Keeping a Gratitude Journal is Amazing for You!
Dear Friends,
Today I am sharing the first blog in the healthy habits series. This week I’ll be covering the healthy habits I suggested for our minds. Today I am sharing about one of my favorite healthy habits; keeping a gratitude journal! You might be wondering how is keeping a gratitude journal going to help me in my relationships with others? It is going to help you in several ways but the most prominent way it will help you is that it is going to shift your mindset to a more positive one which will make you happier. It also increases your grit and resilience and can combat and potentially prevent depression.
Let me explain. First, we tend to focus on negative events in our lives rather than positive events. This seems to be largely for self preservation. Negative events automatically get committed to long term memory, i.e. I touched the hot stove and I will forever remember not to touch it again because I was burned. Positive events go through a filter and do not always get committed to long term memory. Because of this we have to make an effort to commit positive events to long term memory by focusing on them, in this case by keeping a physical record of some of them. Keeping a gratitude journal helps you focus more on positive events in your life because you will be thinking about what you want to write down throughout the day and that will help keep you from focusing on the negative things which is what we are naturally inclined to do. Keeping a gratitude journal helps to keep you in the present because you are focusing on the positive things of here and now, it is like an interpersonal snapshot of a few beautiful fleeting moments of a day that you enjoyed, maybe even loved, and never want to forget. It is these things, the focus on the positive, the making an effort to commit positive things to long term memory, and the focus on being present in the here and now in your life that will make you a happier person. Happier people tend to be more pleasant to be around, and if you are making an effort to be present people will feel that you are not too distracted to have a relationship with them. That is how keeping a gratitude journal will help you in your relationships.
Your gratitude journal can be as simple and minimalistic or artistically decorated as you would like it to be as long as you use it! In your gratitude journal it is important that you write down three positive events that happen to you each day. There have been several studies that have shown how keeping a gratitude journal even for two weeks can effect our perspective in life to being more positive even six months after we have stopped keeping the journal. In those studies it seems that writing down three positive things was chosen because it was enough to keep you thinking about what you wanted to record for most if not all of the day, and it was not too many things to remember or record that might make the exercise feel tedious. Try to be specific with what you are grateful for, don’t just say you are grateful for the dinner you had everyday. It doesn’t need to be elaborate it could be something that seemed tiny and insignificant like looking into your spouse’s eyes just for a moment when they came home from work and greet you. Just a tiny fleeting moment like that that you want to remember.
Because a gratitude journal is a physical tangible object we can pick it up and look through it during difficult times to help us feel happier. It can also be a way to leave behind a legacy, like Charlotte Mason’s notebooks, so you cold leave behind your gratitude journal as a notebook to help your family be more grateful and perhaps learn more about you after you have passed away. If you’re a mother consider having your children keep gratitude journals and encourage your spouse to keep one as well so they can also reap the benefits of keeping one. Also consider practicing verbal gratitude regularly with your family where you all say what you’re grateful for that day perhaps around the dinner table, this could be recorded I suppose and a family gratitude journal could come out of it. What a charming keepsake that would be.
Of all the healthy habits I am going to be covering in this series I think the one might just be the most important and have the biggest impact on your life. I really hope you try it.
Your Friend,
Amanda
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