Showing gratitude has a positive impact on a person’s well-being. What’s so nice about gratitude is that it’s free and easy to do. One way to incorporate gratitude as a daily practice is to create a gratitude list. Specifically, research has shown that people who implement a gratitude list have more happiness, more life satisfaction, and less depression. One example of a gratitude list practice involves writing down five things that happened to you that you are grateful for. Often this is done daily at the end of the day, when you reflect on positive things you experienced during the day. A gratitude list can also be thought of as an end of the day ritual.
The first step in creating a daily gratitude list is noticing. When you think about your daily life, do you take the time to notice things? In a given day, we can decide what we want to focus on. Sometimes there are little things that impact, and other times there are big events that impact us. In addition, we can pay attention to something good that happens or something bad that happens during our day. When we decide to repeatedly notice hassles during our day, that focus can negatively impact our emotional well-being. On the other hand, we can choose to focus on positive occurrences in our day and reap the benefits of concentrating on what we are grateful for. If we decide to focus on the positive, then we may notice that there are more good things happening to us than we realized.
If you decide to try the practice of creating a daily gratitude list, you could also consider incorporating gratitude for your skin. Since our skin is the largest organ in the body, it has so many functions. One skin function that we may overlook is regulating our body temperature. As we are experiencing colder weather this month, we can be grateful that our skin helps us conserve heat to help keep us warm.