How to Use Gratitude to Get What You Want In Life

How Much Gratitude Is Presently In Your Life? 

On a scale of 1 to 10, the latter being the highest, what would you rate your personal level of gratitude? If it’s anything below 10, you are probably still waiting for your ideal vision of success to happen. Here’s the hitch – when attempting to cultivate a success mindset, waiting for your vision to happen actually pushes it further from your reach. Ensuring that it happens sooner than later means doing things differently than you have always done them. An attitude of gratitude plays a key role in the results. 

Does Any Of This Sound Familiar? 

You wake up in the morning and before your feet have hit the floor, your phone is in your hand. You check your social media and notice that your friends are planning a weekend camping trip, which makes you feel mildly irritated. Lately you’ve had no choice but to use your weekends to keep up with your business or work, so you know you won’t be joining them. 

Next you check your personal email and find a message from your brother talking about his ongoing drama with his boss. That adds to your irritation because you don’t know why he puts up with it. 

That reminds you to check your work email. Now things really start to get hot because you learn that one of your top clients did not receive the product package your assistant promised would be delivered. 

Maybe this is not exactly your story, but for years you have been starting out the same way every morning. You can easily predict that it will be the same when you wake up tomorrow morning. You’ve come to expect it – that no matter how much you try to focus on success, your entire day will be fraught with annoying or frustrating circumstances. 

Why Do All My Days Feel The Same? 

There is a physiological reason your past and future seem interchangeable. When we are quite young, our brains are malleable and open. Information enters unedited by the discerning part of the brain (frontal cortex) and creates neural circuitry in our brains. By the time we are in our mid-thirties, over 90% of who we are is based on habitual, subconscious ways of thinking programmed into our subconscious minds. 

The Addiction To The Past 

The dominant parts of our personalities are the result of past experiences combined with strong emotions. The brain produces corresponding chemicals, called neurotransmitters and hormones that influence the activities of the cells. Like an addiction, the cells become dependent on those chemicals, and they crave for more. So if your chemistry is based on emotions such as fear, anger, resentment and despair, your cells literally urge you to continue thinking the thoughts that trigger those emotions so they can get their chemical “fix”. To break the habit requires a diligent effort, but it is possible. 

How Can I Use Gratitude To Change My Chemistry? 

Adopting an attitude of gratitude literally changes your brain. When we express it, our mood is naturally lifted. The brain releases dopamine and serotonin – the two most important “feel good” chemicals. By consciously making statements of gratitude throughout the day, we begin to create new neural circuits. The more we practice it, the stronger the pathways of gratitude become in our brains. Do it repeatedly, and eventually it will replace our old brain circuitry based habitual thinking and negative emotions. 

The Electromagnetic Signature 

The energetic nature of our thoughts is electrical, while our emotions are magnetic. This means that what we think and feel creates an electromagnetic presence or signature in the energy field around us. Our thoughts electrically charge the electrons of matter in the field and our emotions draw those particles of matter back to us. How we are thinking and feeling literally creates our physical environment and experiences. If your electromagnetic signature is based on the past, your future will be a repeat of your past. By changing your electromagnetic signature to include gratitude, new improvements will begin to show up in your life. The vast field of around us is neutral, yet it cooperates 100 percent by giving us more of what we emanate through our electromagnetic signature. 

How To Development An Attitude of Gratitude 

When you are accustomed to waking up in the morning already consumed by the emotions of the past, you must make a conscious effort to do things differently. Here are some tips for incorporating gratitude into your life: 

• Start a daily gratitude journal where you write about things for which you are sincerely grateful
• Look for at least one thing to appreciate, even in the most challenging situations or people
• Put down your electronic devices and spend quality time with the people you care about
• Post sticky notes on your walls and mirrors with gratitude statements
• Find ways to volunteer or give back to the community
• Send thank you notes to people that add value to your life
• Spend time reading books or watching programs that have positive, inspiring messages
• Set several alarms on your phone throughout the day as a reminder to reflect on the good things that have happened in the last few minutes
• At the end of the day, have a review period with yourself or your family to discuss the positive outcomes for the day 

What Difference Will Gratitude Make? 

Consistently expressing and focusing on gratitude creates a myriad of benefits. It improves our overall physical health. It makes us feel more energetic. Emotionally, we become happier and our relationships with others benefit. We find it easier to cope with difficult situations and become solution-oriented. Our stress levels go way down and we wake up feeling well-rested. We think more clearly and our productivity goes up. Gratitude has been described as the “healthiest of all human emotions”. 

It has also been described as the “ultimate state of receivership”, since the simple act of focusing on what we already have be that we desire and appreciate means we’ll end of having more of it.