Practising Gratitude

There’s a lot of people talking about, and practicing, gratitude nowadays, so what is it?

Practising Gratitude is about pausing to notice and appreciate the things around you that we often take for granted and really actually having the feeling of gratefulness for those things whether it’s a small thing or a big thing. It’s about being grateful for things such having a place to live, food to eat, clean water, access to health care and hopefully these are pretty generic things for us all but do we stop and actually appreciate the fact that we have them.

It’s also about being thankful for the family you have, the friends you have, the health of those people, for your own health, for your body for allowing to do what you do. Oh gosh the list could be endless.

According to research from Harvard gratitude helps people feel more positive emotions, relish good experiences, improve their health, deal with adversity, and build strong relationships.

There are always things to be grateful for even on what seems like a bad day. The trick sometimes is to find them on those bad days where nothing seems to be going right. From experience I promise you that if you can pause for some time and find those things you are truly grateful for, your bad day will not nearly be as bad.

A lot of people keep a gratitude journal where they write down each day the things they are grateful for which is great way of doing it as writing it will imprint it in your mind better. It doesn’t have to be a whole massive list but 5 or 10 things. I often just lie in bed in the morning and think of the things I’m grateful for. I try to come up with at least 5. To be honest most mornings it’s the same things such as my coffee, the birds singing, the health of my family etc etc, however it’s good to find at least one different thing each day.

It's also good to take time at the end of the day to consider the things that you are thankful for that happened that day. Go to bed on a positive note.

---

Karen is a qualified personal trainer and nutrition coach living in Cyprus near Paphos with her husband Mal and their cat Dave. She has been a personal trainer for 14 years and a qualified nutrition coach for over 2 years. She is passionate about working with people of any age and fitness level to improve their health and wellbeing.

Click here to see more of her posts.