The law of attraction illustrates time and time again that the fuel that runs the universe is love and gratitude. As a child, I was told to give thanks before each meal. Before showing gratitude for the food, I was taught to go through a list of several items for which I’m grateful. People in the personal improvement genre are using gratitude journals to allow themselves to create a more positive mindset and claiming it allows them to reach their goals more effectively.
Practicing Gratitude
The word gratitude and appreciation is thrown all around in the self-help community. But it’s really a 
matter of being in the moment of awareness and thankfulness for the amazing things in your life, you and the world you live. It goes without saying that there is no exact correct way to practice gratitude. It’s the emotion of gratitude that contains the effect of the activity. The best way to practice gratitude is to create a ritual or habit of practicing
being grateful. Doesn’t that sound odd, we must practice the act of being appreciative of people, opportunities, and experiences? But it seems we sometimes need to be reminded. The easiest and least expensive way I’ve found to do this is with a journal. It can be used to completely change your emotional state and bring hope and happiness to a dark time of your life. You can improve many facets of your life, career, romantic relationships, and even your health. Whether you prefer a quick journal, morning journal, night journal or like me make notes whenever it comes to me, you can create your own techniques.
What a gratitude journal did for me
The basic premise of a gratitude journal is to help you to focus on positive events, conversations, and relationships. The modern mind is conditioned to seek negativity in the world and reinforced by the pressures of societal stress. Over time I have personally found that my mind became more positive as I focus on what I’m grateful for. As time passed, I found myself becoming more
optimistic. On the days I found it hard to see the forest for the trees, I realized that focusing on what I was thankful for helped me to release some of the troublesome thoughts that inhabited my brain. I used the technique of finding a quiet place, my happy place and thinking about my kids, my dogs, and all of the things I am grateful for. My negative thoughts and emotions were replaced with negative ones. There’s an adage in personal development that one mug can’t contain 2 cups of liquid. That being said a mind can’t contain both a positive thought and a negative thought at the same time. It goes without saying that positive thoughts are much less stressful and can reduce anxiety.
Being in a primarily positive state allowed me to gain perspective, I now understand that many things we encounter from day to day will soon be in the rearview. Often we believe that events that just happened are the end of the world. A week from now you probably won’t even think about it, and in a couple of months, you won’t even remember it. Over time staying in a constant
state of arousal and stress will tear up the human body. Lack of sleep, constant increase of blood pressure, and hormones raging will slowly but surely take your system to pieces.
What a gratitude journal can do for you
Altering your mindset by changing the way you think can completely change the way you interact with others, reduce stress, and anxiety as well as evacuate many negative emotions that can lead to negative health effects over time. Try taking into account that there are people in all of our lives that lead to stress and
sometimes negative feelings. You can pick your nose and your friends, but you cant pick your family. Sometimes just begin grateful that your family or other people who drive you crazy didn’t drive you crazy, or that they are not continuing to make you nuts. It seems counter-intuitive, but this actually worked for me with my co-workers. I was able to be grateful for the opportunity to make money when we are in an economy which doesn’t support employment. Be grateful when you overcome a challenge or reprogram a limiting belief can help you to grow personally, resulting in building and supporting additional self-confidence and your knowledge base.
Want a positive attitude like I have? Think it’s hard and doesn’t know how to start? Are you afraid of the cost? When I started my gratitude journal I bought a composition notebook, and I made a list of what I was grateful for. At first, it was the big rocks, but as I continued to add smaller and smaller rocks, I realized I was grateful for house paint, because it preserved the wood to allow the house to last longer, and I couldn’t believe how long ago it was created. The
natural flow as you express gratitude allows you to follow a chain of events that added up to your reason for being grateful. It’s not expensive, and it’s not hard to do, it doesn’t require a lot of effort, and the return in the mental and physical benefits far outweighs the cost.
If your not into writing every day, then do it every other day. If you skip a few days, just try again. At the end of the day, the purpose of keeping the gratitude journal is to help you feel better about
the things in your life, not to impress someone else. As with all journals I recommend reviewing your journal at least once a month. If you’re really into it write every day for a month, then see if you can do another and another. The longer you do it the more you will feel really good every time you write into the journal. Over time your thoughts will shift more patterned towards positive mindsets.