Does a gratitude journal really work? What the research says, and how to make it count

A gratitude journal simply means writing down a few things you're grateful for on a regular basis. The best-known study, published by Robert Emmons and Michael McCullough in 2003, found that people who wrote about gratitude reported better wellbeing on several measures. Later research suggests the benefits are real but modest, and the practice tends to work best when the things you write down are specific and recent.

Why is it so much easier to notice what's gone wrong?

If someone asked you what went badly today, you could probably answer in seconds. The train was late, the email was curt, and your colleague said that thing in the meeting that you've been replaying ever since.

If they asked what went well, you might have to stop and think for a moment, and that's perfectly normal. We're built to notice threats and problems, which was very useful when the threat was a sabre-toothed tiger and is rather less useful when it's a slightly terse message from accounts.

The trouble is that a perfectly decent day can end up feeling like a bad one, simply because the good bits slipped past without anyone noticing them. A gratitude practice is a gentle way of making sure they get noticed too.

What does the research say about gratitude?

Robert Emmons, at the University of California, Davis, and Michael McCullough, then at the University of Miami, published a paper in 2003 called "Counting blessings versus burdens". They asked different groups of people to write regularly about things they were grateful for, about everyday hassles, or about neutral events.

In their weekly study, the people who wrote about gratitude felt better about their lives as a whole, were more optimistic about the week ahead, reported fewer physical complaints, and even spent more time exercising. The authors were careful to point out that the gratitude effect showed up on several of the measures they looked at, though not on all of them.

In 2010, Alex Wood, Jeffrey Froh and Adam Geraghty reviewed the wider research and found that gratitude is linked to wellbeing across many studies, while noting that a lot of that research is correlational. So the honest summary is that gratitude helps, modestly, and knowing that before you start means you won't expect it to work miracles and then feel disappointed when it doesn't.

How does the Gratitude Worksheet work in PiViva?

Each day you write down three things you're grateful for, and that's all there is to it. The practice is deliberately small, as it works through gentle repetition over time.

It helps to be specific and to keep things recent. Writing "my family" every day for a month soon stops meaning very much, whereas "Tom rang when he didn't have to" makes you look back over your day to find it, and that looking is where the good stuff happens.

Some days you'll write down three very small things: a good cup of coffee, a seat on the train, the rain stopping just as you left the house. Small is absolutely fine. The point of the exercise is the looking, and on the days when you least feel like doing it, the looking is often worth the most. PiViva keeps a streak for you, which many people find a pleasant nudge to keep going.

What if it starts to feel like a chore?

That can happen with any habit, and there are a couple of easy things to try. One is to change the timing and attach it to something you already do each evening, such as brushing your teeth, which Building Habits can help you set up.

Another is to change the question you ask yourself. You might swap "what am I grateful for?" for "who did something kind for me today?" or "what went better than I expected?", which can bring the whole thing back to life.

And if you've had a genuinely hard week, gratitude can sometimes feel forced, as if you're being asked to smile when you don't feel like it. On those days, the Self-Compassion Break may suit you better, and the gratitude will still be there when you're ready to come back to it.

You could try it this evening and see how it feels.