Once upon a time, my life was crap. Thankfully that time is over and now life is pretty good. However, I still have a propensity to feelings of depression. 

One place I tend to struggle with depression is at the change of seasons. This morning, I was really feeling Fall creeping in, if you know what I mean, so I decided to do some gratitude journaling. 

Gratitude journaling is a technique I have discovered helps a lot to reduce negative feelings, and it works very quickly. 

Wondering how to start gratitude journaling? It’s easy! All you have to do is write a list in your Journal that you already keep of things you are grateful for.

My Approach is to write like this:

I am grateful for… and then bullet point a list of however many things you want to write. Alternatively, I have a friend who strongly believes in writing I am grateful for… in front of each item, creating a complete sentence each time. He says that continuing to write the words I am grateful helps reinforce the positive benefits for him.

After this morning’s gratitude journal, I started wondering about exactly how gratitude journaling affects the brain chemistry, so I Googled. In my reading, I found that gratitude seems to be a natural antidepressant because it triggers our brains to release the mood enhancing, feel good chemicals dopamine and serotonin (positivepsychology.com). 

This makes total sense to me, because every time I feel down and complete an exercise of gratitude journaling, I find that my mood automatically lifts.

So if you’re feeling down this week, I encourage you to try gratitude journaling! There may be a lot of negative things going on right now, but we all have positive things in our lives to be grateful for.

Think about it. 

I am grateful for my family. We all have families (there’s almost no one who doesn’t have some sort of family ties, whether they be biological family or those friends so close that they become chosen family).

I am blessed to have a fully functioning, healthy body, but even my friends and family who have health struggles still have healthy aspects of their body functions.

I am incredibly thankful that I can financially afford to do what I need to do in my life. There have been times I had incredibly basic needs but was unable to fulfill them – everything from badly leaking, condemned houses that were fire hazards, to being unable to fill my car tank up with gas, to not having enough to eat and being forced to buy half-rotten food and cut it up to salvage the not-yet-rotted part. 

I am even grateful for those experiences, since they taught me to be frugal, and taught me the value of having even the most basic things so that I don’t take anything for granted.

I am grateful for you reading this blog, and for the opportunity to share mental health strategies that work.

If you struggle with depression and have never tried gratitude journaling, I highly recommend it. It works for me every time.