A four-year morning routine: write a gratitude list, then three personal affirmations about yourself. It feels fake at first, but after a few weeks your mood lifts noticeably. The habit takes about two months to stick, then it becomes automatic enough to catch negative thoughts before they spiral.
So if you can start the day with kind of like a positive mental coffee, if you will. We were writing down gratitude at first. It's kind of weird. Like, at least when I first started doing this four years ago now, it felt almost kind of phony. Like, this is silly. Of course I'm grateful for this, grateful for my health, et cetera. But when you start doing it for a couple weeks, you really notice something start to shift. And what you really notice is if you skip it for a couple days after doing it for a while, you go, God, my mood is off. Like, oh, that's right. I haven't been doing my. My morning gratitude. Another thing you can do is double down on it and then also write three things that you appreciate about yourself, three things about you that you're proud of, which we're not really encouraged to do that. We're encouraged to be humble. Like, oh, you know, I. Yeah, it was nothing, right? So this is kind of like your own personal brag to yourself. And you start the day like that. And it really builds that. Those positive mental muscles, right? So that even you can catch yourself maybe falling into negativity. And if you've been doing your gratitude journaling for a couple months, they say it takes two months to start a new habit, make it automatic. You can start to use some of that positive mental muscle to catch yourself falling into negativity and remind yourself of gratitude and what you appreciate about yourself.
