Why You Should Start a Gratitude Practice
By: Minty Horseradish
Tags: Daily Thoughts, Activism, Wellness, Gratitude, Mindset

Every day we wake up and get on with our lives. For many of us that’s going to work, school or running chores and errands. Inevitably things go wrong. We get into an argument with our partner/s, we enter disagreements at work, we have conflicts with our friends, landlords, parents etc... You name it — we’ve all been there.

For most of my life, I saw these difficulties from a victim’s perspective. That the world was against me, that nothing I did was right. That I was worthless or that other people were assholes. It was a dualistic mindset and a trap. I would fall into months of depression, apathy, grief and/or anger.

That is until I started practising gratitude.

As I see it we have the choice: to either see the story of the day as full of unresolved problems and tensions OR we get to choose to see the light that shines through the cracks. That every trauma is a gift, that between the uncomfortable moments there is always something to be grateful for.

Gratitude isn’t just some woo-woo new age thing either. Studies show that this practice has the potential to have lasting changes for our minds, and from my own experience, I know it can.

So here are my three tips for starting a daily gratitude practice that might help you too:

Find an accountability buddy — I screenshot my gratitudes every day and send it to my friend Ber in Australia. (She writes hers in a journal and takes a photo to send to me.) As gratitudes can be incredibly vulnerable, this practice has forged a bond of reciprocal trust and love that I never thought was possible in long-term long-distant relationships.* Write something different every day — initially, I wasn’t bothered about this, but I found if I really took the time to write something different every day I was making it a deliberate practice to see the joy in my life. Don’t have a set number you have to write — there was one-day last year where the only thing I was grateful for was “potatoes”. Other days I’ve written up to 20 bullet points, gushing at how wonderful life is. It’s not about quantity or quality, it’s about consistency.

Joanna Macy’s work on Active Hope (channelling gratitude to prevent burn out in activism) has further ignited my practice which I now actively embody in my community and service. Gratitude practice is now also a common part of our group meetings, circles, communal dinners and in sacred rituals. I have even brought the practice to the 12-year-olds I teach at school (they write in their gratitude journals once a week).

I believe we need gratitude now more than ever. As the world becomes more chaotic in the wake of multiple crises (from CV-19 to the climate emergency) it is imperative that we can still see light peering through the darkness. That we continue to work on changing our individual and collective mindset.

Once this practice becomes a habit you might notice that you start to see things differently. That even on days when your bike gets stolen and your flatmate’s cat pissed on your bed, it was still a great day to be alive. That even on days when you hate your ex, you start to see them as a gift. And that even on days when you feel completely alone, there are still potatoes in the world.

Some examples of my gratitude practice: