The impressive benefits to the simple act of writing down the things for which we’re grateful for can do wonders in our life.

Yes, the practice of gratitude is science backed technique to improve quality of our life. In fact, researchers have reported many times, gratitude has great social, psychological, physical and emotional health benefits. 

It says that being grateful for simple things like good family, healthy food, comfortable home, better sleep, good relationships, caring friends, successful career, salary, money, wealth, etc. help to attract more of good things in our life.

If gratitude practice is so beneficial, the question is how to make it part of our daily life? 

Though there are many ways to express gratitude, writing is considered as most effective tools. And perhaps the most popular practice is to keep “gratitude journal”.

Yes, we can reap the greatest psychological rewards from gratitude journaling.

Also Check : When Looking For Happiness, Find Gratitude

Keeping a gratitude journal

The basic practice for gratitude journaling is straightforward. Here we can record things for which we are thankful for.

To simply start with, we have to record basic things for which we are grateful for an entire day. These basic things could be waking up fresh in the morning, having a glass of clean water for drinking, chatting with close friends, discussion over new projects, etc At the beginning, we can just write a couple of bullet points. 

Once we write down the list of good things or good experiences in our life, we can move further. In next step, we can elaborate in detail about a particular thing for which we are grateful for.

For example, thank you universe. I wake up in fresh mood in the morning. It’s a great blessing to wake up with positive mindset and happy feelings. It keeps me energized for whole day. I feel productive.

Focusing on specific things could be more powerful experience.

We can even write a thank-you note to someone every day. People around us, especially our mother, father, siblings, friends, teacher or colleague has special place in our life. Writing an appreciation note about their presence makes us feel good.

Why it works ?

The intention of gratitude journaling is simple. It forces our mind to pay attention to good things in our life. Translating thoughts into concrete language, especially in the written form, help to change our thinking pattern. Writing helps us to organize our thoughts, facilitate integration and help us to put our experiences in a better context. 

In other words, gratitude journaling make a picture more clear. It allows us to see the meaning of events going on in our life and analyze them for creating a better life.

Every day when we are grateful for new things or new happenings in life, we realize that we already have so much to live a great life. When we start having more gratitude and start writing it down, we start training our brain to find more things to be grateful about. This can help us to generate more positive emotions and feel more optimistic about our life. 

In fact, the entire experience of gratitude makes us feel that our life is gifted with precious things. 

In essence, we already have bunch of pleasant things that makes our life meaningful and worthy to live.

What sets gratitude journals apart from other kinds of journaling is that the content focuses exclusively on expressing appreciation. This puts us in a right frame of mind.

It doesn’t necessarily important that everything is positive and happy, but we can see more clearly that things are working together for our good. We can recognize all of those things, people, ideas, actions that is making our life more grateful.

As such there is no specific rule for gratitude journaling. We can write every day or two to three times a week. But the idea is to stay as consistent as possible. We can write at any time be it morning, evening or night whatever suits to our daily routine. Coming to writing part, it could be great to do it on paper with pen rather than on any digital platform. 

So, if you are in search effective tool to achieve peace of mind, start your journey of gratitude today.

Disclaimer : The purpose of this blog is to create mental health awareness. This information is not a replacement for medical treatment or counseling therapy.