How to Practice Gratitude By Shalu Chawla
Gratitude is an extremely powerful emotion. It motivates people to see what they have to be thankful for even when the world around them seems like such a negative and unforgiving place. Having an attitude of gratitude will wipe away a lot of the stress people would otherwise feel on a daily basis, leaving behind a hopeful outlook on their lives. This, in turn, will have a powerfully positive impact on their overall state of health and well-being. Consequently, it is important to get into a habit of practicing gratitude by actively doing things that express what a person is grateful for in order to reap the benefits of living a happier life.
Journaling to Show Gratitude Some people practice gratitude by journaling about the things they are grateful for in their lives. By identifying the things that they appreciate, this helps them to see why life is truly worth living. Each of the items they journal about becomes one more reason to help them understand why their lives are so thoroughly blessed. Often this is something that is hidden from their view until they begin journaling in this manner.
Avoiding Negativity One of the best ways to practice gratitude is to actively seek out and remove negativity from a person’s environment. For a lot of people, this means turning off negative media and movies. These sources of constant, conditioned negativity do nothing to benefit people, and only serve to drag them down. Replacing these sources of negativity with more positive interests, and avoiding overly negative people creates a much healthier emotional environment. This generally leads to far less anxiety and other health-related problems because a positive emotional state vastly improves how the body functions on an epigenetic level.
Doing Something Nice for Others
People who tend to identify what they have to be grateful for in life also start to place a much higher value on doing nice things for others. The gift of gratitude is that it teaches us how to love others and how to want to be part of the solution, not cause problems for self and others. This could be an activity like sending a card to a sick friend, helping out more at work to lighten other people’s burdens, and going that extra mile to pay someone a kind compliment to brighten their day. Bringing gratitude into a person’s daily routine like this not only helps others, but it will reduce a lot of fighting and negative emotions, which would otherwise cause far more drama than is desired.
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