This week’s blog post is about gratefulness. I know from both personal experience and from working with others that feeling low and unaccomplished can be a heavy weight sitting on your shoulders. Positive Psychology talks about using gratitude as a tool to help people feel better about what they have. Gratitude helps us focus on what we do have and what we have accomplished rather than on what we do not have and what we have not accomplished. This may seem like a very small thing to do but it can actually help you to change your perspective on the world around you. I am not sitting here asking you to always look at the glass half full, that it unrealistic, but I am saying when things are tough, it really helps to take a minute and go “okay, I didn’t get what I wanted, but I do have friends that love me, a roof over my head and food to eat”. Sometimes the gratitude can be even more specific, such as being grateful for a specific friend or specific item in your life such as your computer or your guitar. Gratitude is what you make of it. An exercise I started doing recently and that I have found gets me through the harder days is a gratitude journal. When I wake up every morning I write down 3 things I am grateful for at the start of the day and repeat this at the end of the day as well. My goal was not to repeat any items within the same week. I found that this really helped me to look past what was making me feel low and unhappy with my life and really helped me to start and end my day on a positive note.
Attached to this post is a link to the Positive Psychology page on gratitude in case you wanted to look at a more in-depth literature selection or read about more ways to be grateful!