“There is always, always, always something to be thankful for.”
~Anonymous
I know that Thanksgiving has come and gone but cultivating an attitude of gratitude on a daily basis will have an amazing effect on your life.
Practicing gratitude is a workout for the soul: repeated awareness of the blessings in our lives helps us to dwell on the positive and wonderful in our lives. Our positive attitude helps us to master the change instead of being controlled by it. When we choose to focus our attitudes on the good stuff we find that we indeed have more.
A gratitude journal is a great way to take stock of all the good things in your life on a daily basis.
Here is how it works: Each day take the time to write down 3 - 5 things that you are grateful for. Things that you are thankful for today or just stuff you are generally thankful for, events, thoughts and actions that you are happy about or just the simple things that bring you happiness.
The act of writing down what makes your life good will help to focus your attention on the positive and will help you to create more of those moments for your life.
So start a gratitude journal with me and see how developing “an attitude of gratitude" all year will add to your well-being.
I know that cultivating an attitude of gratitude will bring good things into my life but in doing research for this article I found that while many emotions and personality traits are important to well-being, there is evidence that gratitude may be uniquely important.
According to Wikipedia, "A large body of recent work has suggested that people who are more grateful have higher levels of well-being. Grateful people are happier, less depressed, less stressed, and more satisfied with their lives and social relationships. Grateful people also have higher levels of control of their environments, personal growth, purpose in life and self acceptance. Grateful people have more positive ways of coping with the difficulties they experience in life, being more likely to seek support from other people, reinterpret and grow from the experience, and spend more time planning how to deal with the problem. Grateful people also have less negative coping strategies, being less likely to try to avoid the problem, deny there is a problem, blame themselves, or cope through substance use. Grateful people sleep better, and this seems to be because they think more positive thoughts just before going to sleep."
Gratitude enhances our sense of satisfaction while balancing the attitudes of greed and entitlement.
So, make Gratitude your daily practice, everyday, not just on Thanksgiving Day and see how much fuller life can be for you.
“Develop an attitude of gratitude and give thanks
for everything that happens to you,
knowing that every step forward is a step toward achieving
something bigger and better than your current situation.”
~Brian Tracy