A Gratitude Journal Is A Treasure

It is important for everyone to be aware of what they are thankful for. A gratitude journal enables you to focus on the good things in life. Writing just a couple times each week will teach you how to treasure the good things in your life and keep your focus on the positive. This places you on the path to becoming more optimistic, healthier and happier. Write about what you appreciate and are thankful for, the way you express your gratitude or analyze what makes you grateful.

Your gratitude diary can be a type of prayer journal or even a substitute. Your prayers can be comprised of what you are most grateful for in your life. You can say prayers or thanks or write about what you hope will happen. You can express your gratitude when your prayers are answered. You can even take it a step further and include a bible journal.

Getting your Priorities in Order

You may be doing things because you believe it is required without ever considering why. Writing down your thoughts will help you understand what matters and the best ways to spend your energy and time.

Aligning your Perspective

There are always times times when everything goes wrong. A gratitude journal will help you make it through the difficult times. You can think about the good in your past, realize your life is better than you thought and there are people to provide strength on your darkest days.

Achieving Optimism

It is easy to concentrate on the bad things in life. It is important to remember the good and what makes you thankful. This will enable you to see the silver lining in the most difficult situations. When you are happier and more optimistic, you will sleep better, have less stress, more focus and energy and discover new health benefits.

Looking at Yourself

One of the simplest ways to be thankful is to look at yourself clearly. Figure out what you like about who you are. This may be a skill like cooking or athletic ability or simply something that makes you feel good.

The Loss Factor

If you are unsure of what you are grateful for, figure out what you could not bear to lose. Once you realize how your life would change if certain things were missing, you will realize what you are grateful for.

The Nice Surprises

Writing about unexpected circumstances with positive outcomes is an excellent way to begin your gratitude journal. Surprises often trigger strong emotions. You can break up the monotony by of your life by writing about these circumstances in your journal.

Gaining Focus

Even if it was not something you did, focus on the good. Write about what you saw in the newspaper or on the news. It may make you feel good when a person vacates their bus seat for someone with a stroller, wheelchair or cane. Be thankful for the compassion of others.

The Challenges

You can be thankful for challenges as well. Instead of forgetting the difficult times, think about how your life would be if they had never happened. You may not have learned an important lesson, developed certain aspects of your identity or achieved personal growth. Sometimes you have to be tested to see positive traits in both yourself and others. This is how you achieve an optimistic view of your life.

Controlling your Writing

According to studies, writing in your diary too frequently can make you see gratitude as nothing more than a means of documenting an emotion. This can lead to less appreciation to the positive events in your life. This will not make you more grateful of happier. You should limit your entries to a maximum of three each week. This way your journal remains positive and you will treasure the important things even more.

The Commitment

Once you know how many entries you plan to make in your journal each week, do not change the number. Its is a good idea to set aside a specific period of time for your writing. Many people choose bedtime because they go to sleep happy and have beautiful dreams. Adhering to a specific time will also improve your willpower and discipline.

The Unexpected

You should always keep your gratitude journal with you to prepare for the unexpected. All you need to download the Online Journal app, which is available on Google Android and Apple iOS. Once the app has been downloaded, you can just log into your account. It may not be long before you find yourself in a wonderful situation that you want to write about in your gratitude journal. If you have your journal stored in the cloud, you will not have to risk forgetting about something important.

Quality over Quantity

Setting a minimum number of events to be thankful for every time you make an entry in your journal is not a good idea. There will be times when you have so much to be grateful for and others where there is little. What is most important is writing about what you are truly grateful for and what has made you the happiest. Do not write simply to write.

Personalizing your Journal

It is all right to start your journal with abstract concepts. Once you learn how to write about your gratitude, the targets of your gratitude should include others and possibly even pets. This will enable you to understand the people in your life you appreciate the most. These people will return your feelings and this cannot be accomplishing using only the abstract. This will make your gratitude journal even more rewarding.

Acting on your Writing

One of the biggest mistakes you can make is believing writing about the things that bring gratitude and happiness into your life are enough to increase these emotions. This is the reason you should not write in your gratitude journal too frequently. You never want to believe simply writing down the way you are feeling is more important than your experiences or expressing your appreciation and gratitude to the people in your life.

This means if the only reasons you are writing down the things you are grateful for are because you believe it is good for you or because you think it is the right thing to do, you are on the wrong path. You should be writing in your journal to increase the amount of gratitude and happiness you are feeling and to demonstrate to the people in your life the gratitude you feel for them. Do not lock away all your feelings and thoughts into a journal you are the only one who reads.

Examples of Gratitude Journals

Everyone has different experiences in their lives. You should not be surprised that everyone is grateful for something different. Some people are grateful for the grander things in life while others find beauty and wonder in the little things. This means everyone organizes and expresses their thoughts differently. There are some samples below of the different ways people have written in their gratitude journals.