By far the best habit I have formed! Because always taking care of problems and feeling like your entire time is occupied with putting out fires is emotionally exhausting. We can often lose perspective and, at times, I have felt like I was overwhelmed by negative thoughts. The gratitude journal has given me a better perspective and has greatly improved my life, not just my relationships.
You have many options to keeping a gratitude journal. The one that worked for me was an app that I found, called Gratitude Garden. It motivates you to write three things that you are grateful for each day. It takes almost no time at all and it is really easy to use. But you can keep an actual journal where to write down things that you are grateful for.
It is useful if you pick a fixed number of things to write down each day. This will encourage you to look for things that make you happy and keep them in mind, in order to finish your task at the end of the day. Which is exactly where the benefit of this habit comes in: it sets you up for happiness. It makes you think more about the things that are positive in your life. I have found myself thinking of things that I was grateful for even on the most difficult of days. And I tried really hard never to skip one.
In time, my gratitude journal has trained me to be more positive, to appreciate what I have and to find my own silver linings. If you are going through a particularly hard time in a relationship, maybe making it a point to find something to be grateful for in that relationship, every day, can make things seem less hopeless. I really hope this tool helps you out and that you find so many things to be grateful for each day, that picking only three will seem impossible. 😀
