How Using a Gratitude Journal Will Change Your Life
To me, the holiday season is pretty much the week before Halloween through the second week of January. I feel like those few months are pretty wild for most people: jam-packed calendars, to-do lists a mile long, just like alllll the festive things.
This holiday season is extra special to me because it is the first time I’ve ever been able to truly go HAM with being festive - I’m not in school or working multiple jobs which hasn’t happened since I was in high school so you better believe that I am going to make the most of the next few months.
And yes, I want to do all of the fun things like bake cookies, visit a Christmas tree farm, watch every Christmas movie ever filmed, have a gingerbread house building contest, all of it but I’m also making an effort to be super intentional about my mindset during this holiday season.
I want gratitude, joy, peace, patience, and love to be my norm.
I refuse to let complaining, chaos, and overwhelm be my anthem.
Yes, even when I’m stuck in the crazy AF Target parking lot with the last minute shoppers. Even when I don’t get invited to be part of the girls’ gift exchange. Even when my great aunt Bertha asks me AGAIN when we’re having kids. Even when I burn the cookies we were supposed to bring to the holiday brunch and we have to rush into the store on the way and show up with store bought cookies.
EVEN DURING MOMENTS LIKE THOSE I AM GOING TO CHOOSE JOY. I am going to choose gratitude. I am going to choose peace.
Because the fact is - we do get to choose.
Sure, we don’t always get to choose our circumstances but we do get to choose how we handle them. We can either ACT or REACT.
To me, acting means you handle the situation in stride. You choose to focus on what you CAN control and do what you can with where you’re at. Whereas, reacting is when you completely lose it when circumstances are not ideal.
For example, let’s say you are rushing out the door to make it to work on time and you drop the plate of brownies that you baked for office pot luck lunch that afternoon. This could go one of two ways.
If you act:
You might still huff for a second, “Dang!” But then you take breath, pick up the brownies, and decide to make a pit stop at the grocery store to scoop up a plate of cookies from the bakery. On the way to the store, you shoot your boss a quick text to let her know that you’re going to be a few minutes late because your clumsy behind dropped the brownies. At the end of the text you ask if she needs you to grab anything else for the office pot luck while you’re there. Now when you’re in the store grabbing a new dessert, you’re not stressing out about being reprimanded for being late. In fact, now you get to finish listening to your favorite podcast (maybe The Hustle Sanely Podcast 😉 ) because your commute just got extended by 12 minutes.
You get the new dessert from the bakery, help an elderly woman unload a heavy case of water into her trunk on the way back to your car, get to listen to your fave podcast, then make it to the office 15 minutes after you usually get there. Your boss happily greets you because she expected your delay plus you saved the potluck by scooping up the bowls that she forgot to bring for her famous chili. You sit down at your desk, play some Christmas music, and get started responding to emails. All in GOOD in the land even though your morning started off with a pile of brownings in your driveway, sister.
If you react here’s what that might look like:
*brownies fall* “OMG ARE YOU KIDDING ME??? I spent 2 hours making these last night what a waste of time!” You clean up the brownies while speed dialing your husband so you can make sure he knows just how pissed you are about dropping the brownies. You jump in the car and try to hurry up to get to the grocery store so you can buy a plate of cookies so you don’t show up to the office pot luck empty handed. You don’t communicate with your boss that you’re going to be late because you’re too aggravated to text her. You get what you need from the store and show up 15 minutes late to work (and you better believe you let a few WTFs fly as you hit red lights on the way). Your boss asks if everything is okay/why you’re late and you make sure the whole office knows that you spent 2 hours baking brownies only to drop them on the floor. You spend the whole first half of the work day annoyed with anyone who tried to talk to you because you had to deal with dropping a plate of brownies this morning.
Either way you’re probably not STOKED that you dropped the plate of brownies. But when you choose to act instead of react, you’re choosing to handle the situation with grace and poise rather than letting it potentially ruin the rest of your day. The brownies were already on the ground. You can’t reverse that. You’ve got to focus on what you can control - how you handle the situation.
This is a small example, sure, but the principles can be applied to bigger situations, too.
To be quite honest with y’all, my go-to in the past was to REACT. Yep. I was the person who went into a total tailspin over any little thing that did not go exactly how I wanted it to go. I would snap at my loved ones, make really HUGE deals over small situations, and let my attitude be tainted with negativity for the rest of the day because I was clinging to the “bad thing” that had happened earlier that day.
Do you want to know when I decided it was time for me to undergo a serious mindset check? When my husband so lovingly brought up that it was my tendency to focus on the negative. That if 20 wonderful things happened in a morning but then one small not so awesome thing happened, I would spend the rest of that day harping on the one negative thing instead of being thankful for the 20 wonderful things.
Well when he put it like that I felt kind of dumb, not gonna lie. I knew what it felt like to be around people who choose to project negativity (not great) but I didn’t think about how I was making people feel. I didn’t want people to feel on edge around me - or dread me walking into a room because they knew it would be followed by complaining.
So what did I do to make positivity my norm? I started keeping a gratitude journal, girl!
I know might be rolling your eyes hearing me say that starting a gratitude journal helped me become a more positive person but I am not kidding y’all - starting a daily gratitude practice really changed my life. And it’s SO SIMPLE… here’s what I do:
When I wake up, I grab my iPad and open up my mindfulness journal. I jot down a list of 3-5 things that I’m grateful for from the day before.
Sometimes they’re big things and sometimes they’re small things.
Some examples straight from my journal:
I am grateful for going grocery shopping and filling out fridge with nutritious food.
I am grateful for finding a new coffee creamer that I love.
I am grateful that Adam got a raise.
I am grateful for finding a toy for Harley (that’s one of our dogs) that he can chew on without shredding.
I am grateful for getting brunch with my girls and having heart to heart conversation about our futures.
Here’s why it’s so powerful: when you’re looking for things to be grateful for you find things to be grateful for. Mind-blowing right?
But honestly, you can’t be in a state of gratitude AND have a negative mindset. Those 2 things don’t work together. Just like you can’t have a dark room if you turn on the light. You either have a dark room or a room with light. You are either living in gratitude or living in negativity. When you’re practicing gratitude you can’t be negative.
Now I’m not saying that when a tragedy happens you need to put on rose colored glasses, whip out your journal and act like nothing has happened.
I’m just sharing my experience of using a daily gratitude practice to change my go-to mindset from being negative to being positive. I call it a practice because it’s something that I have to choose to do every day. It’s not a one and done thing.
Since starting my gratitude journal practice a few years back I can honestly say that it is now my tendency to be a light when I walk into a room. I find joy in small things. Silver linings are extremely apparent to me.
So girl, if you struggle with a negative mindset, give doing a gratitude practice a try. You’ve got nothing to lose, really. Even if it means just taking out your phone and typing 3 things that you’re grateful for every morning in the notes app - DO IT! You don’t have to use a digital journal like me or a fancy leather bound journal like someone else.
I like to do my gratitude practice first thing in the morning because I feel like it gets me in a solid headspace for the rest of the day. But if you find that doing it at night works better for you, GREAT!
Just remember: when you’re looking for things to be grateful for, you find things to be grateful for.
If you want to listen in to this conversation, make sure you head on over to the podcast and listen in to episode 009 of The Hustle Sanely Podcast:
