If you’re only keeping up with gratitude and practices of grateful expression now and then, you might be missing out. Being a caregiver can often mean that you’re in situations that feel negative. Gratitude can help you to find the joy and the good in any situation.
Look Around for Five Beautiful Things
When you’re feeling particularly down, stop and take a look around you. Look for five different things in your immediate area that are beautiful or wonderful or another adjective of your choosing. Even if you’re somewhere you don’t want to be, such as the hospital with your aging adult, you can find five things. The act of looking for these things will help to change your focus.
Seek out Positive News
The news is full of both negative stories and positive ones. It might seem sometimes like the negative ones are the ones that get the most airplay, though. Make it a habit to seek out positive news stories as often as you can. This doesn’t mean that you need to be unaware of what’s going on, but that you’re expanding your vision of what makes up the news.
Flip Negative Thoughts
As a negative thought pops up, stop right then and reverse it to its positive version. Flip the thought around and make it a positive thought. The practice of doing this is going to be difficult at first, but it helps you to learn to first of all recognize negative thoughts and then second, rework them into something different.
Keep Your Own Journal
Any journal is powerful, but you can keep a positivity or a gratitude journal, too. This journal is one that you want to use only for the positive in your life. It can be easiest to use this as a running list of what you’re grateful for in your life. As you stick with the habit, you might find your journal evolving to help you reframe positivity.
Collect Quotes that Speak to You
Lots of people in the history of the world have said some really profound words around gratitude and positivity. It’s worth taking the time to seek these words out. When you find some that are particularly poignant to you, write them down.
Gratitude can be about so much more than just statements about what you’re grateful for on a particular day. When you can adopt an attitude of gratitude throughout your daily life, it will pay off for you in so many ways. Your entire life can become a little bit more positive and a little bit more rewarding.
