How To Improve Your Life by Being More Grateful Every Day
Thanksgiving is over. We’ve each eaten enough turkey to require nearly eight hours of running to burn off (on average). And the long weekend of shopping and football continues for us all. Our attentions have all turned to Christmas and everything that comes with it.
The big day has passed. We can’t help the calendar’s marching forward, leaving behind a particular date. But what we can do is continue choosing to intentionally practice gratitude each day. And with surprising benefits to ourselves and everyone around us.
What if I told you that there was one thing, just one thing, that could add a whole host of benefits to your life. What If I said that one simple practice can:
- strengthen your immune system,
- lower your blood pressure,
- improve your sleep, and
- make you more alert, generous, forgiving, and outgoing
If I were reading this I might begin looking for the snake oil to come out. Surely what I’ve described above is too good to be true. Or, if it is true, surely it’s far too expensive for my budget. But it is true, and best of all it doesn’t cost anything at all.
Research by Dr. Robert Emmons, professor of psychology at UC Davis, shows that there are incredible benefits to practicing gratitude on a regular basis. But the difficulty we face is this: How do we become more grateful?
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We live in a wold that is constantly pressuring us to become dissatisfied. Advertising is nearly omnipresent and inescapable a. Every message is designed to make us feel dissatisfied and crave more, more, more. There’s always the pressure facing us to “keep up with the Joneses,” spend all (or more) of our income, and to still desire that next better thing.
So how can we practice gratitude in the face of such overwhelming opposition? How can we possibly hope to succeed when the deck is so stacked against us? I’ve found some great ideas:
1. Keep a gratitude Journal.
This is Dr. Emmon’s reccomendation and what he had subjects in his study do. He recommends “Setting aside time on a daily basis to recall moments of gratitude associated with ordinary events, your personal attributes, or valued people in your life.”¹ If you already have a daily journaling practice it becomes easy to insert this step into the process. All you have to do is write “Today I am grateful for _____.” If you don’t already journal (and I highly recommend that you do) all you need is a pen, paper, and a consistent time every day.
2. Reflect on How Your Life Has Improved
This can be over a period of months, years, or even decades. Complete the sentence: “My life is better today because ______.” Do you have a more fulfilling job? Is your marriage stronger? Are you more healthy? Even if in some ways you often long for “the good old days” almost everyone has some change to be thankful for.
3. Share what you’re grateful for every day.
This one comes from James Clear. He’s built gratitude into his dinner routine. When he sits to eat he says one thing he’s grateful for that day. This habit is awesome because it’s simple, but it also forces us to identify the small and simple things we have to be grateful for each day.
4. Pray
This one is the biggest for me. James 1:17 says that “Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights.”² In other words, God is the giver of everything good in my life, and in yours. What better way is there to express gratitude than to thank God for all the good in my life?
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These aren’t all the available ways to practice gratitude by any means, but they are some of the best ones I’ve seen. I don’t think it matters so much how we build gratitude into our daily lives as that we do build it into our daily lives.
How can you make gratitude an important part of your daily routine? How might you already be doing so? Let me know in the comments.
