This Simple Exercise Will Change Your Life Forever
Ok,
I've got your attention.
Let's begin, shall we??
Gratitude
noun
the quality of being thankful; readiness to show appreciation for and to return kindness.
This single word can change your life forever.
Let me explain.
Gratitude is what brings us joy.
We can only appreciate things that we are grateful for.
Without gratitude we have no reasons to be happy.
Gratitude practice trains your brain to be happier.
I'm from the US.
We are constantly bombarded by images of people and things that are better than us.
Celebrities that are more beautiful.
Individuals that are happier and more successful.
Things that we don't need and can barely afford.
There is a reason for this
Modern marketers have become VERY good at leveraging our primal emotions to motivate us to buy products.
When you watch a car commercial you see beautiful people that are smiling and living a wonderful, exciting life ...
What does that have to do with the car??
Nothing!
They are leveraging our innate desire for success, acceptance and happiness and connecting that idea with their brand and their product.
A similar thing happens when we use social media.
Social media highlights peoples top experiences.
No one posts of picture of themselves when they look ugly or when they are feeling down.
When we scroll through our news feeds we are seeing the top 1% of someones life.
This "hyper-density" of positive experiences can make us feel not so good... Especially when we have to live the whole 100% of our lives, not just the social media worthy moments.
Now you see
We have found ourselves in a society that trains us to be discontent.
It trains us to crave the newest and the best.
It trains us to never be happy.
It's not your fault ...
but it is your responsibility.
Fortunately, the solution is simple.
If we are constantly bombarded by "anti-gratitude", all we need to do is give ourselves a daily dose of the opposite.
Gratefulness
Let me give you a personal example
A year ago I was scrolling through my Instagram feed ...
I stumbled upon a post by a young women that I was quite interested in.
She was telling her personal story of gratefulness and how a simple gratitude journal had changed her life
I thought to myself ...
If she is doing a gratitude journal ... and I start a gratitude journal ... maybe she will like me!!
Ha!
as we now see, social media is good for some things :P
That day changed my life
From then on I chose to take time to give thanks, every day.
I made it simple for myself.
I would write one page, every day.
At first it was challenging
I wasn't grateful for that many things.
I had to fake it.
When I ran out of things that I felt grateful for, I started writing things that I thought I should be grateful for.
Eventually, I began to notice a change
It didn't happen over night.
There were many days when I begrudgingly worked through my exercise.
Yet, I was committed.
And then,
sooner than I had expected ...
I noticed a change.
I would wake up in the morning and just feel happy.
I would notice moments in my day where I was simply grateful to be alive.
I started acting with more compassion and I began to enjoy each aspect of my life that much more.
It turns out this woman had not been lying.
A simple gratitude journal radically changed my life.
It's been about a year now and I still journal every day.
It's so important to me that I take my journal with me everywhere.
Now, I know it doesn't seem like much ...
but it really works.
When we write down the things we are grateful for we are actually rewiring the brain.
Over time, we start to redefine how valuable things are to us.
Simply writing down what we are grateful for leads to a cumulative, lasting change in our physical brain and mental state.
Let me lead you on an experience
Ask yourself this one question.
How grateful am I to be alive??
To keep it simple lets use a score of 0-10.
Record your answer and keep moving.
Now, I want you to think about your life.
Think about all of the things you have.
Literally all of them.
Your clothes, your cell phone, the place you live.
The food in your fridge, the city around you, the electricity running through your walls.
Take a moment to consider how much you really have.
Let's take it up a notch
Imagine what your life would be like if you were born 100 years ago.
WW1 has just ended and you are probably poor.
What if you were born 250 years ago?
They didn't even have light bulbs?
500 years ago?
You probably wouldn't even have had running water!
And if it's really too far out to grasp, try reading this account of daily life in the 1600's
Take a moment and let all of this sink in.
Ask yourself one more time.
How happy am I to be alive??
Did your answer change?
It bet it did.
That is the power of perspective.
That is the power of our mind.
We get to choose how happy we are at any moment.
It takes work, but you can cultivate a mindset of positivity and gratitude.
Moving Forward
Gratitude is a skill.
It is something that must be cultivated.
If you do not use this muscle it will dissipate over time.
A daily gratitude journal is an easy way to cultivate gratitude and create lasting change.
As a bit of an extra incentive, I will start giving out upvotes to people who tag their posts with #dailygratitude
You can change your whole life with this simple exercise ...
and, by changing your life, you will
change the whole world
I hope you liked this post.
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I think the secret is to find that golden middle: never be complacent with what you achieved so far and always strive to achieve new heights; but while doing it, be thankful for what you achieve at every single milestone.
And yes, it sounds a bit contradictory...
balance is the key to everything in life @cryptoeera
Isn't everything a little bit paradoxical on the weekends?
I like paradoxical stuff.
hi, @metama. I had a strong religious experience and that made me see that nothing is accidental, everything happens because someone was there. But I had never thought of the idea of writing a thank-you journal.
Thank you so much.
you are welcome @ramonrene ! I hope that you begin your journal today! May it give you much gratitude so that you can share your joy with the world
GRACIAS, GRACIAS, GRACIAS!
Great post man!
I just wanna add something:
For example, somebody give us something, we would say thank you and say his/her name.
Through our parents, we were born, so we say, "Thanks Mom!", "Thanks Dad!"
How about the universe and all its aspects for existence like air etc. ?
How do we say in gratitude?
I guess we won't say, thanks air or thanks universe or thanks earth or mother earth or mother nature (so there is also father earth or father nature?).
Its very obvious that all these stuffs came from because there is a Giver that gave them to us. Things will not come to existence on its own, without power or force governing them.
So we say, "Thanks God for all of these!"
thank the universe for it's very existence ...
:) I love it :) :) :)
thanks @ronel
Wow that's a beautiful philosophy of life and I really like your way of thinking I think that it's the best way of thinking if you want to move forward in your life.
As I appreciated it I would like to be able to translate your post and to post it on my blog to spread your message to the french community who can't speak english.
So if you accept here are the 3 options within which you have to choose the one you like best:- Full earning, if they choose this option every SBD generated by the post will be sent to the author of the post.
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Hey @thetranslator glad you liked the post. Would be happy to have you share this. Let's split the earnings
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Thanks you for your support and the fact that you let us translate it ;). I will translate it and post the translation on the comment section of this post :)
Wonderful! Am really impressed with this piece of work.. It's very easy to loose site of what life has in stock for us due to ingratitude.. Wish to see more of your creative work.. I have followed and will definitely upvote this post.. Please do well to follow back.. I need good followership likewise
Thank you @henrysparks glad you like the content. Stay tuned for more
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I learned about the blessing of expressing gratitude a couple of decades ago when I was a devotee of an Indian guru. The practice was an inner discipline that was linked to silent mantra repetition. With the constant repetition of this mantra going on in my mind, I became able to feel gratitude for everything that I experienced, whether it was a positive or a seemingly negative experience. The joy that this practice brought about was immense. I no longer follow this guru as devotedly as I used to, but the practice became ingrained and I still have a wonderfully positive, and grateful attitude towards my life. I do like the idea of journaling gratitude, and I think I'll try this out just to ramp up my game ;)
I just joined Steemit today, and your's is the first posting I've read, and you are the first person I'm following. Looking forward to reading more of your thoughts and ideas.
haha so flattered @daryldarko ... thank you for sharing your wisdom as well. I am excited to see what you have to share.
You mentioned it right : we are bombarded with everything. Everyone wants money from our pockets and because of this marketing strategies today are based upon knowing what you want and even making you want something based on your emotions. We must be aware of this, plus to know few tactics so that we make sense of the world around us and understand that at some point we actually don't need something.
Not to mention that with social media we often forget about ourselves and just watch other people that have "better life than us" but in reality they are posting only the things they want and can to make others see them better on top of that many things are faked and we are not even aware of that.
Writing down helps us understand more about ourselves and to hopefully help us see where we want to be in the future while removing the negatives.
well played sir, well played @cyber-smiley
Our livies' s ecery second is important. Even we should be grateful to breath. If we were alive, it would be good chance to live it up and be happy to enjoy what we have. There might be a lot of problems such as breaking up from girl/boyfriend, having depths, losing parents or anything else but if we are alive, we can evaluate every second to gratefull even for breathing. That is the important issue. We have only a life. Take lessons and be grateful. That is it.
no one is guaranteed tomorrow.
Right now is all we can be sure of.
Thank you @jayzaza
Here is the french version of this post 😉: https://staging.busy.org/@thetranslator/fr-or-cet-exercice-simple-va-changer-votre-vie-pour-toujours-or-metama