Gratitude Lists— Hi there, I am going to try to get back to writing on a regular basis.
The Thanksgiving break was wonderful! We had breakfast with my parents on the actual day; but otherwise, it was just a week of lounging and doing whatever we wanted to do.
We are coming off of a day filled with a health scare from our oldest child. He is okay and I am grateful for that fact.
Today I want to talk about gratitude lists and how they are changing my life. Around October 1 of this year, I started making daily gratitude lists. I started by naming around ten things I was grateful for in my journaling app. The list increased to twenty things in the following days. Now I am up to fifty things I count that I am grateful for daily.
When I started making these gratitude lists, I would just name the thing or the person. Last week, though, I started making my itemized gratitude list and then going back and writing out several sentences about why I was grateful for that thing or person or issue.
I noticed a pretty immediate change in my attitude, for the positive, once I was several days into this practice. Now that I am nearly two months in, I can say for certain that it has improved my mental health and depression levels pretty dramatically. My life satisfaction levels are dramatically better, too.
Gratitude lists in Saving Money
Often, I try to spend money to make myself happier in times when I am sad or depressed or feeling lacking in some way. I have noticed that my desire to spend money on unnecessary things has dropped dramatically since I started this practice. I was already doing less spending anyway. But now that I am naming each thing that I am grateful for and that practice is reminding me that I am happy with the things and people and circumstances in my life, I am less driven to seek out superficial consumer driven ways to seek out an endorphin rush.
I am certainly not saying that gratitude lists are improving all of my mental health woes. But I do think that my gratitude practice is improving my life in ways that I could not have predicted or anticipated, just from writing down what I am grateful for and why I am grateful for it.
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