Gratitude journaling - write your way into positivity!

Let’s talk about gratitude 🥰

What is gratitude?  The Oxford English dictionary definition is “The quality of being thankful; readiness to show appreciation for and to return kindness.

Practising gratitude is recognising and acknowledging the things that others have done for you.  It’s recognising and acknowledging the things you have in your life.  

Thing is, you know you're grateful, you don’t take things for granted and you always say thank you when someone holds a door open for you! So, why actively go out of your way to show gratitude for all this fabulous stuff in your life?  

Actively practising gratitude daily has been shown to give you masses of benefits including (but not limited to)

• Improves your physical and mental health
• Reduces anxiety, depression and stress
• Improves your relationships
• Increases your productivity
• It aids your sleep, boosts your energy and your self-esteem
• You feel more positive emotions – which make you feel better overall!

Sound too good to be true?  According to studies by Emmons & McCullough in 2003 and Seligman, Steen, Park & Peterson 2005 – you could increase your long-term happiness by 10% when you write about what you are grateful for.  Plus, you only need to write for as little as FIVE minutes a day. A mere FIVE MINUTES a day and you can boost your long-term happiness by 10%! 

The more you show gratitude for what you have, the more satisfied you will feel.  The more satisfied you feel, the greater your self-esteem will be, leading to increasing your mental health wellbeing – helping to keep low mood at arm’s length (speaking from experience!) and lessening stress and anxiety as you feel more in control of your thoughts, feelings and emotions.

So, how can you practise gratitude and bring more gratitude into your life with your journal?

Your journal is a great place to compile your daily gratitude and is a brilliant way to form a regular journal practise if you’re new to journaling.  It’s a perfect place to write it all down and feel the love as you write, plus if you keep it in a separate journal just for gratitude, it’s great to be able to pick up and flick through if you need a positivity boost when feeling low or having a bad day.  A book full of beautiful and wonderful reminders of all you have in your life to read and raise a smile.

Gratitude journaling is an easy habit to create as well.  You can simply start with writing down 3 things you are grateful for in the morning to get your day off on a positive note.  Alternatively, you could end your day with writing three things you are grateful for that happened during the day. You could do both and sandwich your day with positivity.

Personally, I like to take it a step further and add the reasons for my gratitude in as much detail as I can, and I have a little ongoing challenge that I can’t repeat gratitude for the same thing in a month – this really helps me to look past the obvious and look for the little things that I might otherwise miss.  Anyone else grateful for their cheese grater as it makes life so much easier than having to slice cheese really thinly?

It’s not all about the good stuff though - Be grateful for the bad and tough times!  The things that go wrong, the mistakes we make, the bad experiences, the hurt, upset, stress and general crappiness we have and will experience.

A few years ago, I was once told that my “problem” was that my head was too full of rainbows and unicorns, of fluffy silver lined positive clouds and that life was not like that.  Apparently, I needed to stop dreaming and start living in the real world.  I confess, I was a little stunned and then really upset.  This outburst from a former colleague had come from me trying to lighten the atmosphere at work.  I was working in an office and all morning had been surrounded and listening to moaning and complaining about anything and everything.  It had been getting me down and so with each moan, I tried to find a positive to lift my spirits!  For example, “It’s miserable and raining again” became “Yay for rain nourishing the earth and giving us life”.

I think what upset me most was the perception that because I always look for the good in a situation, I was somehow deluded or naïve enough to think there was never anything negative in life.

Trust me, I am well aware that bad stuff can happen!  I have experienced dark times in my life and know that life isn’t always going to be full of colour, unicorns and rainbows.  Sometimes it’s dull and rains.

But, how you view these times is vital.  I believe that there is learning in everything to help you grow and it’s all about choice.  We can’t control the words, actions and thoughts of others but we can choose how we react, our thoughts, words and actions.  We can let the hard times pull us down, or we can use them to appreciate and be grateful for what we have now we have come through them.  We can find something positive in them through the learning they have given us with the experience and the personal strength we have discovered.

How you choose to view your world will determine your levels of happiness.  Practising gratitude will help you to see things from a different perspective and to see more positivity in all situations.  Personally, that’s something I find makes my life much more fun, enjoyable and pleasant so I’m sticking with it!

A few journal prompts to help you with your gratitude journaling -

Write about three things you are grateful to have in your life today

Who are you grateful to have spoken to today?

Name a household object that you use daily and makes your life easier

What happened today that you are grateful to have experienced?

Don't forget to write the reasons you are thankful to enhance the gratitude!