Want your life to be more Beautiful? Try the Timeless Gratitude Journal
By: Manisha Bhandari
Tags: Spirituality, Journal, Gratefulness, Positivity, Life Lessons

Want your life to be more Beautiful? Try the Timeless Gratitude Journal

Photo by Gabrielle Henderson on Unsplash | My story with the gratitude journal!

8 months ago, a very close friend of mine (A wellness practitioner) tasked me with a ridiculous activity :

Friend: “Every night write down 3 things you are grateful for and send them to me.”

Me: “I will charge you for this activity.”

Friend: “So be it!”

Okay, TBH, I found this ridiculous. I scoffed at this idea.

I mean- yes I know gratitude is important. It’s everywhere on the internet. There are tons of benefits of feeling grateful. I actually didn’t want to even take it up because WAY TOO MANY people were suggesting this idea.

Sure Oprah does it. Sure many celebrities do it.

But doing it as an exercise? Meh.

But who can say no to a good friend? So the first night I wrote down “3 things I am grateful” as a HOMEWORK (Imagine Calvin from Calvin & Hobbes). With some sort of discipline.

The next day when I woke up, my mind started finding reasons to be grateful for everything-by default!

I’d found a new perspective to this game.

It felt good. Really really good.

I am still continuing the exercise, and my lessons might help you take up this exercise too.

Here are a few screenshots:

(Shabby) Real Gratitude Lists from my Whatsapp/Notes Directory!

The first thing that happened is: I started finding gratitude in small things

Okay, accept it- life is difficult. So creating a gratitude list can seem equally arduous. And it is.

But we are creatures of habit.

Neuroscience says that there are circuits in our brain- of worry, of fear of joy, of unhappiness. The more you use a particular circuit, the more that emotion is felt powerfully.

So the more you use the circuit of gratefulness- you know what happens right?

“Gratitude is a state of mind — in fact, there’s a gratitude circuit in your brain, badly in need of a workout. Strengthening that circuit brings the power to elevate your physical and mental health, boost happiness, improve sleep, and help you feel more connected to other people.” — The Upward Spiral

A perspective change

Challenging situations also gave me a chance to feel grateful because they taught me something.

I moved on to think- how can I feel grateful for this?

Grateful for the untimely pimple?

Grateful for the tiff with MIL?

Grateful for the sloth speed Internet?

Suddenly, I wanted to learn. Recognize. Evolve.

I felt lucky. Abundant. And blessed. I had so many things!!

In fact, there were times when I have felt that I didn’t have enough words to express what I wanted to.

And, the Hollywood journalist Jeanne Wolf sums up this feeling perfectly:

“The stars at awards shows always come backstage feeling like they didn’t express enough gratitude!” — that’s the thing with gratitude!”

Some days it felt like a task- but I went on

Like all disciplined and committed habits, I don’t want to say this was an all-gleeful task. Many times, it was incredibly difficult to write down anything!

But today, I feel a great flood of dopamine as I write this that I am on my 182nd day!

Also writing it down (Not just thinking about it) made a whole lot of difference.

Usually, the stories that we tell to ourselves, the narratives that we create can be self-defeating. We might want our events and happenings to sound more challenging and difficult than they actually would have been.

Writing it down gives you a chance to carefully and consciously frame your experiences in a positive, more hopeful light.

I found the more my attention went towards gratitude, the more I found it everywhere, and the more I created happier stories around my life.

Do you want to try a quick exercise?

Look around your room and count the number of circles. (Do it right away)

So when you were counting circles, did you count the squares? No, right?

That’s what will happen when you count the ‘gratitude events’- the challenging events go to the background, without even you realising.

Do Gratitude Journals Really work?

In a research conducted by Wong and Brown (2017), they analysed that gratitude does 4 essential things:

It cuts the cycle of negative and toxic emotions and the rumination that comes after these thoughts

and the rumination that comes after these thoughts We experience more happiness and contentment

Gratitude list works on the foundation of compound interest. You do it every day, you reap the benefits exponentially over time

It trains the brain eventually to see more positivity everywhere

They are gooooood enough reasons no? So yes, gratitude journals do work!

I have experienced that I enjoy the present moment more and feel more resilient.

A very outward reason to practice gratitude would be the influx of Dopamine. But if you’d like to get more than just DOPE, there’s more in store for you.

According to this list of studies, people who participated in a daily gratitude exercise reported “having helped someone with a personal problem or having offered emotional support to another, relative to the hassles or social comparison condition.” (More compassion, more empathy)

Also, patients who expressed gratitude were found to have good quality sleep, strong hearts, and the ability to combat cellular inflammation.

This is Cheesy- but life feels beautiful with Gratitude

Many times we might fail to notice that we are blessed with so many things. They go in the background. They blur. We carry on a monotonous (maybe grumbling) life.

You forget the sparrows, the clouds, the snails, the falling of the leaves, the thunder — yes, they are happening.

How long since you saw this pie? Photo by Marcos Paulo Prado on Unsplash

But when you purposefully write down things you felt grateful for, you feel there’s something more to your life than the mundane stuff.

With gratitude, these things come to the forefront.

In the beautiful book, “Thanks_How the New Science of Gratitude Can Make you Happier”, the author shares an interesting story about Stephen King.

While on a walk, King gets thrown over by a driver. King has a collapsed lung, many fractures, and broken ribs. After the accident, when asked what was he thinking when he could have died in this accident- he says, “Gratitude”.

Isn’t that a beautiful thing?