Gratitude practice helps you sleep
I recently confessed that I’ve struggled with my gratitude practice. It can be tough to maintain. It can be easy to skip. There are days that feel kinda shitty, and those make it seem pointless or impossible to come up with a list of things to be grateful for.
If you swing over to the Actually I can Instagram, you can click on the circle labeled “Gratitude” and listen to me talk about the practice, and how I do it now, but I will recap here as well:
I tend to use a gratitude journal, and write a list of ten things now. I write those in the morning (usually). I use a variety of formats, from listing nouns (my husband, my cat, the sunshine . . . ) to listing what I’m grateful for and why (in varying degrees of specificity).
And then, at bedtime, once the lights are out and I’m snuggled up next to my husband, who almost immediately starts to snore lightly into the back of my neck, I review things I’m grateful for. They can be big (grateful for a paycheck, or biopsies that come back benign) or small (grateful that I remembered to get the laundry out of the dryer and fold it).
Image by Freshh Connection at Unsplash
It turns out that science supports this particular tip: In a study that was published in the Journal of Psychosomatic Research in 2009, researchers found that “[g]ratitude predicted greater subjective sleep quality and sleep duration, and less sleep latency and daytime dysfunction.” That’s right, people (including those with sleep dysfunction, slept better when they added gratitude practice to their bedtime routines. And studies showed that they not only got better quality sleep, but they also slept longer.
Gratitude practice is recommended lots of places, and that’s because there are gobs of studies showing that focusing on the things you are grateful for has a wide variety of benefits. Consciously focus on blessings as opposed to burdens has repeatedly been shown to have a lot of emotional and interpersonal benefits.
Give it a try. Pick a number, and try to list that many things: 3, 5, 10, . . . Or just think through all the good things that happened during your day, no matter how small they may have been.j
One of the things I am most grateful for is readers like you. In an effort to be as helpful as I can, I have not only written all these posts to help you sleep better, but I’ve also rounded them up into an e-book format if you (like me) prefer to read things on paper instead of a backlit screen. 12 Tips to Help You Sleep is 30 pages of tips that include taking a warm bath and watching what you drink to actions like reading, cutting down on screen use, practicing gratitude, and sex (yes, we go there). And it’s on sale for just $10.
