Gratitude journals can be intimidating, but a gratitude calendar can cause you to search out parts of your life to express gratitude about without overwhelming you. It can be as simple or as complex as you feel the need to make it, because it’s a tool for you.
Gratitude Gets a Lot of Press
You can find people just about everywhere talking about the practice of gratitude and its benefits. Science talks about gratitude and caregivers talk about gratitude. It’s a way for you to reframe your view of what happiness is about and it can relieve stress if you’re focusing regularly on gratitude. It’s important for you to give gratitude a try as a caregiver because every tool that you can rely on helps immensely.
Understanding Gratitude
The practice of gratitude is both simpler than you think and more complex. When you’re starting out, you’re going to want to keep things as simple as possible. You could write a three-page journal every night about everything that happened during the day that you’re grateful for now. Or, in the absence of a lot of extra time and energy, you can simplify that and stick to one or two words that embody your main gratitude focus. Ultimately, you can be grateful for absolutely anything. What matters is that you’re acknowledging the positive impact of something.
Making Your Own Gratitude Calendar
A gratitude calendar can be a less intimidating way to start out noticing the gratitude in your life and in your situation. The very easiest thing to do is to take a monthly calendar and use the little daily blocks to record your one- or two-word gratitude entry for the day. This method could last you for months or even years. If you feel compelled to shift to writing more, then a blank journal would work just as well.
It’s about Building a Habit of Gratitude
The most important part of this isn’t really how you do it or what the format is. What’s truly important is that you’re taking some time every day and you’re thinking about gratitude and where you can find it. If there’s a day when you truly have nothing to feel grateful for, that’s fine. But you examined it and you tried to find the gratitude. That alone can do some shifting for you.
Caregivers are balancing a lot, every day. Being able to focus on what about all of that balancing is good and inspires gratitude can be incredibly powerful.
If you or an aging loved-one are considering caregivers in Englewood, CO, please contact the caring staff at SYNERGY HomeCare today. Call us at (303) 756-9322.
