Could gratitude boost your wealth? 3 practical ways to be more thankful

With the US Thanksgiving holiday just around the corner, and Christmas not too far away, there will soon be lots of opportunities and encouragement to reflect on what you are grateful for. But gratitude isn’t just for Thanksgiving, it can also play an important role in your everyday life too.

Research shows that actively choosing to focus on what you are grateful for rather than what you are worried about can lead to better mental and physical health. It also plays an important role in financial planning. Read on to find out how to practise gratitude and why it can be so beneficial.

Gratitude can tune out negative emotions

Humans are naturally predisposed to look for the negatives in any given situation. It’s how your brain was wired to keep you safe: you’re always looking for threats and feeling pessimistic.

While this was very useful when you had to run away from predators and hunt your food, nowadays, the emotions you associate with fear aren’t very helpful at all.

When you’re feeling down or worried, you’re more likely to panic and make rash decisions. That’s why you often hear of people selling their investments during times of economic downturn: they get spooked by the fall in value and think they should cut their losses and sell before things get worse. These are the actions of someone who is focused only on the negatives.

However, when you regularly reflect on what is good in your life and how others have supported you, research has shown that you are likely to feel less panicked and more self-assured.

In other words, you move from a “glass-half-empty” outlook to a “glass-half-full” one. So, it is much easier to approach big decisions with more clarity and calm when you are regularly practising gratitude.   

Gratitude helps you to focus on what’s most important

Financial planning isn’t just about deciding where and how to invest your money. It’s also about understanding what you want your money to help you achieve.

Gratitude is a very useful exercise in discovering this because you spend more time thinking about the things that bring joy to your life. You might feel grateful for the time you get to spend with your family, the satisfaction that your hobbies bring to your life, or the feeling of relaxation you got from your most recent holiday.

By recognising what comes to mind when you think about feeling grateful, you can fill your life with more of what makes you truly happy.

This understanding can help you to avoid the trap of wanting to create more and more wealth without direction, something which can lead to a lack of fulfilment or motivation. Letting gratitude guide your financial planning means you can focus on reverse engineering a life that you love.

3 ways to practise gratitude

If the thought of practising gratitude sounds a little bit intangible, there are a few things you can do to start introducing it to your life.

1.       Keep a gratitude diary

One of the easiest ways to begin practising gratitude is to note down a few things you are grateful for each day in a notebook. You could make this an evening or morning routine.

The entries are just for you, so they don’t need to be great works of literature. A few bullet points is the perfect way to start. Perhaps you feel grateful that the weather was nice and you could go outside to meet a friend, or that you were able to cook your favourite breakfast.

The more frequently you do this, the more easily you will be able to think of things that made you feel happy. You’ll notice and enjoy good things happening in the moment more often too.

2.       Write a letter of thanks

Telling someone that you appreciate them or something they have done is a great way to keep your relationships strong. You could tell someone that you’re grateful to them in an old-fashioned letter, but a simple verbal thanks or text message will also be appreciated.

Just like keeping a gratitude diary, doing this regularly will tune your mind into noticing good things happening, and particularly how others support you, increasing your confidence and feelings of optimism for the future.

3.       Look back at photo memories to see how far you have progressed

When you make incremental progress in life, it’s often difficult to notice the improvement. It’s usually only when you look back and compare yourself to where you were previously that you can see all the good things that have happened.

For example, you may have started a new hobby during the 2020 lockdown like so many people did. If you’ve kept practising, it’s likely that you’re now much more skilled than you were at first.

Why not look back at old photos or projects and reflect on how far you’ve come, and the role that you or others played in that progress?

Regularly looking at photos of treasured memories is another way that you can notice the things in life that have brought you joy.

By using these activities to practise gratitude regularly, you can focus on your life goals and the things you want to have more of in your life. This will be the driving force behind your financial plan, since money is simply the means by which you’ll achieve those goals.

Get in touch

If you’d like some guidance in creating a financial plan that helps you to include more of the things you are grateful for in your life, we can help.

Email theteam@fortitudefp.co.uk or call us on 01327 354321.

Please note

The value of your investments (and any income from them) can go down as well as up and you may not get back the full amount you invested. Past performance is not a reliable indicator of future performance. Investments should be considered over the longer term and should fit in with your overall attitude to risk and financial circumstances.