Turn little things that annoy you into gratitude triggers

Turning little annoying things into gratitude.png

In the book Atomic Habits, James Clear talks about developing a habit of daily moments of gratitude

When I sit down to eat dinner, I say one thing that I am grateful for happening today

It works because it triggers you into adopting a positivity mindset at least once a day.

If the first thing we do in the morning is scroll through X, we'll be bombarded with wild fires in California and how the local government didn't have water in the reservoirs, which then turns into a political thing, and then we have religious fights, and crypto scams and.... you get the point.

If you live downtown, like me, you might start the day with a symphony of garbage trucks, people in a rush honking their car horns because they're late to work, dogs and emergency vehicles! It can be a bit of chaos and can easily throw us into a downward spiral of negative thinking if we let it.

But adopting the habit of being grateful for something every day, no matter what happens, means that we'll have at the very least a few seconds of positivity in our day, every day!

Now what if we could take that practice a step further?

One of my favorite podcasters, Chris Williamson of Modern Wisdom, talked about gratitude this morning and said this:

What if we take the opportunity to transform those little things that annoy us into triggers for practicing gratitude?

In other words, instead of complaining about that loud ambulance sound you heard outside your window at 6:00am on a Sunday and woke you up on your day off! (I mean, How annoying is that?) We could take it as an opportunity to be grateful we're not in the back of that ambulance with a medical emergency on a Sunday morning. We can also be grateful we can wake up at home instead of being on duty like the ambulance driver, who would probably very happy to be in bed, like you. Or maybe we can be grateful for experiencing a gorgeous sunrise in the city!

_{^{Photos of sunrise taken by me on my Samsung Galaxy S20FE.}}

Being grateful is impactful and it's free. It's tiny but at the same time is cumulative. Right now I decided to make this single post about gratitude, but I can say that it already set the mood for the rest of my day and I'm grateful for that.

It's very likely I will find something throughout the day to be grateful for, again.

As a way of saying thank you to other authors in #thoughtfuldailypost community, consider visiting, upvoting and commenting on other articles. Here are some posts from other authors in the #thoughtfuldailypost community that received a comment and upvote from me: