start monday with gratitude

You have been practising gratitude every day for quite some time now. Have you noticed the change in your life as a result? Has life become a lot more sweet as a result?

This week we’re going to look back to the past and compare it to the present moment to see and appreciate just how much gratitude has changed your life.

Today we’re going to focus on the mental change resulting from practising gratitude.

Think of a simple, basic, everyday task that you have to perform. One of those necessary tasks which you wouldn’t necessarily class as being fun but for which you are now grateful.

Compare how you feel about performing that task today to how you would have felt in the past, before you practised gratitude.

Can you find some sense of accomplishment through performing it today? In the past, how did you feel about that same task? Was it a burden that, if you could, you would put off doing?

Does that task feel lighter today than it did in the past?

Can you find something positive arising from the task today that you wouldn’t have found in the past?

We’re going to continue to focus on the mental benefits of gratitude today by focusing on your general outlook.

On a scale of 1 to 10, 1 being not good and 10 being fantastic, where would you rate you general happiness today and in the present time? And where would you rate it before you began practising gratitude everyday?

And what about your outlook of the world around you? Do you have a more positive outlook of the world today than you did before practising gratitude?

And what about your future? If you think of what the future could hold for you, do you look forward to entering the future and receiving all it has in store for you? And what about before you practised gratitude? Were you as excited about the future then?

How much has gratitude changed your outlook?

Just because you practise gratitude everyday doesn’t mean you are immune to experiencing lower emotions such as anger, hurt, sadness. However, let’s consider how gratitude impacts those lower emotions.

Think of a time, recently, when someone annoyed you or hurt you.

How did you feel and how long did that lower emotional feeling linger in your body and mind? Did you turn to gratitude to raise your vibration and move yourself out of that low vibrational emotion?

Compare that with times in the past, before you practised gratitude. When someone angered or hurt you, how did you feel? Did your mind turn to thoughts of revenge, of ideas to ‘get them back’? Did your mind and body linger and dwell on the sensation of anger or hurt, whatever lower emotions you were experiencing? Were you able to move yourself out of those low emotions quickly, within a few hours or did they linger for days? Were you able to find anything to be grateful for in that moment?

Can you see how gratitude has positively impacted your life and made it sweeter because, even though you’re not immune to falling into lower emotions, you don’t linger there as long and you have tools and skills that enable you to recover and raise your emotions faster?

What about the emotional impact of practising daily gratitude? Let’s consider your relationships.

How have your closest relationships changed as a result of gratitude?

If someone reacts in a negative way towards you, are you able to view their reaction from their perspective now and, so, better understand why they might be reacting the way they do? And, in so doing, can you better control your reaction back towards them, ensuring that you both don’t enter a downward spiral?

What about the degree of happiness in your closest relationships? Are you happier in those relationships now? In the past, perhaps certain habits, certain behaviour niggled you a bit about a person. Do those niggles still impact you as much? Indeed, do those niggling habits and behaviour even still exist?

Do you have a relationship with someone that is/was taut? Someone you really didn’t enjoy being in the company of but who you couldn’t always avoid? How do you feel about them now, today, after practising gratitude for so many months? Do you still feel so strongly about them or have your feelings towards them softened? Can you better bear to be in their company today compared to before you started practising gratitude?

What about the physical impact of gratitude? How much sweeter is your body, thanks to gratitude?

Let’s consider, first, your sleep. Looking back over the last month or so, how has your sleep been? Have you slept reasonably well, in general? Have you woken up feeling more refreshed in the mornings? Compare that with how you slept before you practised gratitude.

When we practise gratitude, we tend to become a lot less anxious about the future, our stress levels are reduced. And this, in turn, positively impacts our sleeping patterns.

Has gratitude positively impacted your sleeping patterns?

And what about illness over the last few months? Is there, perhaps, an illness you experience this time of year every year but you haven’t experienced this year? Or your health in general. Have you experienced less illness since you started practising gratitude compared to when you didn’t practise gratitude?

Again, practising gratitude tends to reduce anxiety and stress levels which, in turn, have a positive impact on the immune system, the system in the body designed to fight off illness.

When we practise gratitude, we raise our vibrational energy. For example, where emotions like fear have a frequency of only 100Hz, gratitude has a frequency of 540Hz.

And according to the Universal Law of Attraction, like attracts like.

Through practising gratitude and raising your emotional vibration, you should have attracted things of a similar frequency to you.

So rather than attracting negative experiences which would have been attracted to a vibration of fear, you should have been attracting positive experiences and opportunities of a similar vibration to gratitude.

Looking back over the last month or so, how much goodness have you attracted into your life? How many positive experiences and opportunities have entered your life? Can you remember such opportunities and experiences presenting themselves in your life before you practised gratitude on a daily basis?

One of the greatest plagues of the modern world is comparisonitis thanks primarily to the presence of social media.

Comparisonitis is the compulsion to compare one's accomplishments to another's to determine relative importance. This tends to lead to the illness of not-enoughness.

When we practise gratitude, we first begin by expressing gratitude for everything we have in our life. That reduces the desire and need to compare what we have with what others have because we’re grateful for what we already have.

Once we are grateful for what we have we can extend our gratitude practice to be grateful for what others have because comparisonitis no longer exists in our life.

Looking back over the time that you’ve been practising gratitude, can you see a reduction in comparisonitis and not-enoughness?

As a result, is your life happier and do you feel freer? Isn’t that something to be truly grateful for?