Starting your day with gratitude, is a fantastic way to bring more positive energy into your life. By making a conscious decision to acknowledge what you are grateful for each morning you can enhance your mood and give yourself a better outlook on the day ahead.
It is all too easy for us to dwell on the negatives and brush off the positives. We live in a world where everyone is striving for perfection, competing and comparing ourselves to each other. We turn on the news, we distract ourselves with social media, looking at false images of what we and our lives should be like. It can make us think that we are not enough, or we don't have enough and we constantly strive for more. It can be exhausting!
Have you ever woken up and immediately thought about all the chores you have to do that day, or that meeting you don't particularly want to attend, or do you think about the battle you will have getting the kids ready for school? How does that make you feel?
Bringing more gratitude into our lives can help us to become more present and happier in this moment. We can learn to appreciate the abundance of what we already have rather than constantly wishing for more in the future. Afterall, the present is where we are, the past is the past and the future is unknown, no matter, how hard you try to plan or predict it.
So, instead of thinking ... I'm not good enough yet because I don't have ...., I will feel so much better once I ..., I can't wait until .... (these thoughts can be telling us that the present moment is not enough and can bring us into a more negative state of mind). When bringing gratitude into our minds, these thoughts can still happen, we can still make plans and try to create our futures but we remain grounded and happy with what we already have. If we can intentionally allocate just a little bit of time every day to guiding our thoughts to appreciate all that is good in our lives, in this present moment we can bring ourselves into a more stable and positive state of mind. Using phrases like, I am so grateful that I have ..., I am very lucky that I am ...., I really appreciate my ....means that even if our future does not go quite as planned, we can remain in balance, be more content and more adaptable to life.
How Do I Start?
Get yourself a journal, diary or note book.
Every morning when you wake up, write down at least 3 things that you are grateful for. Put each one in a sentence starting with "Today, I am grateful for ....."
Keep your book with you and during the day if something doesn't go according to plan, make a point of reading what you have written, to remind yourself of what you were grateful for that morning.
Before you go to sleep, read it again and then you might want to add 3 good things that happened to you that day.
The things that you are grateful for don't have to be that elaborate, it can be as simple as: Today, I am grateful that the sun is shining. Today, I am grateful for feeling healthy. Today, I am grateful for the love & support of my family. As time goes on and this becomes part of your daily routine, you may want to write down more than 3 things, you may want to keep writing down everything that comes in to your head. Also, it doesn't have to be different things every day. You can write Today, I am grateful the sun is shining on every sunny day. You can be grateful for the love and support of your family every day. The same applies to your 3 good things that happened that day. That could be a simple as my partner made me a cup of tea, my son finished his homework on time or I got my promotion at work.
Why don't you give it a go? Challenge yourself to try it for 3 weeks? Notice if you can feel any difference in your day to day mood? Let me know how you get on and feel free to leave a comment below.
Have the best day!
Tania x