Four Tips for Making Gratitude a Regular Part of Your Senior’s Day
Gratitude is a powerful force and more people are embracing expressing gratitude as a daily habit. Since November is National Gratitude Month, your senior might want to try incorporating gratitude into her daily routine.
Seek Out the Positive When You Can
When you’re focusing on gratitude, it’s a lot easier to find the positives in life. That might mean paying a little less attention to things like the news or to things that feel more negative to your senior. This doesn’t mean that she shouldn’t have access to information about what’s going on but finding a balance between positive things and other stuff can help. When she’s doing this more often, your senior may start to find it a lot easier to see all the gratitude around her.
Turn Negative Thoughts into Their Positive Versions
If your elderly family member is prone to negative thoughts, such as doom-driven thoughts about her health, there may be a way to turn those thoughts around into their more positive forms. This takes practice, though. It’s not a super simple task for most people right out of the gate. Encourage her to take some of the bigger negative thoughts that she has often and finds ways to make them more positive. For instance, she may still see having help from elderly care providers as a negative. But a positive version might include all the ways that those same elderly care providers help her to be independent in her home.
Keep a Written Gratitude List or Journal
Writing down things that your senior is grateful for helps her to solidify those in her mind. It also helps her to see that list of gratitude growing and growing day by day. Keeping a list or a journal can be really simple, too. If you or she make it a complicated process, she’s going to be much more likely to give up on the idea. So keep it simple and don’t put a lot of rules on the journaling.
Look for Quotes That Help Spark Gratitude
When people are starting out with gratitude and gratitude journaling, it can be tough to find the right things to write down or talk about. If your senior is feeling that way, it can help to start out with quotes or readings about gratitude or that spark a bit of gratitude. This helps to shift her mindset a bit and start to see the gratitude all around her.
Your senior’s individual gratitude practice is about what works for her. The key to having a system that she enjoys is to let her find the tools and the formats that light her up.
If you or an aging loved-one are considering hiring Home Health Care in Wilmette, IL, call the caring staff at LifeCare Home Health & In-Home Services. Call (888) 606-4199 LifeCare serves all of the Chicago Metro Area.
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