A simple tool like keeping a Gratitude log or journal helps

improve interpersonal relationships, decrease stress, build resilience, improve sleep, and REDUCE PAIN.

Gratitude helps train your brain to notice and appreciate the little things in life and, in doing so, greatly shifts your life experience in a positive way.   It is a powerful practice to cultivate.
Practicing gratitude can improve mental health in many ways, including:
  • Reducing stress, anxiety, and anger
  • Decrease negative impact of chronic pain
  • Increasing happiness
  • Increasing sense of well-being and life satisfaction
  • Improving resilience
  • Promoting emotional closeness

How gratitude practices help:

Practicing gratitude daily can help strengthen new  neural pathways and ultimately create a more grateful and positive state. 
Gratitude helps disrupt underlying negative thinking patterns. These patterns include both what we think and how we think.  Common forms of negative thinking include: overly focusing on negative aspects or problem areas (called the negativity bias), discounting the positives (“yeah but”-ing away any positive aspect or occurrence), and catastrophizing or jumping to the worst case scenario. 
This is where a gratitude practice can be particularly helpful.
The practice here:
Each day look for new/different/small things that you are grateful for.  Each evening write down these three things.  As much as you can, do make your list different each time.  This practice helps you develop the habit of noticing the good.  We tend to be great at scanning for the negative already, but we have to intentionally scan for the good or we may miss it.
Review your list the next morning.
If it doesn’t work for you write at night, the time of day isn’t as important as developing a consistent practice.
In the App:
-Click on Gratitude log
-Type in the things you are grateful for and save log. You can go back and review your previous entries in the ARCHIVED LOG section. 
-With the pro version, you can add more than three gratitudes by clicking on the + button.  At the end of the week, you  will get a colorful graphic overview of the week. These can be reviewed in the ARCHIVED LOG section.
David Steindl-Rast “It is not happiness that brings us gratitude.  It is gratitude that brings us happiness.”  (and decreased emotional and physical pain)
Download Gratitude Log

OR

Open Meditation CRUSH on your smart phone!

gratitude-log