The Power of Practicing Gratitude

If you started each morning thinking about at least one reason why you feel gratitude, over time, you would have a different perspective on each day that awaits you. If you ended each day by writing down something you had experienced and felt gratitude for, over time, you would feel your soul growing serene. You would find your balance! Every day gives us at least one reason why we need to be grateful. In order to discover it and truly connect to it, it is essential to look within ourselves and learn to practice gratitude, a beneficial, long-term habit for emotional health.

Daily Practice of Gratitude

One of the most powerful ways to make your brain expect more joy and less stress is to focus on gratitude. Saying thank you, holding the door for someone, or asking someone how their day is going - these little moments can change the tone of your whole day. Here are a few ways in which you can focus on gratitude on a daily basis:

1. Keep a journal focusing on gratitude: establish a daily practice to remind yourself of the gifts, benefits, and all the good things you enjoy. Remembering the moments of gratitude associated with ordinary events, your attributes, or the people in your life you appreciate gives you the chance to bring a lasting attitude of gratitude.
2. Remember the bad things: to be grateful for your current state, it is helpful to remember the hard times you once went through. When you remember how difficult life was and how far you have come, you create a contrast in your mind, and this contrast is a fertile ground for gratitude.
3. Share gratitude with others: research has found that expressing gratitude can strengthen relationships. So, the next time your partner, friend, or family member does something you appreciate, make sure you tell them that.
4. Come back to your senses: through our senses (the ability to touch, see, smell, taste, and hear), we gain an appreciation of what it means to be human and helps us realize the joy of being alive. Viewed through the perspective of gratitude, the human body is not only a miraculous creation but also a gift.
5. Use visual reminders: because the two main obstacles to gratitude are forgetfulness and lack of awareness, visual reminders can serve as clues to trigger grateful thoughts. Often, the best visual reminders are other people.
6. Make a promise to yourself to practice gratitude: research shows that making a promise to perform a behavior increases the likelihood that the action will be accomplished. Therefore, write down your own promise of gratitude - it may sound something like “I promise I'll count my blessings every day.” Make sure to post it somewhere where you'll remember it every day.
7. Be aware of the power words possess: grateful people have a certain linguistic style that uses the language of gifts, blessings, and luck but also abundance. In the practice of gratitude, you should not focus on the good things inherent in yourself but rather on the good things that others have done in your name.
8. Express specific practices: these include smiling, saying thank you, and writing letters of gratitude. By living through this movement of gratitude, you will trigger this emotion more and more often.
9. Think outside the box: if you want to take advantage of opportunities to strain your gratitude muscles, you must creatively seek new situations and circumstances in which to feel gratitude.

Last but not least, enjoy the good things! On days when gratitude is difficult to find, connect with your senses. This meditation invites you to cultivate gratitude by slowing down and observing what you can see, hear, touch, smell, and taste. Nothing special needs to happen to practice gratitude. Maybe it's something as simple as feeling grateful for your morning coffee or the good book you found at your local library. Explore this simple practice to appreciate the little things that happen in your day-to-day life.

Benefits of practicing gratitude

1. Improving your perspective on life Certainly, life is not just about good days when everything goes according to expectations. Life also consists of uncomfortable situations and experiences (which are absolutely natural) that can contribute to personal development when analyzed. Even on a day when it seemed like everything went wrong, you can find a reason to feel gratitude - a message from a loved one, a flowering tree that you saw on a street, or the fact that you got up in the morning.
2. Improving the quality of your relationships Expressing gratitude to your friends, partner, family, and co-workers can strengthen the relationships you have with them. It would be a good idea to tell them more often how much you appreciate them, including for seemingly simple things. For example, when a co-worker keeps you a seat at lunch when you are late, or when your partner wakes up before you to make breakfast.
3. The healthy management of stress Gratitude techniques, such as journaling, are often recommended for healthy management of stress and less favorable emotions. In order to get through challenging times, have a clear perspective on your life, and understand yourself better, it would be a good idea to write down in your journal, at the end of each day, the reasons why you feel gratitude.
4. Better quality of sleep Practicing gratitude before bed helps you get a restful sleep. Focusing your attention and connecting to the things that bring you joy helps you fall asleep more easily and peacefully. At the same time, the chances of waking up the next day with a better mood and more positive energy increase.