I wanted to share a beautiful story of someone who has benefitted greatly by practicing the daily habit of gratitude. Gratitude is the simple practice of expressing thanks for all the things that are going well in our life. It shifts our attention from all the problems in life to the blessings. Problems and blessings will always co-exist hand in hand in every person’s life. It is upto us which one we want to focus upon.
This story is of Pritesh Sankhe, the maker of the Gratitude app on Google play store. I would highly recommend this app to everyone to help inculcate the daily habit of gratitude.
Hi there, I am Pritesh — maker of the Gratitude app, a Completely Private Journal app that reminds you to be grateful during the day.
The Gratitude app was born out of a personal need and I had initially built the app for me. In June 2017, me and my family (my parents and my younger sister) were struggling with many problems. We were in a constant state of negativity, frustration and anxiety. My dad was a victim of politics at his job, my mother was not keeping well, my sister and me were struggling at our jobs and figuring out what to do. It felt as if we were constantly attracting negativity and things felt like they were becoming even worse.
We consulted spiritual healers, went through therapy; I personally attended mind power workshops, read a lot of self-help books and even asked for help from friends and family. I won’t deny that reading the book ‘The Secret’ by Rhonda Byrne had a huge positive impact on me.
While doing all these, I actively started to change my thoughts to positive, to count my blessings. I really understood and absorbed the fact that if I keep complaining about the things that I lack, no matter what I achieve, I’ll continue to be anxious or worrying about things that I lack(at that time). More importantly, I realized that the most important reason of staying unhappy was when we spent all the time thinking about “I” or “me” or “myself” — being self centered.
I started writing and expressing thanks for little things that happened to me. It wasn’t easy. It was difficult at start. In fact, at the beginning things seem to feel even worse. Because, I was expecting things to change sooner and when that didn’t happen early on, I started questioning the whole concept of Gratitude. But I wondered, what is the harm in doing it anyway? There’s nothing to lose.
Right now, I’m not exaggerating when I say that I feel magical after expressing, writing and harboring Grateful thoughts. I eventually succeeded in convincing my family too to try and focus on positive, and now after quite a hard time, all of us are doing great. Over time, I think we realized that we shouldn’t be chasing the wrong things and attach our happiness to them. I built this app because I wanted a private place to write my grateful thoughts, to remind me to focus on positive, and to give it colors. The app has been my happy place.
Here are some of my journal entries from the Gratitude app.
