How To Become Happier Through Gratitude (Sprinkled With Laughter)
I found some really great tips to help you and me along our life journey. I picked the very best ones, and added humorous commentary to each one.
The tips from the experts are in regular font, and my commentary is in italics. Although my commentary is meant to entertain, these are great practices to help change your life!
The articles are all linked if you'd like to do a deeper dive. Cheers!
1. Use Visual Reminders. Because the two primary obstacles to gratefulness are forgetfulness and a lack of mindful awareness, visual reminders can serve as cues to trigger thoughts of gratitude. Oftentimes, the best visual reminders are other people.
Wear a headband that says ‘blessed’, backwards, so when you look in the mirror, your mind is triggered, and you feel grateful. This works really well if you spend 4 hours a day looking in the mirror, like I do. Taking selfies in gym locker room mirrors helps me hit my daily ‘personal reflection time' goal.
Also, make a bobblehead of your significant other. You can do this by molding a random head out of Play-Doh, and using it to replace the head on an Atlanta Braves player’s body. This definitely won’t be weird.
2. Keep a Gratitude Journal. Establish a daily practice in which you remind yourself of the gifts, grace, benefits, and good things you enjoy. Setting aside time on a daily basis to recall moments of gratitude [...] gives you the potential to interweave a sustainable life theme of gratefulness.
If you’re worried that someone you live with might pick up your journal and read it, make sure to write their name every day. If it helps, you can even imagine another person with their same name as you’re writing it, like ‘Bill’ Murray, Gates or Bo Baggins.
3. Watch your Language. Grateful people have a particular linguistic style that uses the language of gifts, givers, blessings, blessed, fortune, fortunate, and abundance.
Write a post on social media about the ‘abundance’ of your cash reserves. Better yet, post a pic of you holding up $50’s-$100’s. $20’s work too, if you have a lot of them. Make a YouTube commercial about how much money you have, and how you can help those watching make money too.
4. Learn Prayers of Gratitude. In many spiritual traditions, prayers of gratitude are considered to be the most powerful form of prayer, because through these prayers people recognize the ultimate source of all they are and all they will ever be.
Say these prayers out loud, with your eyes closed, in elevators and other cramped spaces. Particularly if someone isn’t social distancing, or if they seem shady. Say, ‘I’m thankful that my pepper spray works!’ If you're a man, say, ‘I’m thankful that my pepper spray works!’ It’s 2020 y’all, let’s end all this unnecessary pepper spray shaming.
5. Go Through the Motions. If you go through grateful motions, the emotion of gratitude should be triggered. Grateful motions include smiling, saying thank you, and writing letters of gratitude.
Fake smiling is actually good for you. That’s why I go on dates with random womens from the interwebs, and so should you.
GREATER GOOD BERKELEY (2ND ARTICLE)
6. Avoid envy and materialism. Envy and materialism both involve dwelling on what we do not have, so it should come as no surprise that these emotions may be antithetical to gratitude. Indeed, it may be difficult or even impossible for people to be both grateful and envious or materialistic at the same time.
Stop buying stuff, and stop looking at other people’s stuff. Don’t go onto social media or outside. Only hang out with people poorer than you.
7.Avoid Narcissism.Narcissism appears to be another potent inhibitor of gratitude. “Individuals high in narcissism may not even notice that a gift has occurred because they believe they are entitled to the benefit.”
Apparently I should spend less time in the mirror. Ooops.
8. Practice gratitude at the same time every day to make it a habit.
I practice gratitude every morning, between my first sip of coffee and my 200th sip.
9. Add to your gratitude list daily, at least one more thing each day.
If, by day 4, the Macarena dance doesn’t make it on your list... are you even human?
10.Make a gratitude collage.Cut out pictures of all the things that you are grateful for.
Mine includes a picture of Aunt Becky, photoshopped onto Uncle Jesse’s body. #FullBigHouse #CollegeAdmissionScandal
FORBES
11. Practice mindfulness. Sit down daily and think through five to ten things you are grateful for. The trick is that you need to picture it in your mind and sit with that feeling of gratitude in your body. Doing this every day will rewire your brain to be naturally more grateful, and you’ll start feeling happier after every session.
I like to picture what I’m most grateful for. First, I picture a whole cigarette, then a lit cigarette, and then a cigarette butt. Then another whole cigarette. #TheCircleOfLife
12. Volunteer. For many people, the key to having more gratitude is to give back to others in their local community. Not only will it make you more grateful for the things that you may take for granted, but studies have shown that volunteering for the purpose of helping others increases our own well-being, and thus our ability to have more gratitude.
Helping people is for losers. Disregard this one. :P