Gratitude

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As human beings, worry is a more present feeling in our lives than gratitude, unless we practice it. Being grateful is like running a race—on your first day of running, you get tired very quickly, but over time it becomes increasingly natural.

Recent studies show that practicing gratitude can bring benefits to your well-being, including your sleep:

• A study from the University of Manchester in England had more than 400 people, 40% of whom had insomnia, fill out questionnaires about gratitude, sleep, and thoughts they had before falling asleep.

It was found that gratitude helped people fall asleep faster and have more restorative sleep by promoting more positive thoughts, and fewer negative ones, at bedtime.

• Another study that evaluated the impact of constructive thinking interventions on sleep found that writing a gratitude journal for 15 minutes every night helped participants worry less at bedtime and, consequently, sleep longer and more deeply as a result.

A gratitude journal is a simple tool you can use to track the good things in your life. No matter how difficult life may seem, there is always something to be grateful for.

How to keep a gratitude journal?

Tips:

• You can be grateful for things that happened in your day, in your week, in your year (e.g., what is better in my life today than a year ago?) or you can also be grateful for things as they are (e.g., "which people are you happy to have in your life?", "in a world with COVID-19, I am grateful to be able to breathe"). Another option is to be grateful for what you have because you were born in your generation (e.g., "I am grateful they invented the internet, because now I can talk to my family even from a distance").
• Your journal entries can be simple, like: "family", "Sleep Guardians", "the movie I watched yesterday". And for even better results, try to be very specific like: "I am thankful for the session I did today because now I have a better chance of ending my insomnia ;-)".
• Try to vary what you are grateful for each day. If you give thanks for the same thing every day (e.g., "Family, food, and health"), the benefits of the technique tend to diminish. Being specific (previous tip) makes it easier to vary.
• Remember that gratitude is not feeling sorry for yourself or trying to forget your problems. It's also not just thinking positively (or making up good things). Gratitude is looking around you and seeing what is going well—in other words, it's stepping away from our natural human tendency to only see what is going wrong. After all, as Christopher McCandless (from the movie "Into the Wild") would say:

Express your gratitude!

If you want to go further, one way to intensify your gratitude practice even more is to use your journal entries to then thank the people around you for whom you are grateful.

After all, as Christopher McCandless (from the movie "Into the Wild") would say:

"Happiness is only real when shared"