2020 was the year I started keeping a journal. Okay, full disclosure, I’ve started this at several points in my life but now I want to be consistent about it. I don’t usually write a lot, but I like to jot down what went well that day, what I’ve achieved, maybe what I would change next time if something didn’t go well and three things I’m grateful for. I write in the journal just before bed, and I started to notice that even after a pretty terrible day, if I finish the day by finding something good in it, I go to bed with that as the last thought on my mind, rather than focusing on all the bits that went wrong, and then sleep comes easily. When I don’t do this gratitude exercise, I often go to bed and spend time ruminating and worrying about the day and it’s never a good night’s sleep.
This is a conscious choice that I'm making, I could go back to ruminating I’m sure. But focusing on what I’m grateful for certainly makes it less easy to do and less appealing, too. Experts in wellness and positive psychology have been talking about the benefits of practising gratitude for some time now. Their studies have shown that grateful people sleep better, have more energy, have a stronger immune system and lower blood pressure. They get better grades, are more content and have higher levels of satisfaction and optimism. Grateful people experience more positive emotions, are more generous and kind, more compassionate and they feel less lonely.
In his TED Talk, “The Happy Secret to Better Work”, Shawn Achor gives an entertaining speech on positive psychology. He explains that “your brain at positive performs significantly better than negative, neutral or stressed.” He talks about how we think we will be happier if we are successful but that our brain works differently and that intelligence, energy and creativity rise when we are in a positive state, so happiness needs to come first and can lead us to success. Surprisingly, he explains that our brain at positive is 31% more productive than at negative - we need to find more ways to become more positive in the present so our brains perform better. Achor claimed that we can rewire our brains to be more positive in just 21 days by writing down three new things we are grateful for each day. Finding new things to be thankful for really worked for me to keep up the momentum of my gratitude practice, I’m always going to be thankful for my family, for having a job and a safe home, but writing about it each night won’t keep me alert to new moments that made a difference to my day. Sometimes it could be something as simple as the train coming into the platform just as I reached it on a day when things were running a bit late for me. Simple yes, but writing about it at the end of the day brought back the memory of happy relief when it happened. Participants in Achor’s study did this for 21 days and after this time, their brains started scanning the world for positive things. Journaling good things that happen to us allows our brains to relive the experiences, increasing our levels of contentment.
This sounds easy doesn’t it? So why, then, aren’t we all walking around with sunny dispositions, having had a wonderful night’s sleep? Well, this takes practice (after all it is called ‘practicing gratitude’). And practice takes effort before it becomes habit. It’s also a choice, we have to choose to look for the positives and this should be easy, but our brains do veer in the direction of negative occurrences. It comes down to our mindset, the choices we make each day, the words we speak. These all have an impact on our behaviours, our life outlook, our thoughts and our experiences. Our thoughts, words and beliefs become our reality, so instead of going over all the bad things that happened throughout the day, ruminating, having regrets, feeling annoyance or anger at people or situations, choose to reflect on the good things that happened. Negative, ungrateful thoughts will creep in, but with a little self-awareness, we can learn to catch them in the act. Choosing where your focus goes will impact the quality of your experiences and memories. If we practice gratitude consistently, we will eventually redirect the brains neural pathways and it will become habit. It will get easier to look for the good things and an attitude of gratitude will be cultivated. After the experiences 2020 gave us, it would be easy to focus on the negatives, and enter 2021 with a poor outlook, but we must look for the positives, for the sake of our wellbeing, and be grateful for them.
We have 6,000 to 8,000 thoughts a day, so let’s make them good ones! What are you grateful for?
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