10 Ways to Feel Grateful Every Day

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Almost daily, new scientific findings are demonstrating the benefits of feeling grateful and expressing it to others.

12 Benefits of Practicing Gratitude in Everyday Life

Here are some of the many benefits that people experience when they leave negativity behind and cultivate an attitude of gratitude:

1. More energy
2. Better sleep
3. Better physical health
4. More enthusiasm
5. A greater sense of optimism
6. Deeper empathy
7. Greater popularity
8. A higher level of success in every realm (professional and academic achievement, money-making, friendship, parenting, relationship-building)
9. Greater resilience, better capacity to overcome setbacks
10. Enhanced mindfulness
11. A deeper sense of contentment
12. More happiness

10 Ways to Incorporate an Attitude of Gratitude Into Your Family’s Life

As with pretty well everything to do with raising children, the best way to encourage your child to have an attitude of gratitude is to have one yourself. That being said, there are also ways to teach your child about the benefits of feeling grateful.

1. Say thank you. Show your child how much you appreciate their presence in your life, as well as what you like about your home, your work, your friends, and whatever else you might feel grateful for. Say thank you to anyone who helps you or enriches your life—the supermarket cashier, the school custodian, the driver who lets you into their lane.
2. Focus on the beauty in this moment. Actively celebrate being alive. Notice what’s good or beautiful about the people and the world around you. Take a walk with your child and pay attention to all the forms of life your neighborhood contains.
3. Say “Yes!” whenever possible. Try to catch your child being cheerful and co-operative at least twice as often as you criticize them. Aim for 10 times more often.
4. Establish and maintain healthy routines. Just like adults, kids are grouchier when they’re hungry, tired, cold, too sedentary, or spending too much time on screens. So do your best to give your child a reasonably predictable schedule of meals, snacks, snuggles, playtime, outdoor time, and rest.
5. Transform entitlement and negativity into gratitude. Negativity corrodes family life, as well as everything else. But, happily, because negativity is a habit of mind, it can be changed. With help, even the grumpiest teenager can become someone with attitudes that others—including their families—can enjoy. A particularly effective approach is to help kids or adults move from a sense of entitlement (which breeds negativity) to one of gratitude.
6. Start a gratitude journal. Keep a special notebook where you write about experiences, people, or things you feel grateful for. Contributions can be brief or lengthy, in pictures or in words. They can focus on big events—a new baby or a financial problem resolved—or experiences as simple as a good meal or a joke that got you all laughing. Leave the journal somewhere the whole family can look at it, and invite everyone to add their own sources of gratitude. Depending on your child’s age and personality, you might give them their own gratitude journal to record their private reasons for feeling grateful.
7. Think of gratitude as a mindfulness practice. Feeling grateful shifts your mental focus from what’s wrong in your world to what’s right. It has a positive effect on your brain chemistry and your social environment. Mindfully grateful people find they have more and more to feel happy about.
8. Teach your child to express gratitude. When people take time to actively focus on sources of gratitude, their problems feel more manageable. Teach your child that "Thank you" is not optional. Help them find more reasons to say it.
9. Help your child take ownership of their achievements and happy moments. When your child feels good about an achievement, has had a good time with friends, or has any other positive experience, ask them to think about how they contributed to that good thing. Let them know that when good things happen, we’ve almost always contributed in one way or another, even if only by being in the right frame of mind to notice, or sufficiently positive to allow it to happen. In helping your child recognize their contribution to their own experiences, they’ll increasingly act to ensure experiences they feel grateful for. You’ll notice their sense of well-being increasing, along with all the other benefits of gratitude.
10. At bedtime, think about today’s gifts. After all the other bedtime routines are done and your child is safely tucked into bed, sit down for a few gentle minutes with them and review what that day has brought that makes each of you happy. Perhaps you’ve had healthy food to eat or you’re glad you have a warm bed to sleep in. Maybe your child did well on a school project and is grateful for a feeling of accomplishment and success. Perhaps you’re feeling better after a cold and are grateful for your good health. Finish by telling your child how grateful you are that they’re in your life. You’ll be tuned in to all the things you love in your child, which will help them sleep more soundly and feel better about themself.

No matter how challenging your life is right now, you can find sources of gratitude. As Oprah Winfrey said, “The single greatest thing you can do to change your life today would be to start being grateful for what you have right now. And the more grateful you are, the more you get.”