How to Practice Gratitude – Simple Daily Exercises (PsyCap 4)

Practice Gratitude and Reap These Benefits

When was the last time that you considered the things in your life that you are grateful for? Perhaps your parents told you as a child to count your blessings! As it turns out, this is a profitable exercise that we as adults often neglect. There is a strong scientific basis that supports the notion that enhancing one’s gratefulness, thankfulness or gratitude is related to increases in optimism and reduction in the impact of daily stress. Given the many demands of work and daily life in general, it is advantageous to practice gratitude in a genuine way on a regular basis. Further benefits include higher levels of positive affect, more sleep, better sleep quality and increased connectedness to others.

This is the third article in which I cover how to enhance optimism. In case you missed my first post on this topic, please have a look at “How to Excel at Learning Optimism”. Additionally, this article is part of a greater series on Psychological Capital (PsyCap) – a higher order personal resource comprised of self-efficacy, optimism, hope and resilience. Feel free to have a look at “Self-Efficacy – A Great Way to Build PsyCap (1)” for an introduction to this topic.

If you think about it, what our parents told us to do makes a lot of sense. Gratefulness and negativity just do not go together. I mean try being genuinely thankful and dissatisfied at the same time. I don’t think that works. If you are thankful, you recognize and appreciate the gifts in your life. These may be people, things, the way events took place or even something that did not happen. We dwell too much on what goes wrong instead of things that go well. Even amid such chaotic times, life is full of things to be grateful for.

Practice Gratitude – Counting Your Bessings

We can use the following exercises to practice gratitude and learn to cultivate a gratitude mindset. The counting one’s blessings intervention is related to increases in gratefulness, life satisfaction and optimism.

Take five minutes a day at a set time to write down what you are thankful for. Feel free to be creative, anything or anyone that makes you feel a sense of gratitude counts.

Mon.	Tues.	Wed.	Thurs.	Fri.	Sat.	Sun.
1.
2.
3.
4.

Three Good Things Exercise

The three good things exercise in an intervention that aims to increase happiness and reduce depressive symptoms.

Take ten minutes a day at a set time to write down three things that went well and what you did to achieve this success. Every day is full of challenges and analyzing what went wrong to improve in the future can be beneficial. However, DWELLING on negative things is never helpful. The point of this exercise is to help us shift from focusing on failures to focusing on successes. They can be small things such as catching your bus on time or making someone smile.

Day	What went well?	What did you do, so that it went well?
Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday
Friday
Saturday
Sunday

Summary

In this post I introduced you to two exercises.

Counting your blessings is shown to enhance optimism and reduce the impact of daily stress. Further benefits include higher levels of positive affect, more sleep, better sleep quality and connectedness to others.

If we find ourselves generally dissatisfied, we can exercise to practice gratitude. The resulting gains will have a positive, lasting impact on our daily lives.

The second intervention is the three good things exercise. This correlates with higher levels of happiness and a reduction in depressive symptoms. When considering what went well and how we contributed to these things going well, positive emotions are elicited. These in turn become a driving force for bolstering our overall well-being.

Have a good time implementing these effective exercises! In the next post we will look at another exercise called the best possible self which can significantly increase optimism, positive mood and overall well-being.

References

David W. Chan (2010) Gratitude, gratitude intervention and subjective well‐being among Chinese school teachers in Hong Kong, Educational Psychology, 30:2, 139-153.

Emmons, R. A., & McCullough, M. E. (2003). Counting blessings versus burdens: An experimental investigation of gratitude and subjective well-being in daily life. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 84(2), 377–389.

Pietrowsky, R. (2012). Effects of positive psychology interventions in depressive patients? A randomized control study. Psychology, 03, 1067–1073.