Make Your Own Gratitude Journal

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Stress, work, and family responsibilities, and a similar routine day in and day out can lead to negative thinking and unhappiness. Finding ways to refocus on the positive can help you break this cycle. Keeping a gratitude journal is one of the best ways to retrain your thoughts to focus on the positives in your life. Here are some things to keep in mind when starting your own gratitude journal.

1.) Choose Your Journal
What works best for you? Do you enjoy writing and find it helps you slow down and connect with what you’re feeling? Is typing your preferred method of getting thoughts down quickly? Decide what format fits your needs best. You may also want to decorate your journal in ways that remind you of your purpose or help you feel more positive.  
For example: attach or paste photos that make you happy on the cover or random pages, draw pictures that depict positive feelings about the things you’re grateful for, write inspirational quotes in the margins, and notate special anniversaries and write about why you are grateful for those events and people.

2.) Be Consistent
You should write in your gratitude journal every day. If you like to start your day off on a positive note, write in your journal after you eat breakfast. If you want to use your gratitude journal to reflect after a long and stressful day, write in it before you go to bed.

3.) Write at Least 3-5 Things
Decide on a goal for how many things you’d like to express gratitude for each day, but be sure that it is no less than three to five. You can write your entries as a list or small paragraphs. It may be hard coming up with three items in the beginning, but once you get in the habit, it will be easy to see the positive in all the things you do.

4.) Be as Specific as You Can
In the beginning, it may be hard to find things you’re grateful for so you may be tempted to list things like “I’m grateful for my job.” Instead, you could write “I really like the people I work with every day” or “I’m grateful to have a job that lets me have a flexible schedule to work around child care.

5.) Turn Negatives into Positives
Help transform your thoughts by finding the positive side of negative situations. Instead of dwelling on things that aren’t working out – maybe financial hardships, health problems, etc – try to find a positive in those situations. For example: “I don’t feel well and I’m worried about my health condition, but I’m grateful for the insight it has given me into how much I want to get out of life.”

 

Comments

  1. UnknownJuly 24, 2017 at 5:26 PM

    3-5 daily for all in my family over dinner. Round robin at dinner time

    ReplyDelete

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