My 11-year-old daughter learned about a smartphone app recently called Daylio. Daylio is an app geared towards young people that prompts them to reflect on their day using emojis. It is a journal of sorts, where they can recount their feelings and thoughts about what happened. In the notes space, she has been documenting three good things from the day.
I am sure that you have heard about the studies that link practicing gratitude to increased happiness. Gratitude helps people feel more positive emotions, savor good experiences, improve health, deal with adversity, and build strong relationships. Oprah has sung the praises of keeping a gratitude journal, and there is even an ancient Ignatian spiritual practice of reflecting on where God’s gifts were present during the day.
When we first married, my husband Dan and I would name three things we were grateful for as our blessing before starting dinner. We fell out of that practice once we had small children because our attention always seemed to be pulled towards wiping messy chins and cleaning up spills. Yet it was a wonderful discipline. We would not allow ourselves to repeat gratitudes, so we had to pay close attention.
I have been known to keep running gratitude lists in my planner, and even in my one-line-a-day five year journal, and I love looking book on what I wrote. Hindsight allows me to see how small gifts sometimes multiply into even larger gifts, and hard things can become transformative. I can see where I held anxiety, and usually later apprehend how everything worked out after all—maybe not in the way that I wanted or hoped, but regardless, how I made it through. Gratitude gives me perspective.
There is nothing original about highlighting the importance of expressing gratitude during the month of Thanksgiving. Thankfulness may sometimes feel difficult to embody during challenging seasons, or perhaps we even feel guilty recounting all of our blessings when so many around the world are experiencing such hardship. Are we sticking our heads in the sand? Instead of dwelling on our blessings, should we focus our attention on how we are to alleviate such pain and suffering?
I do not think it is an either-or. In fact, I would suggest that naming the gifts we receive each day actually equips us to take on the hard things of the world. I do not believe that I have ever met someone who has a profound sense of the blessings in their life yet remains complacent or indifferent to the challenges others experience. There is a distinction between feeling blessed because we believe we deserve it (I am not advocating for this) and feeling blessed because we decide to pay attention to what is good.
Yes, practicing gratitude may make us happier as individuals, but it also builds us up to create meaningful change. Articulating the reasons we have to be thankful instills hope deep within us, waking us up to the ways God is active in our lives. Slowly but surely, gratitude transforms us—and by extension, the world around us.