Gratitude Journal

Why You Should Try It

It’s easy to take the good things and people in our lives for granted, but research suggests that consciously giving thanks for them can have profound effects on our well-being and relationships. This exercise helps you develop a greater appreciation for the good in your life. In fact, people who routinely express gratitude enjoy better health and greater happiness.

Why It Works

While it’s important to analyze and learn from bad events, sometimes we can think too much about what goes wrong and not enough about what goes right in our lives. A gratitude journal forces ourselves to pay attention to the good things in life we might otherwise take for granted. In that way, we start to become more attuned to the everyday sources of pleasure around us—and the emotional tone of our life can shift in profound ways. What’s more, actually writing about these events is key: Research suggests translating thoughts into concrete language makes us more aware of them, deepening their emotional impact.

Evidence That It Works

Emmons, R. A., & McCullough, M. E. (2003). Counting blessings versus burdens: An experimental investigation of gratitude and subjective well-being in daily life. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 84(2), 377-389.

People who wrote in a Gratitude Journal weekly for 10 weeks or daily for two weeks experienced more gratitude, positive moods, and optimism about the future, as well as better sleep, compared to those who journaled about hassles or their daily life.

Who Has Tried the Practice?

Undergraduate students at a large American public university and patients at the University of California, Davis, Neuromuscular Disease Clinic participated in the above study. Around 76% of the participants were women. Data on ethnicity and race are unavailable for this study, but additional studies explore how the Gratitude Journal benefits different groups and cultures:

• A group of predominantly white and highly educated people in Brazil increased in positive emotion, happiness, and life satisfaction and decreased in negative emotion and depression after daily gratitude journaling for two weeks.
• Polish natives also increased in well-being after gratitude journaling.
• Turkish university students improved in college adjustment, life satisfaction, and positive emotion after three weeks of gratitude journaling.
• In a New Zealand study, people with arthritis experienced less pain, everyday interferences from their pain, and pain-related anxiety and more self-efficacy after gratitude journaling each week for four weeks.
• Muslim undergraduate students in Malaysia increased in happiness after two weeks of writing daily notes of Islamic-based gratitude that expressed “their gratefulness to the Merciful Allah who grants them with blessings and is responsible for their grateful and blessed situations.” About 85% of the participants were women.
• A four-week Christianity-based gratitude program, in which pastors led activities such as gratitude journaling, sermons, and psychoeducation, improved well-being, life satisfaction, and interpersonal engagement in members of a mostly white congregation in the American Pacific Northwest.

More research is needed to explore whether, and how, the impact of this practice extends to other groups and cultures.

Sources

Robert Emmons, Ph.D., University of California, Davis
Sonja Lyubomirsky, Ph.D., University of California, Riverside

References

Writing a Gratitude Journal can make us more attuned to the good things in life. Do you have an attitude of gratitude? Take our Gratitude quiz to find out: