What have you got to be grateful for?

Right now, personally, I can think of the following:

I'm alive, well, warm, well-fed and happy

I have my partner, Chris

My parents are alive and still well

I have my brother and his family

Everyone I care about woke up this morning

I have a roof over my head

I have many opportunities available to me

I'm listening to my favourite programme on the radio

I love my work and the fact that I get to spend my time doing what I want to do and not what someone else wants me to do

I can afford to pay my bills this month

So often we moan and groan about what we haven't got and what isn't working. We forget all about the good stuff in our lives. However, thinking about and listing the good things in our lives can have extremely beneficial effects.

In an experiment conducted in 2002, Robert Emmons and Mike McCullough asked people to keep a daily diary for two weeks. They were randomly assigned to one of three groups. The first group was asked to write about things they were grateful for, the second about the hassles they had experienced during the day and the third, life in general. The group that wrote about the things they were grateful for reported seeing their levels of happiness, joy and satisfaction with life shoot up.

I tried this myself and it really works. So much so, that I feel generally much happier and more content, abundant and grateful than I used to.

Action point

Try this for yourself by actively practising being grateful for the good things in your life.

Begin each day with a mental list of 5 things that have to look forward to that day.

Before you fall asleep at night, make a mental list of 5 things you are grateful for that have happened during the course of the day.

Start a gratitude journal - use it every day to write down all the things that you are grateful for that day. Turn around a bad mood or a bad day by reading your gratitude journal or just mentally taking stock of all you have to be grateful for and look forward to. Actively look for reasons to be grateful - there are millions of them out there.

Don't believe it works? Try it for two weeks and see what happens.

Ann Harrison is a certified retirement coach, pre-retirement trainer and author of 'The Retirement Detox Programme: 40 Days to Get Your Retirement Back on Track'. For regular retirement-related news updates, visit her blog at Contemporary Retirement or catch up with her via her website Contemporary Retirement Coaching.

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