When I read One Thousand Gifts I took up gratitude journaling for a while. I thought it might transform me into a spiritual powerhouse but actually it just made me grumpy. Ann Voskamp wrote so enthusiastically about seeing the goodness of God in the curls of shredded cheese. And I mean, a person who says beets speak to her of the glory of God is not going to look askance at the spiritual potential of shredded cheese, but I really disliked writing in a regimented way about things I was grateful for. Oh, well, I said to myself, so much for spiritual powerhouse-ness.
I mentioned recently that I finished the book Burnout and liked it a lot (except for the surfeit of Disney princess references). The authors recommend a different take on gratitude journaling. They say most gratitude journaling focuses on being grateful for what you have, which isn't very effective as a mood-booster. They say that for a short-term mood boost, you can focus on whom you have (i.e., thinking specifically about your gratitude for the people in your life). For longer-term changes, they say, you can focus on being grateful for how things happen. Like so:
- Think of an event or circumstance that sparks grateful feelings in you
- Write about what happened
- Write about how it made you feel then and how it makes you feel now
- Explain how the event/circumstance came to be -- what caused it to happen?
One of the authors tried this for one event each day for three weeks, and she said it was amazing. (She shares my skepticism about gratitude journaling as described in women's magazine articles.) The Nagoski sisters are smart women and they tell me there is science in support of this strategy and not just personal experience. So I am going to give it a whirl for a month. I'll report back.
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