E55: How To Incorporate Gratitude Practices Into Your Daily Routine

Gratitude is a gift — and gratitude changes everything. When we allow ourselves to look critically at our lives through the lens of gratitude, and to focus on the many reasons we have to be grateful, life gets better. ... A focus on gratitude reduces stress and increases levels of contentment. It truly is life-changing.

Resilient people proactively cultivate positive emotions like humor, gratitude and optimism. You don’t even have to find anything to be grateful for. The simple act of looking for the positive decreases the stress hormone cortisol by 23%. Just looking for something to appreciate increases serotonin and dopamine, the feel-good neurochemicals in most antidepressants.

Gratitude affects your brain at a neurological level. A gratitude practice has a positive impact on: sleep, mood, alertness, physical risk markers for future disease, happiness, better financial decision making, problem solving, optimism, productivity, and goal orientation. People who practice gratitude are perceived as more likable, have fewer aches and pains, have increased self esteem, and make friends more easily. Practicing gratitude lowers stress, enhances empathy, lowers your risk of cancer, high blood pressure, and diabetes, and it improves your immune system and cardiovascular health.

Our brain has a negativity bias, causing it to constantly scan the environment for what’s wrong.  You can train the brain by sitting in a positive experience for 15-20 seconds. Really soak in that beautiful moment, appreciate it, and relish the feeling. You have to deliberately sustain and internalize positive emotions to transfer them from short-term memory to long-term storage. You can’t just have the experience. You have to install it.

There is literally no downside to practicing gratitude.

Ways to incorporate gratitude into you daily life. 

• Journaling for 5 minutes a day about what you are grateful for can enhance long-term happiness by 10%.
• Write a letter, send a text or email thanking someone. 
• Give a compliment.
• Say thank you.  
• Post or tweet gratitude 
• Post a positive review 
• Call you family or friend and thank them
• Hang words around your house (sticky notes, dry erase marker on mirror, screen saver, flip calendar)
• Round robin at dinner table
• Driving reminders
• Bedtime routine
• Set your phone alarm
• Add gratitude songs to your playlist
• When faced with a challenge - first focus on the positive - state it aloud first
• Turn off the negativity (news, FB, sad tv)
• Surround yourself with positivity people and places
• Create a gratitude jar, or simply recount the best parts of your day when you fall asleep at night. We are so busy in our constant search for happy that we forget happiness isn’t a trait, it’s a skill.
  
  

You have the power to change your brain and your life.   Soon your practice will become a habit.