I’m the kind of person who watches a lot of self-improvement content on YouTube, without necessarily following any of the recommendations. Eventually I decided I might as well try some of them out. I tried cold showers every day for 30 days, it was… alright I guess, I didn’t really feel much, but I thought of it as part of the journey I had to go through. Eventually I came across meditation, something I had been long hesitant to try. When I tried it, I loved it, and I still do it to this day.
A little more than a month ago I decided to try something else, which is known as ‘gratitude journaling’. The idea here is to start the day by writing down three things you are grateful for, no matter how random, big, or small; and at the end of the day you record three more things which happened during the day to make you feel grateful.
Various studies including one conducted by Professor Kimi P Wong show that gratitude journaling can improve the happiness level and general life satisfaction of participants.
I have to admit I didn’t always manage the full regime. Sometimes I missed mornings, sometimes I missed nights. But I rarely missed whole days and I think I did enough of it to conduct an assessment.
I can report that at the beginning of the experiment my life seemed largely mundane and uninspired. Then around day 10, I noticed a shift in my mood. I was starting to feel more cheerful, I had a zest for life, and even if I wasn’t particularly energetic, I had a general air of contentment and satisfaction around me.
What the journaling (if that’s a word) seems to have done was to reinforce how good the good things are, even if they are small and supposedly insignificant. Notes like ‘ate great food’, ‘had a good conversation’, ‘silence’ and even ‘being alive’, were always there to remind me of the good things in life, even if my life was no less repetitive than before. Also, because I was obliged to be positive in my note taking, I could not but make a mental note of this positivity.
Journaling changed my overall perspective towards my much-the-same life, even when some part of me remained discontented.
If you read all this, I highly recommend gratitude journaling. If you won’t do it, don’t worry, I’m grateful you read the article….and I’ll make a note of that in my journal.
