"What could I be grateful for today?"

In honor of Mental Health Awareness month I wanted to support those who are going through something challenging right now.

Whether that person is you or a loved one, this simple practice could be the first step toward a more hopeful and empowered future.

Gratitude is an incredible medicine. Not only does it have incredible short-term benefits to positively impact your physiology, but it offers remarkable long-term shifts as well.

Every time you bring to mind one thing you’re grateful for, your mind goes to work to answer the question.

As you process the request, you’re actually training your mind on how to think.

You’re teaching it that it’s important to be able to easily access things to be grateful for, which makes it a little more likely to proactively look for those things on its own.

When you do this consistently enough, you actually start to shift the unconscious pattern! You begin to see more things to be grateful for without having to tell yourself to.

This is why 30 days of gratitude journaling will change your life.

The conscious choice of gratitude journaling causes you to seek gratitude. The more you do it on purpose, the more your unconscious mind uses gratitude as a filter for everything it perceives without effort.

So for those who are having mental health challenges right now, this is something very simple to try: Ask the question “What could I be grateful for right now?”

The question is structured this way for a few important reasons:

First, it approaches gratitude as a brainstorm. So rather than trying to replace negative thoughts and discredit them altogether, it makes a soft suggestion to explore it.

Second, it asks about ‘today’. It directs your mind to find something amidst the sadness, depression, or challenges of right now to be grateful for. It proves to you that you can be grateful even though you feel a certain way, which supports the unconscious development.

Ask this question once a day, consistently for 30 days, and see how it goes. Doable right? I think you’ll be surprised to see how powerful it is!