Cognitive exercises are those activities that require only that you set aside time throughout your day or week for sustained self-reflection and inquiry. The three activities included here are gratitude, savoring, and imagining one’s best possible self. These three can in some sense be viewed respectively as an orientation of the mind to what is good in either the past (gratitude), the present (savoring), or the future (imagining).
“In ordinary life, we hardly realize that we receive a great deal more than we give, and that it is only with gratitude that life becomes rich.” Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Gratitude Activity
The Gratitude Activity is focused on repeated self-reflection on that which you are grateful. You’ll select three days of the week where you’ll commit to taking time out of your day to sit and identify three things for which you are grateful and then writing about them.
Savoring Activity
The Savoring Activity is focused on developing your capacity to attend to, appreciate, and enhance the positive experiences in your life. You’ll select one day of the week to be especially focused on this practice. On that day, you’ll also return to this app and write about your experiences as well as your goals, plans, and actions for how to savor more in the forthcoming week
Best Possible Self Activity
The Imagining Your Best Possible Self Activity is focused on developing a well-defined sense of just who you imagine your best possible self to be. To do this, you’ll select one day of the week to return to this application for a simple exercise that is centered around, well, just seriously imagining your best possible self and writing about who this person is.
This exercise takes six weeks. During this time you'll work on improving your gratitude by simply setting aside some time three times a week (on different days) to do a simple exercise that consists of reflecting on that which you are grateful and then writing about it. You can create an account or sign in if you want to use this app to do this exercise and keep track of your progress. Otherwise, you can just use the information below on your own.