Hello readers! Let’s talk about a very powerful and life-changing emotion today- Gratitude.
Gratitude wakes us up to the beauty and magic of everyday life, but we have to choose it. It can transform your life and open up incredible opportunities for love, joy, and success. It shifts your perspective and helps you find the good in each and every moment. When we create the space for a simple daily routine of reflection and doing the work, and over time the benefits start to show up in our lives in overwhelming ways. People who practice gratitude consistently feel more generous, compassionate, and connected to others. Ultimately gratitude is one of the great keys to unlocking happiness.
In this article, we walk you through the steps of creating a gratitude journal and give you advice on how to maintain the habit of writing down what you’re grateful for.
Step 1: Select Your Journal With Care
Make the ritual of gratitude journaling as much fun as possible.
Pick out a journal that visually stimulates you (you love how it looks!), or decorates an ordinary, inexpensive notebook with cherished pictures of people or things you love and care about (your children or pets, or inspirational words and images).
Get creative and have fun personalizing your gratitude journal. You are more likely to maintain the nightly habit of journaling if you love the look of your journal.
Not feeling particularly creative?
Make your journal selection a special, rewarding experience. Go to a store that carries a variety of journals, or search online and treat yourself to a journal that inspires you. Gift yourself with a gratitude journal that you’ll love to look at every night.
Step 2: Create A Ritual
Even before you begin writing in your gratitude journal, choose a ritual to repeat every time you journal. Consistency is the key here. Rituals implement a call to action for our mind, body and spirit by our muscle memory. Importantly, rituals create habits.
A few “ritual” suggestions are:
Lighting a candle
Playing a favorite song
Drinking a cup of tea
Taking a relaxing bath
Saying a calming prayer
Chanting a meditation
Anything you decide to do is a great way to let your mind and body know that it’s time to focus on gratitude. Whatever you choose as a ritual, do it consistently. It strengthens the ability to turn action into a habit, and it’s usually fun and relaxing, giving us the motivation to form our habit.
Step 3: Express Your Gratitude
Gratitude journals can take on any desired format. Some journalers make a gratitude list of items to express gratitude — others draw images or create a collage of pictures; while a few write a poem to capture and motivate their gratitude.
Expressing your gratitude is very personal and totally up to you.
Feel the gratitude as you write about it.
Even at the end of a terrible day, try to think of at least one good thing that happened that you can be grateful for, no matter how slight. Forget everything else, and just for a moment, write about that one, good, life event and why you feel grateful for it.
Step 4: Celebrate Quality
Our minds respond better to quality over quantity. One truly grateful, paragraph content can outweigh a list of 50 items. The emotion of gratitude is difficult to connect with a long list.
Dive deep into your gratitude journal about even minor topics, to help you reinforce gratitude in your life. Observe from within as your body and mind get used to experiencing gratitude. The deeper you feel gratitude for even the smallest parts of your life, the easier gratitude sensing becomes for you.
Step 5: Bookend Your Day
Regular, nightly writing in a gratitude journal is important because it closes your day on a high note. It empowers the feeling in your mind, and helps you infuse the thoughts into your spirit. This cue to your subconscious uses dreams to process and understand the important feelings you associate with those thoughts.
Celebrate a positive attitude for the start of your day by re-reading your gratitude journal entry in the morning. It is simply a double-ended bonus!
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