Daily gratitude diary
A gratitude diary will help you in your daily reflections and allow you to set a positive direction for the day in the morning. Taking five minutes to appreciate the positive things in your life that you often take for granted is an extremely useful practice. Awareness of even the small things to be grateful for balances the weight of the difficulties and challenges that everyone faces in life, restoring a more proportionate outlook and encouraging a more positive mindset.
Filling out a Gratitude Journal only takes a few minutes, but it helps you to become aware and focus your mind on small reflections that can turn your day into a positive one.
I wonder if you’ve ever heard of gratitude journals?
They are very well known abroad and are called Gratitude Journals. These are somewhat special diaries in which a person writes down the events and feelings of the day for which they feel grateful.
Every day, time is spent filling out a diary, scrolling through the experiences in your head and focusing on what brought you a sense of joy, no matter how big or small, for which you say a sincere “thank you!”.
The content of the article:
- What are the benefits of keeping a gratitude diary?
- What is gratitude?
- What is the connection between gratitude and happiness?
- What are the benefits of practicing gratitude
And what to write in it? A change of perspective Do you agree with this?
What are the benefits of keeping a gratitude diary?
Making a daily list of things to be grateful for can help reduce daily stress, which will have a positive impact on our psychological well-being in the long run.
Is it possible?
In this sense, recalling moments of gratitude can serve to restore resources that can be used to adapt to or overcome moments of stress and difficulty.
This is one of the functions of a gratitude diary: to keep an archive of events for which you can feel happy, so that you can pull it out at the right time, i.e. when you are sad or stressed.
But a gratitude diary is more than just a diary.
What is gratitude?
I believe that gratitude can be defined as an emotion or feeling closely related to joy, which is born and felt within oneself and which can find expression and spread: one can feel grateful for a kindness received, a fortunate coincidence, an achievement, a kindness given, a word heard.
Gratitude is also a skill: the ability to enjoy the pleasures we encounter in our lives, big or small.
And gratitude, after all, is at the heart of the worldview: never take anything for granted.
Gratitude is not just about saying “thank you” when you receive a gift, it is about remembering that life is now, focusing on what is happening here and now, appreciating our existence, giving value to who we are and what we have, not what we lack.
Finding reasons to be grateful trains our minds to look for the joy in our lives and thus focus on the positive things, no matter how big or small.
For example, saying thank you for what you do is a good exercise to make our actions valuable.
What is the connection between gratitude and happiness?
Robert A. Emmons, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Davis, is one of the leading experts in this area of psychology known as
He and his team have been studying the phenomenon that grateful people are not only happier, but also more helpful, more forgiving of themselves and others, and less materialistic.
One of his studies involved a sample of over 1,000 people who were divided into three groups:
- The first group had the task of writing down events for which they were grateful that had happened during the week;
- The second group had to write down what annoyed or upset them;
- The third group noted the events of the week that affected them (whether positive or negative).
After 10 weeks, people who were tasked with writing down events for which they were grateful were more optimistic and satisfied with their lives than the other two groups: they reported feeling emotions such as happiness and enthusiasm, sleeping better, having fewer symptoms and physical discomfort, and being more aware of situations in which they could be helpful.
The result of another experiment conducted and filmed by Soul Pancake on the relationship between gratitude and happiness, which they filmed, is also food for thought.
What are the benefits of practicing gratitude
So, practicing gratitude means training our mindset to focus on the pleasant aspects of our days, it means changing the perspective from which we look at the world and focusing on what and who has given us at least a moment of well-being.
It means learning to look at ourselves with kindness, which does not mean despising ourselves, but rather accepting and appreciating ourselves for who we are, and recognising the results we have achieved, thinking that these are achievements made through merit, not luck, and that if we have made mistakes, we will do better next time.
From this perspective, keeping a gratitude diary and writing down what you are grateful for from time to time can only help to boost your self-esteem. As Philip Watkins writes in his article “Gratitude and the Good Life”: “Just as gratitude enhances what one sees in others, it seems to enhance the good that one sees in oneself.”
Feeling and showing gratitude to others, as well as to yourself, is a skill and a gift. It strengthens interpersonal relationships and increases self-esteem. There are studies that have examined the role of gratitude in improving love relationships.
Specifically, in a longitudinal study of married couples, researchers tested the effects of gratitude at three different points in time over four years after marriage.
The results showed that gratitude contributes to the reciprocal process of relationship maintenance: each partner’s behaviour towards relationship maintenance and gratitude influences the other’s behaviour, perceptions and feelings, which in turn influences the other’s behaviour, perceptions and feelings.
And so it is also good to pay attention to gratitude in the family, especially in the relationship between parents and children: how often do adults demand gratitude from their children! And they certainly have a reason to do so, because being a parent is a constant and uninterrupted job that often doesn’t involve holidays. However, being a child is also tiring.
Therefore, it is important that adults first practice gratitude and thankfulness with each other, as well as with children and youth. Remember that young people will be grateful not because they are told to be, but because they see their role models doing it every day.
In this way, gratitude training becomes a help for ourselves and for the relationships we value.
But how do you write a gratitude diary?
First of all, you must realise that you are doing a serious business and you must treat it as such: it is a commitment to yourself to develop your own well-being.
There will be days when you don’t feel like it, and that’s when you need to be persistent and not give up, motivated by the goal of building your own peace. Let’s try to consistently and punctually dedicate a few minutes of our day to this: every day, at about the same time, let’s set aside time to reflect on the day and keep track of events, situations, and encounters for which we can say “thank you”.
To the description of the facts, you can add the feeling you experienced (“I felt a comforting warmth”, “My heart was filled with joy”, “Tears came to my eyes”, “I felt my heart beat faster”, “My mind was clearer”…) and the “why” for each reason to be grateful, i.e. what the gesture or thought meant to you.
In the evening, before going to bed, recalling the pleasant moments of the day can help to calm you down and thus ensure a restful sleep. In the morning, on the other hand, reflecting on the pleasant events of the previous day can have the effect of recharging your batteries to face the next day with more energy.
A gratitude diary can be supplemented with quotes and phrases read or heard in podcasts, books, films that are related to gratitude or for which you should be grateful. In addition, for those who can draw, a gratitude diary can be filled with drawings and sketches describing a moment, object, or person.
And what should I write about it?
In a gratitude diary, you shouldn’t write only about important events, on the contrary: life is made up of small everyday things, isn’t it?
We can look back and write down on paper what made us laugh or smile, what gave us comfort or reassurance, what brought us pleasure. Things like those described by Francesco Piccolo, for example, in his Moments of Minor Happiness:
- “When my wife wears one of my shirts”
- “The satisfaction of being able to look into the fridge of a bar or supermarket and pull out the bottle of milk with the longest expiry date […]”
- “Water when you’re thirsty, bed when you’re sleepy”
A change of perspective
Thanking yourself and others for who you are, for what you do, for what you bring is a good exercise to make our actions valuable, to try to look at ourselves and others with less judgement and more understanding.” – Dushevnyjlekar.com🧡
It means changing your perspective on things. It doesn’t happen overnight, it doesn’t happen overnight: it takes a bit of practice.
Follow the link to find out:
Mindfulness is a centuries-old practice that originated in the Buddhist tradition and was designed to alleviate suffering…
