The Most Effective Ways To Cultivate Gratitude

How to Cultivate Gratitude?

Are you a natural pessimist? Take heart: The benefits of gratitude aren’t only available to people with a naturally grateful disposition. Instead, feeling grateful is a skill we can develop with practice, reaping its rewards along the way. Here are some of the most effective ways to cultivate gratitude, according to research.

• Keep a gratitude journal, recording three to five things for which you’re grateful every day or week. Because some evidence suggests that how we keep a gratitude journal—for instance, how often we write in it—can influence its impact, the GGSC’s Jason Marsh offers these research-based tips for gratitude journaling. Apply these tips through the GGSC’s new and easy-to-use online gratitude journal, Thnx4.org.
• Write a “gratitude letter” to an important person in your life whom you’ve never properly thanked. Research suggests gratitude letters provide strong and long-lasting happiness boosts, especially when they’re delivered in person. When participants in her studies write gratitude letters, Sonja Lyubomirsky provides them with these instructions.
• Savor the good in your life—don’t just gloss over the beauty and pleasures that come your way. Loyola University psychologist Fred Bryant has identified 10 ways to practice savoring; GGSC advisory board member Rick Hanson has developed his own method for savoring positive emotions and experiences, which he calls “taking in the good.“
• Focus on intentions: When you receive a gift, or when something good happens to you in general, consider how someone tried on purpose to bring that goodness into your life, even at a cost to themselves. Research suggests this goes a long way toward cultivating “an attitude of gratitude,“ among children and adults alike.
• Teach gratitude to children: Researchers Jeffrey Froh, Katherine Henderson, and colleagues have developed a gratitude curriculum for kids, based on Froh’s work studying gratitude in schools; results suggest it can boost gratitude and happiness for five months. The gratitude journal and gratitude letter exercises have also proven effective with kids.
• Recognize the positive: The GGSC’s Christine Carter asks her daughters about three good things that happen to them each day—a way to help them appreciate the gifts big and small that come their way.For more of this article click here: http://greatergood.berkeley.edu/topic/gratitude/definition

The dawn it breaks
awaiting
for the sun to rise

Like a child at birth
about
to open their eyes

With each new day
just like new

We are given a gift
of a different view

If we open it carefully
at what it may be

The gift inside is
“presence” you’ll see

To be in this moment
right here, right now

Stopping the questions
what, when, where and how?

Open your eyes and
just fully embrace

So you can live happy with
a smile on your face. 
-Nikki-

With Love & Gratitude, 
Nikki

Nikki