This will be a short post, since my entire family is currently at our house. But in the spirit of Thanksgiving, I wanted to share some thoughts on gratitude.
Starting several years ago, I overhauled my approach to health. For more on the full story, read more here. I started eating a whole-food, nutrient rich diet, reset goals for my work outs, and made sleep a much bigger deal in my life.
Those things alone, I started to realize, wouldn’t be enough for me to get to the healthy life I wanted. My attitude to everything that happened in general would have to change.
It started to make sense to me that gratitude could be a massively effective antidote to the constant stress and worry I exposed myself to. After all, have you ever tried being grateful and mad at the same time? It’s hard. Really hard.
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With this realization, I decided I needed something to hold me accountable to spend some time each day to think about all the things I’m grateful for. I needed something that would only take several minutes and I needed a constant reminder to do it until it became a full blown habit.
Luckily, this is where my iphone came to the rescue. I looked up a free app that would help me focus on gratitude every day and found one called the Gratitude Diary (see the picture above for what it looks like). There were others that came with fancier features but I just wanted something simple that came with daily reminders. And really, you can’t beat free.
It’s been over a year that I’ve been doing this and I couldn’t be happier that I have this in my life. It has now become a habit and I often find myself thinking of it organically when I’m sad, frustrated, or stressed. I take out my phone, jot down some ideas, and I feel better nearly immediately.
What did I enter today? I’m grateful for my family. And with that, I’m off to watch football, work on a puzzle, and stuff my face with delicious food 🙂