How to Create Joy in Life by Being Grateful

How can we feel more unbridled joy in life? The kind of joy kids experience when playing together. Or that intense happiness that comes from seeing our baby or grandbaby for the first time. The breathtaking awe of nature that may catch us by surprise like a rainbow. Sitting by a warm, crackling fireplace enjoying a hot drink. Indulging in a passionate hobby. Whatever way we uniquely experience joy, we can all agree that it passes too quickly. What if by opening our eyes and hearts to the abundance around us, we could find more joy? One way to do this is by being grateful. It’s not always easy though.

Challenges to Our Gratitude

With any practice that we begin, more than likely, we’ll experience obstacles to its success. Recognizing these potential blocks to our gratitude when they come up, can help. Here are three:

1. Focusing on what’s wrong or lacking

We tend to focus on what’s wrong rather than on what’s right. But the beauty of gratitude is that it’s an effective tool for turning the negative into the positive. For example, when you wake up in the morning, do you start running through your to do list? You may even feel overwhelmed and discouraged by all the chores and obligations. Instead, think about all the blessings in your life. Now you’ll start the day on top of the world instead of the world being on top of you.

2. Losing the Luster

Dr. David Brandt in his book, Is That All There Is?: Balancing Expectation and Disappointment in Your Life, writes about how we lose our enthusiasm for things that once excited us: “Human beings have a curious capacity to take things for granted. The most exquisite diamond loses its luster with familiarity. The most compatible intimate becomes boring. Miracles like the daily sunrise fail to astonish because they’re commonplace! Repetition and time dull our sense of wonder.”

Notice that when you first see the ocean at the beach or the forest on a hike that after a while the magic goes. Recognizing, though, that we can linger longer at the beauty of nature, on our child’s happy face, or on the smell of our favorite food, helps us connect more deeply with our experience of the world.

3. Difficult times

You may be without a job, have an illness or are facing a difficult time in your life. When going through tough times, it’s harder to see the good that exists amidst our troubles. But by being more grateful for what we do have, we can increase our happiness by 25% according to University of California Psychology Professor Dr. Robert Emmons and author of the book, Thanks!: How Practicing Gratitude Can Make You Happier.

In bad times, look for an opportunity that may exist, yet may not be so obvious. For example, a job loss can present all kinds of fears. Perhaps though it’s time to change life’s direction and look for work that is more suited to your talents and passions. Even the bad experiences, can lead to something good, maybe not right away, but overtime.




Creating More Joy

Now that we’ve explored a few challenges to our gratitude, here are some ways to help create those intensely happy moments we can all use more of:

Notice the pleasures around you – Think about the people and things that you may not be appreciating. A job, spouse or friend? A warm bed, hot shower, the miracle of breathing? The benefit of not taking things for granted is that it pulls you into the moment. You become present and feel more alive.

Show your gratitude – This can create a joyful moment for you and the person receiving your gratitude. You can write someone a gratitude letter, or simply say thank you in person – for their friendship, their love, helping you with a big project, etc. This week make it a point of doing one of these things and see how good you feel afterward.



Nurture your gratitude – To amplify gratitude in your life, you can start a gratitude journal, create gratitude affirmations, post gratitude quotes, and even complain less. Vow to choose a gratitude practice that you can do daily.








Celebrate your potential – We all have talents and skills that are unique to us. We seldom think about them. Instead, we think about how we can’t do something. Focus on your gifts and, if you’re not using them, think about ways you can. This will surely bring more joy to your life.

With these few practices above, you’ll begin to notice that you’ll experience more joy, peace and contentment in life.

What are you grateful for in this moment? Let’s share some gratitude by commenting below.

Stress Relieving Journal:

People that have experienced traumatic events or just everyday stress find that writing them out often helps. The best way to do this is by setting aside a time each day, about fifteen to twenty minutes to write. Try to keep the same time therefore it falls into your schedule as something that is routine, normally people will do things that are more routine than extra.

Go somewhere quiet where you are alone. Get comfortable, but don't lie down (often times lying down will trigger you to fall asleep). Write your feelings down, such as anger, frustration and grief. In this way your blank piece of paper is giving you a therapeutic way in which to vent your feeling that you have been bottling up. Feelings that often are unhealthy to vent in many ways because they can cause conflict or pain. Oftentimes you have bottled up feelings that you were unable to vent from a traumatic event such as a rape or domestic violence or even loss of a loved one through murder/kidnapping. Journal writing can help assist you to heal these often unexplored hurtful, terrifying, sad feelings that you have kept deep inside you for so long.

When my children were pre-teens I had them begin to journal their thoughts. I found this to be a way for them to vent their frustrations towards feeling "unjustly punished ect." in their eyes. Once I stumbled across my daughter's journal and found some disturbing things written in it about how she felt about me. However, she may have written them while frustrated she never acted them out. Thus, I never had a child that went to a public school and shot anyone or murdered her parents. I had a normal teenager who thought her Mother was "too strict" that wished Mom would die so she could live her life her way. A very natural wish for a teen when Mom wouldn't allow her to go to an "unchaperoned party." Of course had my daughter written detailed plans on how to murder me I would have been concerned then.

Writing about traumatic events or feelings also helps improve your health. It can improve your blood pressure, your heart rate and muscle tension. All due to the fact that it is a stress reducer. Therefore keeping a stress relieving journal is one way to improve your health and get something off your chest. Therefore, I believe this works no matter what the age of the person.

I'm sure everyone has a lot of things that bother them everyday that they could write about. The boss made you angry because you got passed over for promotion for the second time. Your son got arrested for a DUI. Your spouse invited his boss to dinner, forgot to tell you until he gets home from work, and the boss is due in one hour. The guy in the parking lot wasn't watching and backed into your car. Then there's more traumatic things like the loss of a parent or child in an accident or robbery. Some drunk drive crippled you for the rest of your life. Someone you know was raped or abused. Cancer has creeped into your family.

You feel devastated, invaded, full of hatred, want to lash out, want to scream, want to cry in desperation. Reach for that pen and tablet, write it out. Write it all out. Don't miss anything. Write your feelings down. Let the dam overflow from the pen unto the paper. That's right, write it all out. Don't hold back. I write when I am upset and life doesn't seem fair. I wrote when my Mother died. I wrote about the turmoil that I felt boiling inside me. It helped relieve my stress. I kept writing about how much I missed her being around. Eventually it helped ease the pain. It will help you too. The pain threshold lessens as the stress level decreases. That's why it's called a stress relieving journal.


de-stressing