Gratitude and Habits

Welcome to Day 6 of the Habits Reboot week. If you missed Days 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5, please go back and start there. Today we are going to look at how gratitude and habits work together to create success, and then I’m going to give you something to think about. No trash bags will be needed today.

Over the last two days I gave you three challenging ways to create space that hopefully made you think hard. They definitely took me some time to work through and were revealing and absolutely worth the time I invested. I had a lot of “ohhhhh” moments.

Pull up these three lists that you made:

10 Ruminations
10 Old Goals
10 Expectations from Others

These are all things to set free in order to make room for new things that bring joy, new habits that we really want, and to give ourselves peace. What if we look at each item and send it off with gratitude? What if we say thank you to each one for whatever purpose it served in our lives, and then send it on its way while having gratitude for what will come in its place?

Go do that. Each item.

They are so much easier to let go of, right??

Gratitude refocuses your attention towards the good things you have. And the consequences of this shift are better feelings and more positive experiences.
– Philipp from Kurzgesagt

Please watch this for some gratitude science.

Applied to habits, when gratitude is added we are more likely to reach for the better habit, focusing on the positive it delivers rather than the negative of what we are not doing instead. The focus shifts from what we are missing out on to the gifts of what we get instead.

For example: Let’s say I am trying to stay off email by replacing the impulse to check it with reading a book. When the urge strikes, if I approach the moment with gratitude, I will think about how thankful I am to have that book and that I get to learn new things from it rather than focusing on the negatives that I might be missing. I will also focus on how grateful I am to be forming a much healthier habit.

It turns “I have to” into “I get to.”

Gratitude Journalling

Gratitude itself is a habit. If it isn’t on your list of habits to embrace, add it! I have a morning routine that begins with my gratitude journal. Every single day. I do it first thing because I want to cultivate a grateful mindset that I then carry with me into everything that follows. I think it wears off sooner than I’d like so I probably ought to add a midday and evening gratitude practice, too. In any case, these moments to check in are powerful. Give it a try and experience for yourself how it helps reboot your habits.