Gratitude Hacks: How to Feel Thankful (Even When You Don’t Want To)

There is More to Gratitude Than You May Realize

Did you know that the biggest impact from a gratitude practice doesn't come from sitting down and writing in a Gratitude Journal?  I know that's what most people think about when it comes to thinking about having a gratitude practice, and honestly, that's what I thought about it too, until today.

In this post I'll share what I found out recently that surprised me about gratitude. I'll also share a number of ways that you can use your planner to journal for gratitude, and some gratitude hacks, such as how to feel grateful when you really don’t feel like it. Gratitude is one of the easiest tools you can use to find more happiness and so that's why I'm excited to share these ideas with you, as well as some of the nuances to a gratitude practice that you just might not have heard about before.

Gratitude can Motivate You

Feeling grateful is powerful stuff. Just the other day, I got up in the morning and I was feeling blah and quite unmotivated to do all the things that I knew that I should do. Fortunately, I have a very strong morning routine that is really well established.  So I went ahead and went through my usual motions of my morning routine.

One thing I do in the morning is journaling and as a part of that practice, I write down the things that I'm grateful for in my journal. I'll be honest, doing this didn't make me feel like I was ready to jump up and get started doing things when I wrote down what I was feeling grateful for that morning.  What it did do however was make me feel just a little bit better–enough so that I was able to decide to list my top three priorities for the day. A few minutes prior,  I hadn't really even felt like thinking about this.  Rather, I'd been contemplating just making it a personal wellness day, cozying up on the couch and reading a good book.

The feeling of gratitude had gently motivated me enough to feel like writing down my priorities and when I did that, I was then able to think to myself, "Yeah, I can do this." and it actually became quite a productive day.

Using Your Planner for Gratitude

My journal has a place on the daily pages specifically for gratitude, but you can just as easily carve out a spot in any planner or journal for recording your own daily list of things you are feeling grateful for. Or maybe you just begin a list on a blank page at the front or back of your planner and just keep adding to it a little each day. 

When You Don't Feel Grateful

If you’ve know me for awhile, you might think that gratitude has always come easy to me, but that’s not the case. Back in my early years of being a single mom, struggling to pay my bills, I wasn’t finding gratitude easy at all. In fact I was pretty down on the life I’d created for myself.

However, I was actively searching for ways I could make life better, easier, and happier. I remember one day I was on my way to work in my little yellow VW bug and I was listening to an Esther Hicks audiobook. She was talking about gratitude. I remember how she gave examples of things that you could be grateful for that I hadn’t even considered before.

I had always been looking for the big things in my life to be grateful for and at the time they seemed in short supply. She explained that you could feel grateful for how smooth traffic was that day and a whole host of other small everyday things. This changed my view on gratitude and I’ve never looked at it the same way since. 

You can always find something to be grateful for, even when you don’t feel like it. You just have to look for the little things. My job may not have been the greatest back then, but I realized I could be thankful that I had one at all.

I realized I could be thankful that even though I had to be at work before the sun came up and couldn't leave until after the sun went down, I could be grateful for getting to watch the sunrise in the big windows in the office building where I worked. I could take a moment and notice how beautiful it was each day.

I could be thankful for getting to hear the sounds of the birds when I woke up or how great the breeze had felt on my face at the end of the day. All of a sudden I had much more to feel grateful for. 

This leads me to another way you can use your planner or journal for gratitude. My journal has a spot on the daily pages to reflect on what gave you joy, what beauty you saw and a small win for the day - these too are all ways of practicing gratitude. There have been quite a few people who have told me that answering these three questions on a daily basis was life-changing. Some have told me that it even helped lift them out of a period of depression. 

When Your Gratitude List Feels Repetitive

Another challenge that many people have in practicing gratitude is that they find themselves writing down the same thing every day. Hopefully, this blog post has already given you some ways to think about gratitude differently, but at the end of the day, I think it’s perfectly okay to write down the same thing that you are grateful for time and again.

I’m constantly listing many of the people in life in my gratitude list. I think the key to not letting it feel repetitive is to allow yourself a moment to let the feeling of how and why you are grateful sink into your body. In this way, it does still have an impact, even if you are writing it down every day. 

What Gives You the Biggest Gratitude Boost

Now let me share what I learned today that surprised me about gratitude. I happened to see one of Andrew Huberman’s videos about the science of gratitude and it turns out that what’s most impactful about gratitude is different from what we all believe. The biggest boosts to your wellness from gratitude actually come from you receiving gratitude or watching other people receive it. You get huge increases in serotonin and oxytocin when this happens. 

Of course, we don’t have a whole lot of ability to control how much gratitude we receive, but if you think about it, it does feel good when you genuinely say thank you to others, and in some ways it actually can become reciprocal, particularly when you practice it regularly.

There probably isn’t a day that goes by that my husband Curt and I don’t say thank you to each other for something. It’s the simple things that we do for each other, such as taking out the trash, cooking dinner, or cleaning up the kitchen after a meal. It’s the things we actually expect from each other for which we express our gratitude to each other.

Research also shows that giving thanks can make you feel happier. I know that I feel happy when I thank Curt for something (which probably is because at the moment I’m saying "thank you", I’m feeling grateful). Yet it also feels good to know that when you say thank you to someone else, you are essentially giving them a happy hug - they get a big boost of happy chemicals every time you do so. 

Planner Idea for Giving More Gratitude

So how can you make a practice of incorporating more giving of gratitude into your life? One thing you could do is to use the monthly calendar section of your planner to record at least one instance each day where you have told someone “thank you”. This could be a good daily reminder to practice taking the opportunity to express gratitude more often.