Growing with Gratitude: How can your life make you happy?

In my personal pursuit of happiness, one of the things that I read about that was effective in helping people to be happier was to count their blessings.  I had heard from time to time that this is something that people should do and even in church my pastor would say things like “Learn to be grateful for what you have” but I never really sat down and did it.  That was when I learned what a gratitude journal was.  A gratitude journal is like a log of all of the things that you are grateful for on consistent basis that you can reflect on what is good about your life.  I was determined to write down 5 things every night before I went to sleep that I was grateful for.  The first couple of nights I had to fight not to write down more than 5. Then when It started to look like I was grateful for the same things over and over again, I begin to write down the smaller things like the fact that it was a sunny day out.  After a couple of weeks I began to notice that may days were a little better because I was paying attention to the good things that were going on so that I would have something new to write in my journal.  The more I focused on the good things, the better I felt which made me happy.  Who would have thought that I had so many things to feel good about? I sure didn’t.  I continued this for a month and still do it from time to time when I feel like my life isn’t all that great.  Have you ever tried to keep a gratitude journal?  If you haven’t, I challenge you to try to keep one for a week or so and let me know how it turns out.