My Love Gratitude Journal

With the year-end approaching, multiple tips and ideas for gifts are running around.

Some gifts will be forgotten as soon as the party is over.

This gift will boost your relationship, make someone happy and install a healthy life habit: the Love Gratitude Journal!

What is it?

A Love Gratitude Journal is a diary where you log at least one thing you appreciate about your spouse every day for an entire year.

Why do it?

The benefits of journaling

“I can shake off everything as I write; my sorrows disappear, my courage is reborn.” Anne Frank

Journaling is an act of mindfulness, focusing on being present and putting aside any negative experiences from the past. Some of the many benefits from journaling include:

1. Learn from your experiences: reflecting on what happened during your day and writing things down will help you to make better decisions on similar situations in the future.

2. Similar to meditation, writing about how you feel about a person or situation will create a space between your emotions and your reactions. Over time, you’ll learn to avoid impulsive responses by recognizing the things that trigger them and using that space to make better decisions.

3. Release built-up emotions by writing about your true feelings without any fear for reaction and allowing your mind to process them, giving your feelings their own place.

4. Organize your thoughts while you’re writing out the events of the day, including your reactions can help to solidify the memories in your mind, improving your memory and your personal organization. It’s also a great place to go back in time and read about your past events and feelings.

5. Expressing gratitude and joy in a daily manner helps you to maintain a positive outlook on life. You’ll learn to take notice of the positive aspects of any situation and appreciate even the small, previously insignificant, things in life making you feel blessed and happy.

The benefits of gratitude

“Cultivate the habit of being grateful for every good thing that comes to you, and to give thanks continuously. And because all things have contributed to your advancement, you should include all things in your gratitude.”― Ralph Waldo Emerson

1. Gratitude changes your mood for the better instantly and with significant impact. A moment of thinking about reasons to be grateful can bring joy to the rest of your day. Awareness about what’s good in your life will put you in a good mood which in turn is linked to a happier life and more satisfying relationships.

2. Gratitude can break negative thinking cycles. Using the power you have over your thoughts, forcing yourself to think from a place of gratitude can push out any negative thoughts. Doing this many times, the feeling of gratitude becomes natural and negative emotions become easier to abandon.

3. Gratitude will boost your feelings of wellbeing and vitality, lifting your spirit and raising optimism.

4. Happy and successful people go through their lives with a genuine attitude of gratitude, thanking everyone around them for anything they can think of.

The benefits of a love gratitude journal

“Let us be grateful to the people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.” – Marcel Proust

A love gratitude journal will change your marriage forever.

1. The journaling will remind you to focus on your wife’s positive aspects, overwhelming anything that you would otherwise complain about.

2. You’ll fall deeply in love all over again, noticing subtleties in her nature and behavior you didn’t notice before.

3. Your appreciation, gratitude and intention to find the best in her will stay with you all day long and you will show up differently in your marriage which will make her respond differently as well.

4. This will give you even more things to write about in your love gratitude journal, choosing to look for and focus on your wife’s positive qualities, changing your view of her and also the way you interact with her will change how she will respond as well: a positive cycle.

How does it work?

The law of belief: whatever you believe, with feeling, becomes your reality. The more intensely that you believe something to be true, the more likely it is that it will be true for you. Brian Tracy

If you focus on things to be grateful for with your partner, your belief system will be immersed by their positive aspects and in reality, they will become their best version of themselves for you.

The law of expectations: whatever you expect with confidence becomes your own self-fulfilling prophecy. (Brian Tracy). In short, what you get is what you expect.

Writing about their positive attributes will cause you to expect the best of them and this will exert a powerful, positive influence on their behavior.

The law of attraction says that you are a living magnet. You invariably attract into your life people and situations in harmony with your dominant thoughts. (Brian Tracy)

If you look for the positive in others, your dominant thoughts will be positive and you will attract positive behavior from others.

What was the result?

I started my Love Gratitude Journal in May 2019 with the words “thank you for loving me … and so much more!”

During the days clouded by heavy migraine attacks, journaling helped me to empathize with her pain and to be grateful for her gentle kindness. During the good days, I wrote about her beauty, the amazing things we did together, the dream projects we talked about and all the reasons for loving her which I continued to discover along the way.

One year later I wrote “365 days is not enough to write down all the reasons because each day, new sides of your love and beauty appear. My discovery journey will never end.”

I will never forget the tears of joy and happiness in her eyes when she received the journal.

The Love Gratitude Journal gave me the pleasure of journaling, expressing positive feelings and experiencing her gratitude and loving reactions for 365 days but it also installed a habit of searching for and appreciating all the good things about the amazing person I was lucky to marry years ago.

Take care & stay safe,

Jürgen

References:

The Compound Effect, Darren Hardy

Maximum Achievement, Brian Tracy