Day 1: What is The Thankfulness Experiment?

Welcome to The Thankfulness Experiment!  You are invited to join me on a 66 day journey to see if being thankful really makes a difference.  The task is simple… list 5 things you are thankful for each day on this blog.  The goal?  To reach 10,000 reasons we are thankful by January 5^th.  Is this possible?  Absolutely… if you invite your friends to join in… and if we work together to turn journaling thankfulness into a habit.   

Thankfulness is often on my radar screen during the month of November, simply because of Thanksgiving.  I don’t know about you, but the Thanksgiving meal itself is enough for me to be thankful all month because I love all the yumminess that I get to eat that day.  But what about being thankful all the time?  This is definitely something to strive for, but I’m not quite there yet.  What about you? 

Some of you may wonder if thankfulness could really make a difference in your life.  And that’s a fair question.  Believe it or not, scientists have tested this theory…  Family Fun magazine (yes, I am a mother of two boys) had a brief blurb that shared “University of California researcher Dr. Robert Emmons found that grateful people report a host of benefits, such as stronger immune systems, better sleep, and more joy and optimism.” (November 2012, p. 39).   Those are some pretty good reasons to join in a thankfulness experiment, right?

So, let’s begin.  In order to determine if being thankful really makes a difference, we need to create a baseline and answer this question:  “How thankful am I right now?”  So before you begin The Thankfulness Experiment, rate yourself on this question using a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being “My life stinks!  Why should I be thankful?” and 10 being “I’m thankful all the time… in fact my picture is in the dictionary next to thankfulness!”  Jot down why you gave yourself this rating too.  Feel free to blog this or just write it in a notebook. 

We will rate ourselves again on day 66, January 5th, to see if this Thankfulness Experiment made any difference in our lives.  It will be interesting to see what benefits we experience… will our own experiment synch up with Dr. Emmons findings?  Or better yet, will we experience benefits that go beyond his research?  Only time will tell…

So here we are… ready to begin The Thankfulness Experiment.  You can hold me accountable to 66 days of thanksgiving, and hopefully, I can hold you accountable too.  I’m looking forward to partnering with you on this journey.  Today, I’m focusing on some people I’m thankful for, so here’s the first five reasons on our list…

1.      I’m thankful for my husband, with whom I’m celebrating 10 years of marriage today. 

2.      I’m thankful for my dear friend who encouraged me to embark on The Thankfulness Experiment journey.

3.      I’m thankful for my boss who challenged me to start using social media… and here I am, officially on Twitter and writing my own blog. 

4.      I’m thankful for two of my fellow bloggers, who taught me the ins and outs of blogging in about 45 minutes.

5.      I’m thankful for the enthusiasm of my two friends and their daughters, who were so excited about The Thankfulness Experiment that they designed a logo and t-shirts for it!

I’m so thankful for these people… and for each of you who are joining me in The Thankfulness Experiment.  Here’s to 10,000 reasons… only 9,995 more to go…