It is important to be consistent and develop a call to action in your mind so you will not allow your journal to sit on your desk unused. Whatever routine you decide on will be a great way to allow your mind and body to know that you are about to reflect on gratitude.
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Do your routine consistently because it will strengthen your ability to create a habit out of journaling. You can format your gratitude journal however you want. Some people like to make lists of things that they are grateful for, while others like to draw pictures. You may want to write some poetry or narrative. The only important thing to do during the process is to feel your gratitude while you are recording it. Do whatever feels best for you so you will continue using your journal.
If you don't like writing long paragraphs, then don't feel like you have to. This journal is only for your reflection. No one else has to see it. Even after a bad day, think of at least one positive thing that happened that you appreciate. Forget about all of the negativity from the day and write about one great life event, and why you are thankful for it.
The Day Gratitude Journal. Want to get started right away with practicing gratitude? A Mindful Practice for a Lifetime of Happiness. With this journal, you will build a powerful daily gratitude habit and re-discover all the great things that are already in your life. Click or tap this link to grab your copy: There are three main things that you can use a gratitude journal for. These are a diary, a personal development tool, and a life-changing experience. A diary is the basic level of a gratitude journal.
It acts as a place to write things down that make you happy. Typically, you will put three to five things down on the paper each night and call it a day. Brief notes usually suffice for this kind of gratitude journal, as long as you are feeling the gratitude as you are writing. This is a great habit because you will reflect upon the things you are grateful for on a regular basis, which will tune your mind to a positive frequency. It is easy to grab your journal and a pen and get started. However, with this method, you are missing out on a lot of the potential benefits of your journal.
You will be focusing only on the things that are currently present in your life, instead of thinking about possible things that are missing.
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But this is a fast and easy way to keep a gratitude journal, so it is a perfect place to start. If you have a little more time to commit to your gratitude journal, you can take it a step beyond writing a simple diary and create more of a tool to aid in your personal development. By knowing why you are writing in your journal, you will be able to track your growth.
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Having a process for spotting your progress and the shifts that are happening in your life means you can have your journal work for you to develop new habits and improved methods of thinking. When you know why you want to do something, it is easier to plan your intentions and make an action. With this clear vision, you will be more likely to write in your journal more often, and stay motivated. With a clear process for tracking your personal changes, you will be able to pinpoint your successes.
If you want to make your gratitude journal a central part of your life, then you should aim to make it a life-changing experience. To do this, work with your gratitude affirmations, refer to inspirational quotes, and use different gratitude techniques to be able to make a fundamental shift in how you live your life. This doesn't have to be extreme, but it can be an integration of your gratitude into your everyday thoughts. Using affirmations and gratitude techniques can help you retrain your busy mind, shifting your thoughts from negative to positive.
The impact of this will be long-lasting and profound, as you will be able to incorporate your gratitude into every part of your life. If you are having trouble starting your journal, or you need some inspiration, there are a few questions you can ask yourself to get you started. It can sometimes be difficult to dig deeper without some prompts. Think about kind or thoughtful things that people have done for you lately, or the people who have always been there for you during times of trouble.
Also, think about either events or people who have inspired you to become the person you are. Actual changes in income, on the other hand, buy very little happiness. I think that last line is especially fascinating: So we could increase our annual income by hundreds of thousands of dollars and still not be as happy as we would if we increased the strength of our social relationships.
The Terman study, covered in The Longevity Project , found that relationships and how we help others were important factors in living long, happy lives:. We figured that if a Terman participant sincerely felt that he or she had friends and relatives to count on when having a hard time then that person would be healthier.
Those who felt very loved and cared for, we predicted, would live the longest. Beyond social network size, the clearest benefit of social relationships came from helping others. Those who helped their friends and neighbors, advising and caring for others, tended to live to old age. In The Happiness Advantage , Shawn Achor recommends spending time in the fresh air to improve your happiness:. Making time to go outside on a nice day also delivers a huge advantage; one study found that spending 20 minutes outside in good weather not only boosted positive mood, but broadened thinking and improved working memory This is pretty good news for those of us who are worried about fitting new habits into our already-busy schedules.
Twenty minutes is a short enough time to spend outside that you could fit it into your commute or even your lunch break. A UK study from the University of Sussex also found that being outdoors made people happier:. Being outdoors, near the sea, on a warm, sunny weekend afternoon is the perfect spot for most. In fact, participants were found to be substantially happier outdoors in all natural environments than they were in urban environments. The American Meteorological Society published research in that found current temperature has a bigger effect on our happiness than variables like wind speed and humidity, or even the average temperature over the course of a day.
It also found that happiness is maximized at 57 degrees The connection between productivity and temperature is another topic we've talked about more here. It's fascinating what a small change in temperature can do. One of the most counterintuitive pieces of advice I found is that to make yourself feel happier, you should help others. In fact, hours per year or two hours per week is the optimal time we should dedicate to helping others in order to enrich our lives.
Spending money on other people, called "prosocial spending," also boosts happiness. The Journal of Happiness Studies published a study that explored this very topic:. Participants recalled a previous purchase made for either themselves or someone else and then reported their happiness. Afterward, participants chose whether to spend a monetary windfall on themselves or someone else. Participants assigned to recall a purchase made for someone else reported feeling significantly happier immediately after this recollection; most importantly, the happier participants felt, the more likely they were to choose to spend a windfall on someone else in the near future.
So spending money on other people makes us happier than buying stuff for ourselves. But what about spending our time on other people? A study of volunteering in Germany explored how volunteers were affected when their opportunities to help others were taken away:. Volunteering was still widespread.
Due to the shock of the reunion, a large portion of the infrastructure of volunteering e. Based on a comparison of the change in subjective well-being of these people and of people from the control group who had no change in their volunteer status, the hypothesis is supported that volunteering is rewarding in terms of higher life satisfaction. In his book Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-being , University of Pennsylvania professor Martin Seligman explains that helping others can improve our own lives:.
Smiling can make us feel better, but it's more effective when we back it up with positive thoughts, according to this study:. A new study led by a Michigan State University business scholar suggests customer-service workers who fake smile throughout the day worsen their mood and withdraw from work, affecting productivity. But workers who smile as a result of cultivating positive thoughts--such as a tropical vacation or a child's recital--improve their mood and withdraw less.
Of course it's important to practice "real smiles" where you use your eye sockets. You've seen fake smiles that don't reach the person's eyes. Smile with just your mouth. Then smile naturally; your eyes narrow. There's a huge difference in a fake smile and a genuine smile. According to PsyBlog , smiling can improve our attention and help us perform better on cognitive tasks:. Smiling makes us feel good which also increases our attentional flexibility and our ability to think holistically.
When this idea was tested by Johnson et al. Smiling is one way to reduce the distress caused by an upsetting situation. Psychologists call this the facial feedback hypothesis. Even forcing a smile when we don't feel like it is enough to lift our mood slightly this is one example of embodied cognition. As opposed to actually taking a holiday, simply planning a vacation or break from work can improve our happiness.
A study published in the journal Applied Research in Quality of Life showed that the highest spike in happiness came during the planning stage of a vacation as people enjoy the sense of anticipation:. In the study, the effect of vacation anticipation boosted happiness for eight weeks. After the vacation, happiness quickly dropped back to baseline levels for most people. For example, the following title was taken almost at random from a prestigious journal in social psychology: Affective influences on the explanation of conflict in close relationships" Forgas, , p.
Just by reading the title, it can be inferred that the study investigated how emotional states change the way people explain conflict in close relationships. It also suggests that when feeling sad, people accept more personal blame for such conflicts i. The abstract is also an invaluable source of information. It is a brief synopsis of the study, and packs a lot of information into words or less. The abstract contains information about the problem that was investigated, how it was investigated, the major findings of the study, and hints at the theoretical and practical implications of the findings.
How to Create a Gratitude Journal
Thus, the abstract is a useful summary of the research that provides the gist of the investigation. Reading this outline first can be very helpful, because it tells you where the report is going, and gives you a useful framework for organizing information contained in the article. The title and abstract of a research report are like a movie preview. A movie preview highlights the important aspects of a movie's plot, and provides just enough information for one to decide whether to watch the whole movie.
Just so with titles and abstracts; they highlight the key features of a research report to allow you to decide if you want to read the whole paper. And just as with movie previews, they do not give the whole story. Reading just the title and abstract is never enough to fully understand a research report. A research report has four main sections: Though it is not explicitly labeled, the introduction begins the main body of a research report.
Here, the researchers set the stage for the study. They present the problem under investigation, and state why it was important to study. By providing a brief review of past research and theory relevant to the central issue of investigation, the researchers place the study in an historical context and suggest how the study advances knowledge of the problem.
Beginning with broad theoretical and practical considerations, the researchers delineate the rationale that led them to the specific set of hypotheses tested in the study. They also describe how they decided on their research strategy e. The introduction generally begins with a broad consideration of the problem investigated. Here, the researchers want to illustrate that the problem they studied is a real problem about which people should care. If the researchers are studying prejudice, they may cite statistics that suggest discrimination is prevalent, or describe specific cases of discrimination.
Such information helps illustrate why the research is both practically and theoretically meaningful, and why you should bother reading about it. Such discussions are often quite interesting and useful. They can help you decide for yourself if the research has merit. But they may not be essential for understanding the study at hand. Read the introduction carefully, but choose judiciously what to focus on and remember. To under- stand a study, what you really need to understand is what the researchers' hypotheses were, and how they were derived from theory, informal observation, or intuition.
Other back- ground information may be intriguing, but may not be critical to understand what the researchers did and why they did it. While reading the introduction, try answering these questions: What problem was studied, and why? How does this study relate to, and go beyond, past investigations of the problem? How did the researchers derive their hypotheses?
What questions do the researchers hope to answer with this study? In the method section, the researchers translate their hypotheses into a set of specific, testable questions. Here, the researchers introduce the main characters of the study the subjects or participants-describing their characteristics gender, age, etc.
Then, they describe the materials or apparatus , such as any questionnaires or special equipment, used in the study. Finally, they describe chronologically the procedures of the study; that is, how the study was conducted.
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Often, an overview of the research design will begin the method section. This overview provides a broad outline of the design, alerting you to what you should attend. The method is presented in great detail so that other researchers can recreate the study to confirm or question its results. This degree of detail is normally not necessary to under- stand a study, so don't get bogged down trying to memorize the particulars of the procedures.
Focus on how the independent variables were manipulated or measured and how the dependent variables were measured. Measuring variables adequately is not always an easy matter. Many of the variables psychologists are interested in cannot be directly observed, so they must be inferred from participants' behavior.
Happiness, for example, cannot be directly observed. Thus, researchers interested in how being happy influences people's judgments must infer happiness or its absence from their behavior-perhaps by asking people how happy they are, and judging their degree of happiness from their responses; perhaps by studying people's facial expressions for signs of happiness, such as smiling. Think about the measures researchers use while reading the method section.
Do they adequately reflect or capture the concepts they are meant to measure? If a measure seems odd, consider carefully how the researchers justify its use. Oftentimes in social psychology, getting there is half the fun. In other words, how a result is obtained can be just as interesting as the result itself. Social psychologists often strive to have participants behave in a natural, spontaneous manner, while controlling enough of their environment to pinpoint the causes of their behavior.
Sometimes, the major contribution of a research report is its presentation of a novel method of investigation. When this is the case, the method will be discussed in some detail in the introduction. Participants in social psychology studies are intelligent and inquisitive people who are responsive to what happens around them. Because of this, they are not always initially told the true purpose of a study. If they were told, they might not act naturally. Thus, researchers frequently need to be creative, presenting a credible rationale for complying with procedures, without revealing the study's purpose.
This rationale is known as a cover story , and is often an elaborate scenario. While reading the method section, try putting yourself in the shoes of a participant in the study, and ask yourself if the instructions given to participants seem sensible, realistic, and engaging. Imagining what it was like to be in the study will also help you remember the study's procedure, and aid you in interpreting the study's results.
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While reading the method section, try answering these questions: How were the hypotheses translated into testable questions? Did the measures used adequately reflect the variables of interest? For example, is self-reported income an adequate measure of social class? Why or why not? The results section describes how the observations collected were analyzed to determine whether the original hypotheses were supported. Here, the data observations of behavior are described, and statistical tests are presented. Because of this, the results section is often intimidating to readers who have little or no training in statistics.
Wading through complex and unfamiliar statistical analyses is understandably confusing and frustrating. As a result, many students are tempted to skip over reading this section. We advise you not to do so. Empirical findings are the foundation of any science and results sections are where such findings are presented. Even the most prestigious researchers were once in your shoes and sympathize with you. Though space in psychology journals is limited, researchers try to strike a balance between the need to be clear and the need to be brief in describing their results. In an influential paper on how to write good research reports, Bem offered this advice to researchers:.
No matter how technical or abstruse your article is in its particulars, intelligent non psychologists with no expertise in statistics or experimental design should be able to comprehend the broad outlines of what you did and why. They should understand in general terms what was learned. Most statistical analyses presented in research reports test specific hypotheses. Often, each analysis presented is preceded by a reminder of the hypothesis it is meant to test.
After an analysis is presented, researchers usually provide a narrative description of the result in plain English. When the hypothesis tested by a statistical analysis is not explicitly stated, you can usually determine the hypothesis that was tested by reading this narrative description of the result, and referring back to the introduction to locate an hypothesis that corresponds to that result. After even the most complex statistical analysis, there will be a written description of what the result means conceptually. Turn your attention to these descriptions. Focus on the conceptual meaning of research findings, not on the mechanics of how they were obtained unless you're comfortable with statistics.
Aside from statistical tests and narrative descriptions of results, results sections also frequently contain tables and graphs. These are efficient summaries of data. Even if you are not familiar with statistics, look closely at tables and graphs, and pay attention to the means or correlations presented in them. Researchers always include written descriptions of the pertinent aspects of tables and graphs.
While reading these descriptions, check the tables and graphs to make sure what the researchers say accurately reflects their data. If they say there was a difference between two groups on a particular dependent measure, look at the means in the table that correspond to those two groups, and see if the means do differ as described. Occasionally, results seem to become stronger in their narrative description than an examination of the data would warrant. Statistics can be misused. When they are, results are difficult to interpret.