Why Should You Practice Gratitude Daily?

This is why gratitude works. Hi, my name is Rachel Havocost and I am so happy you're here. If you're new, welcome. Truthfully, I have struggled with my own mental health for almost 19 years, and I've been through therapy, eating disorder, recovery. I have a master's in psychology, and I just want to be able to create accessible, easy to digest tools and skills for you and also normalize some hard to talk about topics. Today, I actually want to talk to you about gratitude. I just had a phone call with one of my best friends and she was telling me, I feel like nothing is ever enough.

I feel like I see all of my friends, I see all of my family members, and they have all these things that I want. Just don't understand how to get to a place where I feel like what I have is enough. And so we started talking about gratitude, and she said, I just don't get it. Like, I sit down to write gratitude, but I already know. I already know these things. I already know I'm grateful for what I have. Why do I need to write it down? And I said, let me stop you right there. When you tell someone you love them, do you stop?

If I told you I loved you yesterday, you already know, right? So do I need to tell you again today? No. We tell people over and over and over again that we love them. Just because they know, just because we've told them doesn't mean we stopped telling them. The same is true with gratitude. Just because I know I'm grateful for something doesn't mean I stop repeating what I'm grateful for. And the very act of repetition, the very act of naming out loud over and over again increases what already is.

It lets whatever we're grateful for energetically understand that we love and like and are grateful for it. And therefore that increases it. That creates more. And she said, I just feel like, you know, like, when is it going to start working? How do I know when it works? And I said, well, here's the thing. Mental fitness is like physical fitness. You don't go to a Pilates class one time and then have a strong core. You don't even go for a week and have a strong core. You might go for a month and have a stronger core, and you might go for a year, and then your core is super strong.

And even if you take a whole week off, your core is still strong. The same is true with mental fitness. We have to repeat trusting that it's going to take time to see results. So if you've been experiencing any resistance to trying a gratitude practice. This is your invitation to treat it like physical fitness to start today and recognize that it will take some time to see results and that when you do, and if you continue to stick to it consistently, your practice will become so strong that even if you take time off, that experience of enoughness will stay with you.

Let me know if this was helpful, and if you have questions about how I do my gratitude practice, let me know in the comments and I'm happy to provide you some prompts or other tools for increasing your enoughness. See you next time.