How to Practice Gratitude: 4 Ways to Practice Gratitude

Practicing gratitude refers to reflecting throughout the course of daily life on past actions or your actions in the present moment and feeling grateful for their positive outcomes. Methods for practicing gratitude in your own life include keeping a gratitude journal, maintaining a meditation practice, using a gratitude jar (writing down positive moments on slips of paper you add to a jar), or even taking a deep breath several times throughout the day.

From a scientific perspective, grateful people experience more serotonin and dopamine flowing through their brains—chemicals that increase feelings of pleasure and well-being in humans. This means an expression of gratitude can literally make you feel good, contributing to sustained positive emotions and encouraging you to continue grateful behaviors.

Practicing gratitude can lead to or augment health benefits like improved mental health. Benefits of gratitude might also be an increase in optimistic feelings, better relationships with your family members, and easier removal of negative thoughts from your consciousness.

There are many different ways to practice daily gratitude, and you can do one or several on a daily or weekly basis. Here are a few possible methods:

1. 1. Maintain a gratitude journal. Gratitude journaling is one way to keep track of your feelings of gratitude over a day, week, month, and year. Explain your sense of gratitude about anything that you’re feeling grateful about and make it a consistent habit. Journaling like this can lift your mood in both good times and hard times.
2. 2. Practice mindfulness meditation. There are lots of ways to meditate, but mindfulness is about focusing on the here and now. Studies have shown that meditation can help alleviate or improve stress, pain, depression, and high blood pressure. Try playing meditation music to set the mood, or start a routine of morning gratitude meditation to begin your day on a positive note. Even if you can’t get into a rhythm right away, don’t give up. Or consider hiring a meditation teacher to guide your practice.
3. 3. Say thank you more often. Taking the time to say thank you is a simple way you can practice mindfulness and gratitude simultaneously. Sometimes the smallest things make all the difference in making another person feel valuable. Thankfulness can improve your state of well-being, and if you share gratitude with other people, it’s like you’re passing that feeling along. You can practice this method individually or with a group—for example, ask your friends or family members to take turns explaining something for which they are grateful around the dinner table tonight.
4. 4. Write a gratitude letter. If someone in your life has done something for the greater good or you just want to express gratitude to a friend, write them a letter. Explain to the recipient what they did for you that made you feel grateful. You don’t have to reserve this method for extraordinary moments—you can write a letter even for a small act that occurs during the course of everyday life events. Sometimes it’s little things like a heartfelt email or a handwritten letter that can make big differences in your relationships with your loved ones.

Find something comfortable to sit or lie on, grab a MasterClass Annual Membership, and dial into the present moment with Jon Kabat-Zinn, the father of the Western mindfulness movement. From formal meditation exercises to examinations of the science behind mindfulness, Jon will prepare you for the most important practice of them all: life itself.