Gratitude Finding Three Things

It is fairly well recognized that counting your blessings, as opposed to your burdens can have a huge impact on your psychological health.

Studies have demonstrated that showing gratitude for even the most basic things can have reduce depression and increase contentment.

How to Find Gratitude in life?

Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life.
It turns what we have into enough and more.
It turns denial into acceptance, chaos to order, confusion to clarity.
It can turn a meal into a feast, a house into a home, a stranger into a friend.
Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today, and creates a vision for tomorrow.”
-Melody Beattie

We cannot travel to, own, earn, win or consume happiness, but we can find it in gratitude in our daily lives, as Albert Clarke said,

“We must see that it is not happiness that makes us grateful, but the gratefulness that makes us happy.”
-Albert Clarke

Feeling Thankful

Many writers and philosophers considered thankfulness to be the highest form of thought, almost a spiritual experience. Acting thankful is something that inevitably leads to gratitude.

Buddha took this to an extreme.

Let us be thankful, for if we didn’t learn a lot today, at least we learned a little, and if we didn’t learn a little, at least we didn’t get sick, and if we got sick, at least we didn’t die; so, let us all be thankful.
Buddha

Gratitude as a Daily Habit

Marc and Angel suggested making gratitude a daily habit by:

..intentionally identifying three things in your life you are grateful for. It could be as simple as feeling thankful for the clean water that comes out of your faucet or appreciating the cool breeze on a warm day.

List the things you feel grateful for over dinner, or make it a habit to identify what you’re thankful for before you go to bed. Over time, being thankful becomes like second nature, and you’ll experience benefits ranging from improved sleep to greater immunity.
Marc and Angel

Do you make gratitude a daily habit?

For me, feeling and showing gratitude can reset my mind from its daily worries, anxieties and concerns. Concerns that, at times, feel quite overwhelming.

Thinking of the things I am grateful fore, can help ground me, re-focusing my attention on what I do have, on what is around me.

Many aspects of my life are not ideal, are unfair and may never change. And yet, there is still so much I can be grateful for, even in circumstances not so ideal.