As we are getting ready for Thanksgiving, we’re often reminded to search for gratitude in everyday life this time of year. From my work as a regional social worker for Hope For The Warriors, I know that most of us want to be grateful. I see that desire daily with the veterans and military families I work with.
But feeling grateful and being grateful are two totally different things.
And the big question is how do we go from feeling gratitude, which is a beautiful, but fleeting emotion, to actually being grateful?
My answer is always practice, practice, practice!
By working tangible practices into our daily lives, we help rewire our brains to feel gratitude consistently, use adaptive perspectives when life challenges us, and make more readily and easily acknowledge the role others play in our successes.
And these practices of gratitude offer up immense health benefits. A daily gratitude practice is associated with people experiencing more positive emotions, feeling more connected, expressing more compassion and kindness towards others, and even having stronger and more resilient immune systems.
Are you not feeling inspired by the now almost cliché suggestion to keep a gratitude journal? Me too. However, it should be acknowledged that using a journal to record our daily practice is a wonderful habit. Not only does it encourage us to practice daily, but we have a record. Something we can look back on to re-experience the joy. It’s a cliché for a reason: it works.
Here are a few ideas that I have adopted in my search for building good gratitude habits:
Be Grateful Physically
Take a gratitude walk.
Want to knock out two great wellness habits at one time? Use your daily walk to practice gratitude!
A gratitude walk can either be a time when you mindfully use the world around you to inspire gratitude. Tuning into all five senses; experience sounds, sights, and smells that you are grateful and privileged to experience.
Or simply use the time to review the day. What are you feeling grateful for right now? What are you looking forward to?
Be Grateful Visually
Create a gratitude tree or a gratitude pumpkin.
Some of us need visual reminders. This is especially true for those of us who are neurodivergent. Make your gratitude practice visual. The possibilities are endless. You can create a gratitude tree on poster board, adding a new leaf every day with something you are grateful for a simple, classic idea.
My family personally loves our Thanksgiving gratitude pumpkin. After Halloween we take one of the larger pumpkins, put it in the middle of our dining room table and take turns writing one thing we are grateful for that day during dinner.
By the end we have a beautiful pumpkin covered in gratitude and a unique center piece for our Thanksgiving table. Other ideas include taking little slips of paper and either tying them to trees, chandeliers, etc., or decorating the walls with them.
It doesn’t have to be Instagram-worthy to be effective; it just has to be visual.
Be Grateful through Relationships
Connect with gratitude.
Make it a conversation around the dinner table or wherever you and your family have those wonderful random deep conversations.
Start integrating your daily gratitude practice into your relationships. If you eat dinner, or any meal around the table as a family use that opportunity to practice with your little ones.
You can come straight at it and go around the table listing one thing each day you are grateful for. That’s a classic strategy.
Or you can get sly and play gratitude games such as“rose, bud, thorn” or “high, low, buffalo”.
Rose, bud, thorn- is a game where everyone lists one positive experience (the rose), one thing they are looking forward to (the bud) and one not so good experience they can learn from (the thorn).
High, low, buffalo- is a game where everyone lists one positive experience (the high), one not so positive experience (the low) and one random thing from their day (the buffalo). High, low buffalo is a favorite in my house.
What child doesn’t want an excuse to tell their parents super random things about their day!
And I will confess, we don’t play around the dinner table. We play on the drive between school and gymnastics because we don’t sit down to dinner as a family every day. I’m not perfect, and neither are you. Get it done when you can remember. For me that is during our car chats.
Just remember, make it specific, make it a habit. Practicing gratitude every day is when we start to see the benefits as an individual and as a family.
Written By: Ariel Mulzoff, LMSW @ armywifenetwork.com
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