One of the daily habits I have cultivated in the past few years is that of practicing active gratitude. I emphasize the word active as this is the key to actually getting the benefits that this daily practice promises. Let me start by explaining the mechanics of this daily habit.
Each morning as part of my daily routine, I do a bit of journaling and part of the journal is to create a list of three things I am grateful for.
Then each night, when I’m going to bed as part of my bedime/wind down routine – I make another list of three things that I am grateful for.
Somedays, I have the same thing on the list in the morning as at night. Most days though, the lists are different. This practice bookends the day in a very powerful manner, and it helps to keep my spirits and energy levels at a high level.
It can take me 30 seconds to 15 minutes depending upon where I am at. When I am operating in flow, the list comes quickly. I find that on my most difficult days – it is much harder to come up with three things that I can be actively grateful for. These are the days that I need to spend even more time to get focused on the goodness in my life and somedays I get grateful for the lack of badness in my life too. Duality is at play many days in one of these lists, as I give thanks for things that I have eliminated or avoided entirely in my life. Sometimes, this is just as useful as giving thanks for those things that are awesome in my life.
So what kinds of things can land on these lists? Well, in my own journal I have given thanks for things like this:
- Having my sons at home with me
- An incredible night’s sleep
- Light blocking curtains in my bedroom
- New air conditioning that actually works
- An incredible team at work
- Being able to attend a concert that I have planned for months
- Having medical insurance
- A chocolate affogato
- Time with my parents over Father’s Day weekend
I think you get the idea. The topics can be profound and monumental or they can be mundane. The point here is that this is your list, and that you truly feel the thanks and gratitude in your gut and bones. This is the key to this practice of gratitude. If you are just writing down stuff to ‘check the box’ of getting these things down on paper or virtually in your online journal.
Gratitude is not something you think, it is something you feel.
If you can feel gratitude, truly stop, and feel it deeply – you will have more ‘gratitudinal capacity.’ Gratitude is something that many of the most successful people practice. It has come up over and over again in my study of modern day success stories. Oprah Winfrey has a great quote that I think is useful for our consideration:
“I practice being grateful,” says Winfrey, and she knows what you’re thinking. “And a lot of people say, ‘Oh Oprah, that’s easy for you ’cause you got everything!'”
No, says Winfrey: “I got everything because I practiced being grateful.”
This increased capacity for the gratefulness for the wonderful life you have will enrich the quality of your life. It helps to disperse self pity and it expands your perspective beyond yourself as you cultivate the habit. This notion of gratitude also increases your connectedness to the broader community, and this notion of connectedness is a key to long term success. I’ll outline what I mean about connectedness being an important key to happiness in a future post.
Being able to enrich others with this notion of gratefulness on a daily basis is among the most powerful topics I’ve shared since I started this 84 day journey with you.
The benefits of gratitude are numerous, and a number of studies have been published that outline the benefits. One of the studies that I have read was published in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology back in 2003.
You can find the detailed findings via this link over at Berkeley.
Here’s a meaningful quote from the study:
“Seen in the light of this model, gratitude is effective in increasing well-being as it builds psychological, social, and spiritual resources. Gratitude inspires prosocial reciprocity (McCullough et al., 2002), and indeed, is one of the primary psychological mechanisms thought to underlie reciprocal altruism (Trivers, 1971). The experience of gratitude, and the actions stimulated by it, build and strengthen social bonds and friendships. Moreover, encouraging people to focus on the benefits they have received from others leads them to feel loved and cared for by others (Reynolds, 1983). Therefore, gratitude appears to build friendships and other social bonds. These are social resources because, in times of need, these social bonds are wellsprings to be tapped for the provision of social support. Gratitude, thus, is a form of love, a consequence of an already formed attachment as well as a precipitating condition for the formation of new affectional bonds (Roberts, in press). Gratitude is also likely to build and strengthen a sense of spirituality, given the strong historical association between gratitude and religion (Emmons & Crumpler, 2000; McCullough et al., 2002). Finally, to the extent that gratitude, like other positive emotions, broadens the scope of cognition and enables flexible and creative thinking, it also facilitates coping with stress and adversity (Aspinwall, 1998; Folkman & Moskowitz, 2000).”
So in many ways gratitude will immediately benefit you the day you practice it, and it is also a deposit of reserves for the days that invariably arrive where you will need a little extra self love in your life.
In the study – they also confirm the notion of ‘experiencing gratitude’ or what I called out as active gratitude. I have done the ‘making the list of three things’ mechanical gratitude recap, and it is hollow both in feelings and in results. When you actually experience/feel the gratitude – you will find more things in your life that you will be grateful for.
Practicing daily gratitude is upward spiral inducing. That’s another quote from the article as well.
So do you have 5-10 minutes to start priming your gratitudinal capacity? Give it a shot, today.
I promise the results will flow in time.