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Gratitude


I am practicing writing things I am grateful for in my Happynichi (ok, I don’t doodle enough in it to be a real one… as I have said before I need to work on it). In doing this, it makes me look for more things that make me grateful. This has given me a different perspective on my life.  I feel like I am getting less frustrated and enjoying life a little more.  I sit at my planner at night and take the time to jot down my thoughts.

This is where the keeping a mood tracker or gratitude list fits in.  Looking back on things that make you thankful gives you that feeling again.  I know we don’t all write just our plans in our planners, but we write things that happened and make us feel a certain way.  We like to make our planners pretty and filled with color because they make us happy, more than likely we already are jotting down those grateful moments.

I also think that sometimes we might not be able to fully express our gratitude to the person we want to.  Like when you go to Aldi and there is already a quarter in the cart or if you are fortunate enough to have someone pay it forward in the drive thru line. Sometimes you thank someone and you don’t get a response… its ok, you know you did it. They know you are grateful and sometimes they don’t know what to say.

This brought me back to a meeting I had at an old job where we had a guest speaker from The Mayo Clinic come and talk to us about gratitude, Amit Sood, MD. Dr. Sood has some great articles on the Mayo Clinic website as well as studying happy people. In this session, he gave us assignments for the first thing we do when we wake up in the morning, before we even get out of bed – the easiest one is to think of 5 people you are grateful for and why you are thankful for them.  To take those few minutes, laying there thinking about people and being thankful to them, it gives you a positive start on your day. I try to use this practice every day; it doesn’t have to be people either.  Eventually you start to feel repetitive, but you can use moments or pets.

Resources other things to look at:




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