Gratitude

Over the last two or three years I have read/heard many times that keeping some kind of ‘gratitude journal’ is supposed to deliver a boost to your happiness/contentedness. The basic idea is to spend a few minutes at the end of each day reflecting on the hours just gone and identifying a small number of things (e.g. three) that you are grateful for. It makes sense that by reminding yourself of such things on a regular basis you will end up with a generally more positive attitude – highlighting and acknowledging the good stuff that has happened or reasons to be cheerful.

I already keep a small journal of sorts. Each night before I go to sleep I make a note of the key events of the day by just writing one or two words to describe the event and drawing a little symbol or icon to represent it. For example, I have different icons for work (two gears meshed together), reading (an open book), watching a film (movie camera), watching TV (TV set), drinking coffee (cup), walking (stick man), listening to a podcast or music (head with earphones). I should add photos of a page or two to this post sometime to illiustrate what I mean (more likely I will write a separate entry about my notebook habits).

For the last week, I have been adding an extra section at the bottom of each day of this journal headed “Grateful for” with a three item list below populated by things I am grateful for from that day. I thought this would be easy. It hasn’t been. When I reflect back on my day each evening I find it surprisingly difficult to come up with items for my ‘grateful for’ list. It is NOT because everything is bad or because I am ungrateful wretch, at least I hope it is not. Rather, I am just finding it hard to identify anything significant or different each day. For example, if I look back on today’s activity so far (I am writing this at work before I leave for home) I can only come up with things like the fact that my schedule hasn’t been too hectic today or that I had egg sandwiches at lunchtime. Things like this just seem too trivial to acknowledge, but try as I might, I can’t pull out anything more significant. I am not sure what to make of this. Perhaps the whole point of keeping a gratitude journal is to focus the mind on small things that would otherwise go unnoticed; to remind yourself that even on a mundane, ordinary day, small and unspectacular things happen that provide a boost to life. I hope so.