I am grateful, not in order that my neighbour, provoked by the earlier act of kindness, may be more ready to benefit me, but simply in order that I may perform a most pleasant and beautiful act; I feel grateful, not because it profits me, but because it pleases me.
The benefits of a daily gratitude journal include reduced inflammation, better sleep, lower stress and increased optimism. However, beneath the searing obvious lie the alternative benefits of gratitude not even Oprah Fucking Winfrey Tell you about.
Gratitude forces you to focus on positive thoughts and emotions
Use a daily gratitude journal to hi-jack the negativity and send good experiences rushing to the surface of your conscious mind. You’ll think about the friends, moments and the facets of work which make you the most happy. Not the negative bullshit you read on Twitter or see on the news.
In other words, a daily gratitude practice makes you consciously aware of what doesn’t add value to your life. By exploring your existence through gratitude, you peculate out all the crap. You are then free to remove it from your life: addition by subtraction.
I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought; and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.
Gratitude teaches you what makes you happy at work. And what doesn’t.
Keep a gratitude journal and you’ll focus more on the parts of your job which bring you pleasure and meaning – be that meeting new partners, writing emails, closing a deal, staring at Janet in accounts, helping a distressed colleague or having meetings about having meetings about having meetings. There’s a downside though: huge overhauls and complex and difficult changes.
Accepting hard truths and facing up to your life decisions?
Nobody said it would be easy.
A daily gratitude journal is your tool to open the door. Whether you walk through it is up to you.
Enjoy the little things, for one day you may look back and realize they were the big things.
Gratitude helps you create happier memories
Your memories are a complex love affair; the marriage of neurons and dendrites and axons and neurogenesis. It’s brain science. For the sake of simplicity, the more you access your memories, the more powerful, visual and memorable they become.
The Availability heuristic is the brains bias for selecting the most immediate examples which pop like a random squirrel into your mind when evaluating positivity or self-confidence…or your happiness.
The more readily accessible a memory is, the more likely you are to use it. You can use a gratitude journal to create a flywheel. You’ll be like fucking Amazon, but instead of selling plastic crap imported from China, you’ll be building indesctructable confidence into your minds eye. Or something.
The benefits of a gratitude journal compound. Happiness really is a state of mind, and because your mind is, neurologically speaking, plastic, you can wire it to your liking, update your neocortex.
Happiness in, happiness out.
Over and over again.
Memory is the reactivation of a specific group of neurons, formed from persistent changes in the strength of connections between neurons.
Gratitude helps you find positivity in times of chaos
You cemented the happy, positive memories into your synapses and rewired your neocortex. Congratulations. Now you can access positivity when a global pandemic comes along and shits on your parade.
Can’t see you friends or family for two years? Access your memory palace.
Lost your job because your boss is a wanker and invested all your clients cryptocurrency in a bear market? Did your girlfriend walk out on your with Jake from the gym? Did you lose your 24-word crypto wallet seed key? No worries, you can now mask the pain and sorrow with a finely tuned collection of happy memories in your happy mind palace.
Gratitude helps you find pleasure in the small things of life
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle said, “It has long been an axiom of mine that the little things are infinitely the most important.”
Andy Warhol said, “You need to let the little things that would ordinarily bore you suddenly thrill you.”
Realising that your life is made up of the humble, restrained and unassuming events which make up a lifetime of Tuesday afternoons will cause you to stop waiting for big things to happen.
If you measure life by the grandiose you will have but a handful of memories. If you measure life by the small things you will have infinite riches.
You can exercise happiness.
Gratitude brings your family together
Your family is psychotic, nurture the psychosis. Nothing like a gratitude journal to bring the family together. Our kitchen is our place of psychotic congregation. Each morning we turn on the kettle and spend three minutes speaking of the happiest moments of positivity over the last 24 hours.
Every day. For three minutes, we are together, building memories by strengthening our memories.
Gratitude turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos into order, confusion into clarity...it makes sense of our past, brings peace for today, and creates a vision for tomorrow.
Gratitude makes you laugh
Kids pull lunacy and poetic analogies from everywhere. Gratitude makes you laugh.
If you don’t have kids, aside from having a lie in, you will have access to funny things you have done with your friends and colleagues, girlfriends and boyfriends. Pulling those jokes to mind in the morning puts a smile on your face. The science is here: Smiling makes you happier and adding a gratitude journal to your morning routine will improve your mood.
Gives you a sense of perspective
Perspective is balance. Taking all the available input and building a judgement of what is really happening. If you are prone to a lack of perspective, one of the benefits of a daily gratitude journal is having that sense of perspective brought slowly back to you.
Quality over quantity. You just gave yourself a self-confidence upgrade.
85% of people hate their job. But there are real moments of pleasure and success in your botched employment experiment.
You may be broke, but it could be worse.
By bringing the positive, productive, happy things to the surface; by making those neurons fire electricity across your hemispheres, you build a more valid an accurate sense of perspective; of how the world really is.
Gratitude makes you happier
“Hey Apocalypse Daddy! This is all anecdotal clap trap. We don’t even know who you are. Why the hell should we listen to you?”
People are so hard to convince. Will magnetic resonance imaging convince you?
Probably not. What about the anterior cingulate cortex and the medial prefrontal cortex and how scientists have proved gratitude sends these areas of the brain into a snivelling, dribbling mess of activity?
Or how practising gratitude lights up an EEG scan like a goddamn firework display on the 4th of July after two years of Covid firework restrictions?
Gratitude Opens Your Mind
How does a gratitude journal open your mind? Back to the flywheel. The more you seek, the more you find to be grateful for. It opens your mind to what is inside. It’s a form of meditation, of mindfulness. Gratitude is a shortcut to the inner workings of what drives you, what pushes you, what pulls you back.
If you don’t believe in gratitude then take it up with Confucius. The Chinese philosopher who put loyalty, knowledge and virtue before all else said, “It is better to light one small candle of gratitude than to curse the darkness.”
Don’t have the energy to argue with Confucius (I mean, who does?) over whether gratitude works? Then take it up with Buddha, Epictetus, Aristotle or Lao Tzu. Fulfilment never comes from oustide. It never has. This is why gratitude works: it forces you to look within. If teaches you to cultivate the habit of seeking only your own justification for a meaningful, happy life.
On gratitude, Marcel Proust said,
Let us be grateful to the people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.
Even Winnie the fucking Poo understood the benefits of gratitude.
Piglet noticed that even though he had a Very Small Heart, it could hold a rather large amount of Gratitude.