Gratitude

Over the last 2 weeks I participated in a gratitude study. This was a project for someone for school. I was supposed to express gratitude (preferably out loud) in moments of parental stress with the theory that having more gratitude in your life will reduce your stress. I was also supposed to keep a daily tally of each moment of stress. The woman who conducted the study just sent out the statistics from the study.

Her results showed that there was a steady and significant decrease in stressors (53/2%). That was with an average of 31.4 participants each day.

That's the main statistic & I won't bore you with the rest, but it was an interesting study. As for my personal results, I was glad that I did it. My numbers did show a decline, but with kids (or anything in life) you will never not have any stress. The main thing was that I was able to handle the stress better. I usually ended up expressing the gratitude just in my head, but stopping and actually doing that really flips a switch and allows you to handle the moment with out overreacting. There were still moments that I remembered what I was supposed to do, but didn't do it anyway b/c I just wanted to be mad about whatever it was. After those moments were over I of course realized that they weren't as bad as they had seemed in the moment. I also found that if I allowed myself to skip the gratitude in a certain situation, it was usually downhill from there with other situations that followed. So it was interesting and helpful and something I will continue to try and keep up with. So if you are feeling stressed and feeling like you bark at your kids all day, it might be worth a try.