Time to Be Thankful

I have recently realized I’ve been focusing a lot on what is going wrong with my life and not being thankful enough. So how does one go about being thankful in their life? Do you take time every day to be thankful for what you have? Taking time to be thankful can also help improve your mood. I’m going to work on being more thankful and you can too!

Being thankful can be hard. We have so much going on in the world today and we’re being pulled in so many different directions that we often get overwhelmed. We’re busy thinking about the next project at work that must get done, what to cook for dinner, and how the kids have soccer practice tonight. Our brains are also wired to be pulled towards the negative anymore. We think about problems because we know we have to solve them. We don’t think about all the things going right in our lives, we don’t think about the positives. The thing is – we have to train our brains to notice the things we need to be thankful for.

You can do this in a few different ways. The first way is to make a gratitude journal and at the start or end of each day – list everything you are thankful for. This way you will focus on all the good things in your life. Another way is the 100 Happy Days or 100 Thankful Days challenge. In this, you write about one thing that makes you happy or thankful in your life each day for 100 days. You’ll focus more in depth on the things that make you thankful by doing this activity. If you aren’t a person who likes to write, you can just take some time each day to meditate on the things that make you thankful when you have some quiet time. The only challenge is you have to make that quiet time in the day. Each of these take some commitment, but you will find they are worth it!

Doing exercises like the ones I discussed above can be challenging since we tend to focus on the negative, but they can help us. Being more thankful for what we have in our lives can improve our moods and make us happier people. It can lead to less depression and anxiety. In our lives we have so much compared to people who don’t have the technology to read this article…stop and think about that for a moment. Aren’t you thankful?