When I start gratitude, I typically do it first thing in the morning. I make sure that my phone is either on airplane mode or silent or completely off. I do it in the morning because it's the quietest time in my house. If that works for you, too, maybe some of you have families and children. Optimizing those 10-15 minutes before the whole house has awakened really is beneficial. I find it very tough to do it in the middle day because my schedule is so hectic and meetings and phone calls and it just all unravels past the morning. So, first thing in the morning works for me and I definitely do it before I've like checked emails or social media or all of those things. The second thing you want to do is really pick what modality you are going to use to practice gratitude every day. For me personally, I like to use a notebook. And you can use This is just a mental happy notebook. We call it our notebook of positive aspects. I like writing things down. I'm kind of old school in that way. If you are a techy, I use tech for pretty much everything else except um my gratitude practice. So, I'll definitely recommend if you use the phone, make sure that you don't get like overwhelmed or distracted by other things that are notifications that are popping in to your phone at the time. Maybe silence other notifications so that those dedicated 10 to 15 minutes while you're practicing gratitude are undisturbed and you can really focus on what it is that you're grateful for in the day.

Very simple way to practice gratitude. This is actually how I got started. Remember I was telling you guys in the welcome video about a gratitude jar. Um this one's less fancy than some of the ones that um I've seen or even the one I have at work on my desk. But what I love about the gratitude jars if you're creative, you're fun, and you like to, you know, really be creative every single day, gratitude jars are a great way. You can decorate them. Not great for like taking your practice with you wherever you go day-to-day, but like I said, I leave it on my desk at work as a reminder to practice gratitude. It gets other people in the office involved as well because they'll kind of come by, write a gratitude note, put it in there, so. And it's a great way to also practice gratitude as a family if you have like a family gratitude jar like in your kitchen or in your living room.

So, three ways to to practice gratitude, either a notebook, any notebook and a pen, a piece of paper, phone, just make sure it's silent, or you can get creative and deck out a gratitude jar, any Mason jar that you find. And actually, some of them even come with the words gratitude jar on it, so. Whichever works for you.

The other thing once you're getting into your gratitude practice is positive affirmations and how to really use them. So, what I've seen a lot of people do with their gratitude practice is that they just kind of run on through a list of, oh, you know, I'm grateful for my mom or I'm grateful for, you know, my job. Those statements are good and they are okay to start when you're getting started with gratitude practice. But, what I always tell people is try to get deeper and focus on feeling because being reminded of a feeling is what's really going to work to uplift your mood, to shift your spirit, to being a little bit more positive and and upbeat despite what you're facing.

And I'll actually read you some a statement from my gratitude notebook. So, you could say something like, I am grateful for my body, right? That is a good good statement. But, a great statement would be something like I am grateful for my body because it helps me feel healthy and strong. It's a better statement because you're expressing what is it that you're grateful for, but also how it makes you feel in the moment, right?

Another statement is I'm grateful for flowers and trees. Now, everybody's gratitude statements are going to be different. I love nature. Nature actually relaxes me. Whenever I'm stressed, I'll try to go outside, take a walk. For me to look at, you know, trees and flowers is a reminder that everything will be okay. So, to deepen that statement, I would say something like I am grateful for flowers and trees outside because nature makes me feel relaxed. And when I remember, like if I could just reflect on nature and take a deep breath, it does actually relax me.

I am grateful for the experiences in my life. Now, taking that a bit further, I would say I am grateful for the experiences in my life because it makes me feel wiser moving forward. Those are just some examples of statements. I will include on the back of this action card just some positive affirmations that you can start off with, also some sample gratitude statements that you can use and showing you the difference between what's a good gratitude statement and what's a really great gratitude statement.

You know, anytime you're doing a new habit, a new practice, it just takes work, you know? It just takes a little bit of consistency. And for me, the factor of staying consistent with the practice was that I just wanted to feel better, you know? I wanted to improve my mood, improve my life, and I really wanted it desperately cuz I was just really in a bad place. So, I was willing to kind of put in the work. As I said um before, really try to do this for it even if you start off with 5 minutes and then a couple days you grow to 10 minutes and then maybe grow to 15 minutes.

The most common statement people usually make is that, you know, if you're feeling really low and you're feeling really sad, you might not know what to be grateful for and that's perfectly okay. If you're in that place where you want to practice gratitude but just emotionally you're not all the way there. That's why the gratitude statements and the positive affirmations that are included in this lesson are great place for you to start. You can just borrow those until you feel good enough, well enough to have your own statements or it starts evoking statements of your own.

We in the Mental Happy community, we dive much deeper on practicing gratitude, offering more tips videos, um and inspirational stories from other community members who have tips to share as well. Um if you're not already a part of the community, uh you can join at mentalhappy.com and get all the help and support in there. So, tune in to the next video. We're going to talk about how do you actively stay motivated going forward.