Reminding ourselves to feel grateful can improve our hapiness and health. Most of us don’t take a conscious effort to catalogue our blessings, I think that a big mistake.
Gratitude is a virtue and an emotion, a knowing awarness that we are the recepients of godness. It is distinctive.and discernible from other postive states. In fact, i would say it is the forgotten factor in happiness.

Grateful people report consistently higher levels of positive emotions, life, satisfaction, vitality and optimism and lower levels of depression and stress. A friend mentioned yesterday that when we practice grateful thinking we can actually reduce our stress levels and take control of our hapiness levels. Overall, the biggest predictor of our happiness is the quality of our relationships and gratitude is a relationship strengthening emotion. Grateful people are less focused on the internal, and more on the interpersonal. They define success less in terms of materialism and more by the quality of their relationships.

Gratitude means recognising the contribution of others.

How to become more grateful ? Well i think we need to keep a gratitude journal, meaning establish a daily practice in which you remind yourself of the gifts, grace, benefits and good things you enjoy. Setting aside time on a daily basis to recall moments of gratitude associated with ordinary events, your personal attributes or valued people in your life gives you the potential for a sustainable life theme of gratitude. Going through the motions of gratitude should triggered emotions, the motions inculde smiling, saying thank you and writting letters of gratitude. Writting is good. I love it !

Also I would say to think outside the box, by thinking outside the box you will create opportunities to express your gratitude, you must creatively look for new situations and circumstances in which you feel grateful. For example, if you are a woman, the freedom to have an education, earn your own money and choose who you have a relationship with is something half of the women in the world don’t have and you do. Being grateful humbles us and demands own own sense of self-sufficiency.

Until next time...