Gratitude is thankful appreciation for the goodness in your life. It involves noticing simple pleasures, relishing experiences, and appreciating others with a readiness to return kindness. Feeling and expressing gratitude is one of the best ways to boost happiness. Gratitude fills you with positive emotions that lead to more kind and friendly – these attributes make life more joyful. Eileen Caddy said, “Gratitude ... brings joy and laughter into your life and into the lives of all those around you.” Gratitude also has a positive impact on your physical and mental health, and your ability to deal with adversity.
To benefit from all these wonderful outcomes, you can practice deliberate gratitude. Taking time each day to reminisce on what you’re grateful for, amplifies it and allows you to see the breadth of your blessings and view the world with even greater joy and appreciation. Unfortunately, the reverse is also true. If we ruminate on the negative, we train our brain to see more of the negative and we become increasingly miserable. The great thing is, we have a choice. We can choose to focus on our blessings. President Nelson said, “Counting our blessings is far better than recounting our problems.”
There are many ways for us to practice deliberate gratitude. Doing so will not only help us reap the benefits of gratitude but also grow our gratitude muscle. This Thanksgiving season find a gratitude practice that you enjoy and can maintain over a lifetime. Below are a few ideas to get you started:
Write in a Gratitude Journal
Write a few lines each day about your blessings. There are a variety of ways you could do this. Here are two ideas: 1) You could use Elder Eyring’s nightly journal prompt, “Have I seen the hand of God reaching out to touch us or our children or our family today?” 2) You could have slips of papers with different categories on them and pick one each day and write about. For example: something in nature, a freedom, a defining moment, a gospel doctrine, a tender mercy, a modern convenience, a person, and experience, etc.
Verbally Express Appreciation to Others
Verbally express real appreciation to at least 3 people you encounter each day. This could include family members, friends, co-workers, cashiers, postal workers, civil servants, mentors, neighbors, and so on.
Say Prayers of Gratitude
Focus at least one prayer a week solely to expressing gratitude to Heavenly Father for specific blessings He has given you. Elder Bednar said, “The most meaningful and spiritual prayers I have experienced contained many expressions of thanks and few, if any, requests.”
Write Thank You Notes
Write a thank you card to at least 1-2 people a month who have made a positive impact in your life and deliver it to them. Dr. Seligman, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, tested the impact of various positive psychology interventions. One assignment was to write and personally deliver a letter of gratitude to someone who had never been properly thanked for his or her kindness. Following this assignment participants immediately exhibited a huge increase in happiness scores. This impact was greater than that from any other intervention, with benefits that lasted for a month.
Memorize Hymns of Gratitude
Choose from a variety of hymns to memorize that focus on gratitude and start or end your day going over the words. Hymns could include Count Your Many Blessings, hymn 241; see also hymn 193, 291, 72, 86, and more)
Count Your Blessings
Create a gratitude list that you can continually add onto and put it where you can see and read it often (you could include others by having everyone write on a gratitude poster, paper chain, google doc, or social media platform)
Author, Melody Beattie said, “Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos to order, confusion to clarity. It can turn a meal into a feast, a house into a home, a stranger into a friend. Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today and creates a vision for tomorrow.”
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