The Importance of Gratitude and How to Work it Into Your Life
We experience life through our emotions. We are meant to cherish our existence by feeling love, joy, peace, and enlightenment.
For thousands of years, humanity has realized that gratitude is the key to fulfillment. All religions predominantly use prayer as a regular practice to communicate with the divine source of our lives.
Gratitude has a positive effect on our overall well-being, helping to improve our relationships, optimism, happiness. It gives us stronger self-control, better physical and mental health, and steers us to an overall better life. With all those benefits, why aren’t you taking the time to write in a gratitude journal yet?
Benefits of a Gratitude Journal
Gratitude is crucial for our contentment, and therefore, developing a regular practice to solicit it using a gratitude journal helps in reaping the incredible benefits of journaling.
A gratitude journal provides the means to procure tangible benefits from gratitude exercises. At the end of your day or week, when you write down all the positive events that occurred and why they made you happy, your stress levels go down significantly, and you get an extra sense of calm while sleeping.
The 15 to 30 minutes spent writing in your gratitude journal results in miraculously serving as an antidote to negative emotions like cynicism, anger, entitlement, and resignation.
You cultivate a new outlook and self-awareness of what is vital to you and what you genuinely appreciate in your life. By observing what you are grateful for, you realize what matters to you, and hence you can decide on what you should focus on.
The comfort of the privacy of your gratitude journal gives you the audacity to write your heart out without the fear of judgment from anyone else. In times when you feel low, reading previous entries from the journal is a great way to count your blessings as you recollect all the right things and people in your life.
Maintaining the Gratitude Journal
Practice the habit of writing your gratitude journal for 15 minutes every night. You could choose to write it less frequently, but at least write it once a week if not every other day.
Keep the journal in your bedroom, where you can see it before you go to sleep so that you remember to write in it. Just the sight of the journal could serve as a symbol of gratitude that gives you a feeling of appreciation.
Make as many entries in the journal as you feel like, choosing to keep them brief. Five to ten entries a day is a good number to aim for. If you choose to use JRNL for your gratitude journal, you can use your phone or tablet to jot down an entry at any point during the day.
What is life’s most significant blessing? What keeps us piously alive? What would help us to remain satiated with the joy of living?
These are all questions to answer in your gratitude journal. Ready for a challenge? Try our 7-Day Gratitude Writing Challenge for Journalers.
