How To Start A Morning Gratitude Practice

Practicing gratitude daily is a great way to improve your overall mental and emotional wellbeing. It helps you to focus on the positive aspects of your life, rather than the negative, and to appreciate all of the good things that you have.

Daily gratitude can help to promote more meaningful relationships, and help you to connect more deeply with the people and things in your life that bring you joy. 

It can help you find a sense of purpose and direction. Research has even linked gratitude to improved physical health, as it helps to enhance your immune system and reduce blood pressure. 

With regular practice, you may find that you become more content, more positive, and more resilient when faced with difficult situations. 

By taking the time to intentionally practice gratitude everyday, I can certainly see the changes that it has made in my life. Not that I was a negative person before, but by being grateful I have noticed that I have become a more optimistic, glass half-full type of person. Gratefulness has also positively affected my relationships as well.

If you want to improve your life, practicing daily gratitude is a start.  It has an immediate, powerful impact on your life. And you start experiencing the benefits from the first day you deliberately begin your day with gratitude.

Here are five benefits you can gain from starting your day with a positive mindset.

Benefits Of Practicing Gratitude

Better Mood

Starting your day with positivity elevates your mood and helps you have a better day. Being positive brings you inner peace, lowers your stress levels, increases your optimism, and makes you feel good. All of these benefits combine to put you in a better mood.

Taking time out to inject positivity and gratitude into your day improves your mood at all times of the day but it is especially effective first thing in the morning.

Increased Health

Positive people tend to be healthier than their peers. This is partly due to the lower stress levels experienced by those who practice positivity, but there is more to it than that and scientists are still working to understand it. Positive people are healthier on every level and tend to live longer as well!

Starting your day with positive thinking sets the tone for your entire day and will lead you to have a more positive outlook on everything else in life.

More Success

Being positive and grateful first thing in the morning helps clear your mind and allows you to focus more on your tasks for the day. This leads directly to having more success every day and over the long term.

Positive people, as a whole, are much more successful than others. This is true in every aspect of life, from your career to your relationships.

Happiness

Not only does starting your day with gratitude and positive thinking increase your mood, but it makes you happier. It boosts all of those “feel-good” hormones in the brain that make you happy. 

This isn’t a transitory effect, either; it lasts all day and over the long term increases your overall, permanent level of happiness.

Improved Relationships

When you start your day with positivity, you clear your brain and are in a much better space to relate to the people you care about most. This makes it easier to maintain 

healthy, caring relationships. 

These are just a few of the benefits you can get from deliberately beginning each day with gratitude and positive thinking. You will experience many more if you make it a habit.

Morning Gratitude Practice

Practicing gratitude in the morning can be a great way to start your day on the right foot. It can help you focus on the positive aspects of your life and create a more positive mindset. This in turn can lead to increased happiness and reduced stress. 

A morning gratitude practice has extra benefits, however, because it also gives you all the benefits that come from starting your day off with positivity. 

As with other types of morning positivity, you can choose from several types of morning gratitude practice.

The two most common types of morning gratitude practices are list-making and gratitude journaling.

Both work well to bring positivity into your morning and can be integrated into just about any morning routine.

Gratitude is the healthiest of all human emotions. The more you express gratitude for what you have, the more likely you will have even more to express gratitude for.

Zig Ziglar

Gratitude Lists

Gratitude lists are exactly what they sound like – lists of things you are grateful for. You can make one whenever and wherever you want to (or need to). They can be as short or as long as you need  them to be.

To make gratitude lists into a morning gratitude practice, you need to make a list of things you are grateful for every morning. 

Try to make a list that is about the same size every morning – typically five to ten things. FYI – You do not have to list the same things each day. If starting out daily is too much for you, feel free to practice gratitude every other day, or three times a week and work your way up.

Just list whatever comes to mind first. Your list will vary from one day to the next and that is a good thing! It will show you all the different things in your life that are good and help you become more positive.

How do you make your lists? You can either make them silently or aloud at any time during your morning routine. Or you can write them down. The choice is yours. Choose  what feels right and works best for you.

Gratitude Journaling

Gratitude journaling is a specific type of journaling where you focus on being grateful. It is often used to write down gratitude lists, as described above, but it is also used with specific gratitude prompts or to write down extensive paragraphs related to gratitude.

You do not need a large chunk of time when using the journaling method. You only need to journal for five or ten minutes a day, but you can certainly go longer if you choose. And you don’t need any fancy tools. You can use a regular notebook, a premade journal, or a digital app.

Here is a list of  journaling prompts to help get you started with your gratitude practice.  

Journaling Prompts

1. Who special someone has taught you about unconditional love in the past or present?

2. Write down one good thing that happened to you today.

3. What are five personality traits that you are most thankful for?

4. What about your upbringing are you most grateful for?

5. Are you happy with how your day turned out?

6. Can you do better tomorrow?

7. Name 5 things you are doing well currently.

8. Did you have a nice surprise today? Write about it.

9. Did you do something nice to someone today? Write about it.

10. What family members are you most grateful for? Write about what makes them special.

11. What is something nice another person did for you today or this week?

12. What is something nice you did for another person today or this week?

13. Who or what in your life are you happy to have let go?

14. Think of 5 people that irritate you or you have trouble getting along with. What irritates you most about them? Now list 3 positive notes or qualities about each person.

15. What were your 3 best days? Write a small paragraph about each day.

16. What were your worst three days? Write a small paragraph about each day and think how much better off you are now.

17. Write the top 10 things in your life that cause you stress. For each stress factor, write what you can do to change it.

18. Think about the worst period you went through in your life and list 10 ways life is better now than it was then.

19. What are irritations in your life that could use a change in perspective? 

20. List something good that has recently caught your attention to make you realize how fortunate you are.

21. Think about the qualities of the people you admire. List these qualities and how you can incorporate them into your life.

22. List 3 people and/or things you feel that you take for granted. How can you express more appreciation for these things or people?

23. What friends are you most grateful for having? List what makes each friend special.

24. List 3 things you could do today to be a kinder person.

25. Who are the people that first come to mind that don’t have it as good as you do?

26. Think of 3 people that do not have it as good as you (sick children, homeless people, the disabled, elderly, war victims, etc). What could you do to help people in these situations?

27. Name 3 things that always put a smile on your face.

28. What is the most beautiful place you have been to? Relive being in this place now.

29. What are your biggest accomplishments?

30. What do you really appreciate about your life?

31. Name 3 things that you can start doing today to express your gratitude to others?  Start doing it in the next few days.

Starting, and maintaining a gratitude practice is pretty simple, though it’s not always easy.  But if you remain consistent, over time it will become a regular part of your morning routine.  And you’ll realize that as you start each day with positivity, you will become a happier, healthier more optimistic person.