Increase Gratitude During Business Travel

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Gratitude (and the wider practice of mindfulness) can help reduce burnout and generally make business people feel more content. But how can overstretched executives and business travelers feel more gratidude? Read on to learn about the positive aspects of gratitude, as well as some tips and tools to help practice it more often.

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Why is gratitude important for business travelers?

Gratitude is fundamental to our sense of wellbeing and mental health. Traveling for business can take a toll on our bodies and minds, so finding ways to combat these negative influences can help us enjoy our work more and reduce burnout.

Let’s face it, if we are business executives or regular business travelers, chances are that we’re in the upper couple percent of society and the world in terms of income. Finding reasons to be thankful (aka grateful) can help us realize just how good we have it. This gratefulness isn’t in any way to replace the hunger or intensity you bring to your job, but instead to recognize all of the goodness in our lives.

The National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) found through a VCU study that “thankfulness predicted a significantly lower risk of major depression, generalized anxiety disorder, phobia, nicotine dependence, alcohol dependence, and drug abuse.”

Tips to increase gratitude during business travel

Feelings of negativity or pessimism are quite natural in high paced business roles. We are always looking for what might go wrong or “minimizing down side risk.” While that level of healthy skepticism may be professionally important, it can be easy to allow it to bleed over to our personal life and mental health. Increasing our sense of gratitude can help us find more satisfaction with our life and calm our mind.

Meditation (mindfulness) is the first step to more gratitude during travel

Mindfulness is the state of being fully present (according to Mindful.org). That means not totally being sucked into our devices, work, or internal thoughts so that we can observe what’s going on around us. This also allows us to be aware of ourselves, our actions, and (most importantly) our reactions.

While the idea of mindfulness is a simple one, it can be a bit intimidating to start meditating. It shouldn’t be! Just spending time clearing our head or observing our surroundings can begin the mindfulness journey.

Mindfulness meditation is just as simple as pausing to focus on our breath and observe (but not judge or solve) the thoughts running through our brain. I like to use the Peloton app for guided meditations (article on in-flight meditation) but there are many free, freemium, and paid programs out there (e.g., Headspace, Aura, Calm)

Say ‘thank you’ in your daily interactions

The simple act of thanking others can help you feel more thankful in the process. Though this is just scratching the surface. When you thank somoene, pick out why you are thankful for them or their actions. This will be more impactful to them and will trigger deeper connections in your own mind.

To improve your thank you’s pick an interaction per day to insert a heartfelt thank you. Tell the person why you are thankful for them or how their work impacted you. If you feel less comfortable saying this out-loud, you could try an email, handwritten note, or text message. (mindful.org)

Journal about the things that you are thankful for

Gratitude journalling is all about spending a few minutes to write down the things you are thankful for each day. The deeper idea is that you focus mental energy on thinking about the people or situations you are thankful for and then take it a step further by recording them.

Reviewing your gratitude journal can also remind you of situations or people that you were previously thankful for.

Gratitude journaling just takes a 5 minute (or less) commitment each day. To establish effective habits, you should pick a daily trigger or time that reminds you to journal. This coud be when you have your morning coffee or just before you go to bed (or any other regular event). The Whoop Journal feature also allows you to log which days you journaled, helping you see trends as well as it’s impact on your daily recovery.

Log your level of gratitude during business travel

We talk alot about gathering data on the habits you’re trying to establish or outcomes you want to measure. Your sense of gratitude can be one of those metrics!

The Whoop Journal feature allows you to track 300+ attributes and gratitude & journaling are on that list. If you are using Whoop, you’ll get a daily reminder to fill out your journal with yesterday’s attributes in an easy to complete form (takes less than 30 sec). This can help increase accountability (by having to face how yesterday went) as well as providing data to analyze. Once you’ve completed at least 10 entries on an attribute, you can start learning how it impacts your sleep and recovery.

Kit to help increase gratitude when traveling

While gratitude as an action and a mental state is obviously free, some tools can help us practice it more often and effectively.

Whoop 4.0 for logging daily gratitude level and seeing impact

The Whoop 4.0 is a wellness tracker that logs 5 body metrics and combines that data with your daily habits to produce actionable insights about your lifestyle. To learn more about how to use the Whoop to better inform your wellness decisions, check out our detailed review.

As it relates to gratitude, the Whoop 4.0 journal feature allows you to quickly log what happened the previous day and then it integrates it to assess impact on your recovery. For this topic, you can log how much gratitude you felt the previous day and if you spend time journaling. After you complete 10 daily entries, the Whoop statistical engine will start to show you the impact of these habits / feelings on your daily recovery.

Bonus: there are SO many other amazing features from the Whoop 4.0 (haptic alarm, strain tracking, 300+ habits, stress scores) – learn more here.

reMarkable 2 for gratitude journaling

If you read any of our posts, you’ll know that we are huge fans of the reMarkable 2 paper tablet for a variety of business travel tasks (taking notes, organizing your day, marking up presentations, reading ebooks). Gratitude journaling extends the usefulness of this device.

How do I setup gratitude journaling on my reMarkable 2?

The simplest version would be to start a new notebook (tag it ‘gratitude’). I prefer to use the medium rule format for weekly gratitude journals (it leaves enough space for 2-3 entries per 7-day week. Then set a goal to write two or three things you’re gracious for each day. My recommendation would be to make a new page for each week (so your journal would be 52 pages long).

Gratitude Journal Format for reMarkable tablet

The next level of gratitude journaling on the reMarkable is downloading a PDF template to better format your pages and spark thoughts. I’m a big fan of Laurel Studios template series and their mindfulness template is no exception. The formatting is simple and straightforward, with prompts to trigger introspection. Check out their template to get started!