Gratitude journal

What It Means

A gratitude journalJournalingWriting down your thoughts and feelings, in a notebook or an app, to understand them more clearly and to see what's behind your stress. See more is a regular written record of things you feel thankful for. In the version described by UC Berkeley's Greater Good Science Center, you write down up to five things once a week and reflect on what each one means to you. The entries can be big or small, and the practice works best when they're specific.

How People Say It

• "Sunday nights I write my gratitude list."
• "I'm grateful for the sandwich, honestly, it was a good sandwich."
• "Writing them down makes me notice them during the week."

The Breakdown

Signs it may suit you

• You tend to remember the hard parts of a week more than the good ones.
• You'd like a short writing habit you can do once a week.
• You already keep a journal and want a focused page in it.

How to keep one, following Greater Good

1. Choose a notebook, a notes app or a document. Write it down rather than running through it in your head.
2. Once a week, list up to five things you're grateful for.
3. Make each one specific: who did what, and when.
4. Mix it up. The same people can come back, but pick a different detail each time.
5. Spend a moment on what each one means to you.

A short self-check. After a month, read your entries back. If they've started to repeat word for word, look for new details, since Greater Good suggests variety.

Starting the conversation. Some families share one thing at dinner: "One good thing from my week was when you fixed the gate without being asked."

Good to Know

Greater Good's practice page summarizes research in which people who kept a gratitude journal weekly for 1010,000 stepsA popular daily step goal that began as the name of a 1960s Japanese pedometer; later studies find health benefits begin well below it. See more weeks, or daily for two weeks, reported more gratitude, better moods, more optimism and better sleep than people who wrote about hassles or everyday events. An early, often-cited study of daily and weekly gratitude lists is Emmons and McCullough's 2003 "Counting blessings versus burdens." Later results are more mixed: a systematic review of gratitude programs for workers found improvements in stress and depression but inconsistent results for well-being. Talk to a doctor or a licensed mental health professional if low mood lasts or gets in the way of daily life. If you're thinking about suicide or are in crisis, call or text 988 (the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline). Call 911 in an emergency.

Related Terms and Categories

• Journaling

  Writing down your thoughts and feelings, in a notebook or an app, to understand them more clearly and to see what's behind your stress.

• Hedonic adaptation

  The tendency for the emotional lift or sting of a change to fade over time, so that how happy you feel drifts back toward where it was before.

• Morning pages

  Julia Cameron's practice of writing three pages by hand first thing every morning, about whatever crosses your mind, for nobody's eyes but yours.

• Mood tracker

  A daily record of how your mood was, often a number or a color for each day, kept to spot patterns over weeks and months.

Wellbeing and habits