It’s my first summer not working in the day program I used to work at and I am slowly building up my own business, which means my days look much different lately. I have more time to rest and do things that are good for my body, heart and mind. I am trying to fill my brain with new learning to support my clients and the new ones that come in, and personally I am trying to learn about myself and how I can best fill my life with joy and take care of myself when things are hard. So this summer I’m diving into gratitude journalling as one thing that I want to challenge myself to do – here comes the 30 day gratitude challenge!
The rules that I have set for myself are small and simple – journal for 30 days with self compassion. That means if I miss a day, that’s ok there’s another day I can try tomorrow. If it takes me more than 30 days to complete that’s ok! If my journal one day is short and really hard to get through, that is also OK and I can modify the questions as I go. There are no rules for how much to write, what it should look like and how long it should take. And I hope you can take these rules for yourself too! If you are joining along, take my posts and videos as a template and feel free to take your own creative liberties to make it best for you!
Over the next 30 days I will be building out this page with some information around gratitude journalling as well as linking all the different prompt posts to this post so you can easily find them. This is a practice also for me in doing things imperfectly – I could take time to try to write this whole post at once and keep it under wraps until I am very happy about it, but who is tracking that? I might as well do this slow and steady and put my heart into it so it ends up being a nice piece to read 🙂 So as I work on my gratitude, I will also work on my patience and perfectionism. Self love sometimes looks like challenging your comfort doesn’t it?
If you have any ideas of things you are interested in regarding gratitude let me know!
Benefits of building a Gratitude Journaling Practice
- Gratitude increases your happiness
- When you start practicing gratitude, you will bring awareness to little things that bring you joy that you may have taken for granted. When you learn to appreciate even the smallest things, like the sun shining, the “hello” your barista gives you when you get your morning coffee, your cat snuggling you before bed, your happiness levels will increase.
- A systematic review about gratitude interventions reported greater satisfaction in life for those who engaged in gratitude interventions and showed benefits for happiness https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10393216/
2. Benefits your Mental health
- The same study listed above describes fewer anxiety symptoms measured in individuals who completed gratitude interventions vs the control group
- Patients who underwent gratitude interventions in this study also had fewer symptoms of depression than the control group
Journal Prompt posts:
Day 2 – What’s your song of the summer?
Day 5 – thank goodness you’re here!
Day 8 – sometimes change is positive
Day 9
Day 10
Day 11
Day 12
Day 13
Day 14
Day 15
Day 16
Day 17
Day 18
Day 19
Day 20
Day 21
Day 22
Day 23
Day 24
Day 25
Day 26
Day 27
Day 28
Day 29
Day 30
Reflection
Be Your Own Sunshine 
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