is that you are carrying in your mind. Let’s say that things are not going well for you. If that is where you hold your attention—things are going badly—chances are great that you are going to get more of the same. But if you want to make immediate and permanent changes, get the Law of Attraction working for you, not against you.

One of the quickest ways to get it working for you is through cultivating gratitude. If that seems a bit of a stretch for you, let me explain. Most of us believe that we can change some thing, someone, or some situation if we complain about it long enough, either quietly to ourselves or vociferously to others. At some point, we think, somebody will do something about it. Even if life worked that way, this approach fails to take into account the negative effect that these thoughts have on our own happiness, our health, our performance, and our relationships with others. Ultimately, it will also have an impact on our relationship with ourself, in the form of diminished self-esteem. Worse, complaining flies in the face of the Law of Attraction.

Gratitude, on the other hand, focuses our attention on what is positive in our lives. If we carry those positive thoughts in our mind, we will attract more of the same. The energy that surfaces through your expression of gratitude is healing and creative. It attracts solutions. Its power lies in the fact that it is a completion and a new beginning at the same time. You’ll see that gratitude is the “starter” that kicks the engine of change into action. For example, you can begin to make changes by blessing your work. This isn’t dependent on how good or bad your job is. It isn’t dependent on how much you hate what you have to do or how much you dislike the people with whom you work. It isn’t dependent on how little they are paying you. And it isn’t dependent on how overworked and underappreciated you are. There is some aspect of your job for which you can be grateful. Find it! Focus on it. Express gratitude for it daily—constantly, if you can.

It seems we have our priorities turned around in the popular culture. We send our thank you cards after we get the presents. We treat gratitude as if it were our way of rewarding the world for doing right by us. When what we want or expect to happen actually happens, then we are grateful. In the meantime we withhold our gratitude. By doing it this way, however, we lose the power of the Law of Attraction. The irony is that so long as you are focused on what is not working in a situation, the likelihood of those circumstances changing is practically nonexistent.

Initially, you may not be able to be grateful for everything that happens in your life, but be grateful for whatever you can. You might consider expressing gratitude for a situation that you first believe to be negative. We’ve all had seemingly terrible situations in which something unexpectedly pops up to transform them into positive experiences. In those circumstances you may have found yourself being grateful not only for the transformative elements but for everything which brought you to that point.

The truth is that so much of life really is a matter of how you look at it. There is a Zen koan about a farmer in the Middle Ages in Japan who finds a wild horse. His neighbors come to congratulate him on his good fortune. “We’ll see,” is all the farmer has to say. Within a week, the man’s son attempts to ride the horse. He is thrown, and his leg is broken. The farmer’s neighbors come again, this time to express their sadness over this misfortune. “We’ll see,” is all the farmer has to say. Within a month, the army comes through the countryside conscripting every able-bodied young man to fight in the war. The farmer’s son is left behind as unsuitable for military service because of his injured leg. Again, the farmer’s neighbors come to congratulate him on his good fortune. You already know what the farmer said. In the Zen tradition this story continues with hundreds of such twists and turns.

The purpose of the Zen koan is to get us to look at how much our limited perceptions determine the value we place on an event. It was Shakespeare who first noted in Hamlet that “There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.” This is as true today—and in your workplace—as it was in Shakespeare’s time.

Consider keeping a gratitude journal. For two weeks, write in it either first thing in the morning or last thing of the day. List everything and everyone that comes to mind for which you are thankful at that particular moment. Notice any difficult situation you find yourself in and begin focusing only on the elements of the situations for which you feel genuine gratitude. Note these elements in your journal on a daily basis. See what impact giving thanks has on your outlook and your life.

In my workshops, I begin the discussion of this section by having everyone spend a few minutes doing a silent check-in on their state of mind. I ask them to be aware of any physical comfort or discomfort and any feelings or emotions they are experiencing. After the check-in, everyone spends three minutes writing down a list of everything for which they can express genuine gratitude. Some people sit there for half a minute trying to find something. Then, when they find the first thing, the floodgates are opened, and they find it hard to stop.

After the written exercise, I ask them to do another silent check-in on their state of mind. In all the years of doing my workshops, no one has ever told me they didn’t feel better in body, mind, emotions, and spirit after spending just three minutes consciously expressing gratitude. Some felt marginally better, while most experienced significant positive shifts in mood, feelings, and body sensations along with an increase in their conscious connection to whatever they viewed as their “source.”

Try these exercises for yourself. A regular, daily program of expressing gratitude—and applying the Law of Attraction—can have immediate and long-term benefits on your body, mind, and spirit.