Make Every Day a Day of Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving is such a wonderful holiday! A time to spend with friends and family and to reflect on all that we are grateful for. The only problem is that it comes just once a year.

Since gratitude is one of the greatest ways to stay positive, I think we should make every day a day of thanksgiving. I know we are thankful for many things everyday, but do we consciously think about it? We get so caught up living our lives that sometimes we forget to be grateful.

That’s why we need to make gratitude intentional. Picking a moment everyday to count our blessings is a great way to make sure we don’t start taking things for granted. I take a minute every morning as my kids head off to school to think about what I’m thankful for. At first I just felt gratitude for my two wonderful children, but now I’ve started adding other things for which I’m especially grateful.  It’s a great way to start the day by focusing on all the good in my life.

Gretchen Rubin, author of The Happiness Project, has a number of suggestions for building moments of gratitude into your life. She thinks about what she is grateful for each time she turns on her computer. Other ideas include choosing a screen saver that reminds you to be grateful, setting an alarm on your calendar that goes off once a day as a reminder, or practicing a threshold ritual by thinking about what you are thankful for each time you enter your home. It doesn’t matter what it is, as long as it reminds you to take a moment every single day to count your blessings.

What cue helps you cultivate an “attitude of gratitude”?