1. Keep a Gratitude Journal. Establish a daily practice to remind yourself of the gifts, benefits, and good things you enjoy. Set aside time daily to recall happy moments, your personal attributes, valued people or anything that makes you happy to be alive and write a note about them.

2. Remember the Bad. To be grateful in your current state, it is helpful to remember the hard times that you once experienced. When you remember how difficult life used to be and how far you have come, you set up an explicit contrast in your mind, and this contrast cultivates gratefulness.

3. Take a vacation. There’s some truth to the saying “absence makes the heart grow fonder”. Ideally, you shouldn’t have to separate yourself from something (or someone) in order to appreciate it or them (that can lead to a vicious cycle). But it can be a good way to trigger your sense of gratitude just once in a while.

4. Learn Prayers of Gratitude. In many spiritual traditions, prayers of gratitude are considered to be the most powerful form of prayer, because through these prayers people recognize the ultimate source of all they are and all they will ever be.

5. Come to Your Senses. The most basic pleasures in life are usually accessible to us all the time, but they slip out of our consciousness because we get so used to them. Learn to notice the little things, and deliberately appreciate them.
• Look around. Notice beautiful shapes, colors, and details
• Smell the roses. And the food. And the air. Recognize the smells that make you feel good
• Savor your food. Eat slowly. Don’t just gobble and chug. Identify flavors
• Appreciate the sense of touch. How do leaves, blankets, lotions feel against your skin.
• Listen to more than music. Listen when you think it’s quiet, and you’ll discover it’s not really all that quiet. You might hear the wind, leaves rustling, kids laughing.

6. Use Visual Reminders. Visual reminders can trigger thoughts of gratitude. Often times, the best visual reminders are other people. Put pictures of your loved ones on your desks or as your mobile phone or desktop wallpapers.

7. Relax. It’s hard to cultivate a sense of gratitude when you’re angry, frustrated, or anxious. If these are issues that you struggle with, it’s important to resolve them, as they’re formidable barriers to thankfulness.

8. Live in the Moment. If you’re too busy dwelling on the past or thinking about the future, you won’t be able to fully notice how fantastic things are right now. Plus, thinking about the past and future opens the door to comparison, which is the only way you can perceive something as not good enough. What you have now is all that exists, and comparing that to something that doesn’t exist anymore (or yet) is an easy way to foster dissatisfaction and torture yourself. Like the old saying goes “Past is History, Future is a Mystery and Today is Gift and hence it is called the Present”. Enjoy today, this moment and don’t postpone your enjoyment.

9. Go Through the Motions. If you go through grateful motions, the emotion of gratitude should be triggered. Grateful motions include smiling, saying thank you, and writing letters of gratitude.

10. Cherish any kind of lightheartedness in your life. Things like laughter, affection, and playfulness are fleeting. Don’t be the person who takes life too seriously, who doesn’t have time to have fun, or who has no sense of humor.

Sources:
Greater Good, University of California, Berkeley
Robert A. Emmons, University of California, Davis
Michael E. McCullough, University of Miami

Photo by Toa Heftiba is licensed under CC0