A Year Of Daily Gratitude Journalling – It Actually Works!

Well, I thought that I’d talk about “gratitude journalling” today. At the time of writing the first draft of this article (8th December 2022), I realised that I’d been doing this literally every day for the past year.

If you haven’t heard of this before, it is when you document things (whether physical items, experiences, emotions, thoughts etc...) which you enjoyed, feel grateful for or appreciated in some way. That’s literally all there is to it.

Whether you consider this to be a scientific/psychological practice or a spiritual one – and it can be either – the goal of it is to improve your emotions by practicing seeing and enjoying the good things that are already a part of your life.

One of the first things that I will say about it, and this is good life advice in general, is to make it your own. You’ll find pre-made journals and standardised templates out there. You’ll find conflicting studies which tell you that it is either best to do it daily or best to do it weekly. Personally, I’d recommend just finding or doing whatever actually works for you. It doesn’t matter how “strange” or “different” it is, if it actually works for you then use it.

The entire goal and point of this is to feel better about your life. To see the good that is around you right now, to find ways of feeling happier more often. It is a very subjective and emotional activity, rather than anything that has to be done in the “correct” way with exact technical precision. So, although I’ll tell the story of how I found my own “version” of this activity, don’t just mindlessly copy it! Find or create whatever works best for you.

My own practice with it began completely spontaneously. On the 1st October 2021, I had an absolutely amazing day, and I wanted to document it for posterity. So, I wrote a computer document called “A Magical Day”. This was originally just a one-off thing. A record of a great day. There were a couple of days in November 2021 which were really good, and I did the same for them. Then a run of three great days in early December 2021, and three more documents.

By the next amazing day I had on the 8th December 2021, or in the days immediately after it, I decided to be a bit more pro-active. Instead of just documenting days that seemed like they were better than usual, I decided to focus on the good parts of every day, to appreciate them more. This didn’t necessarily have to be physical things either – it could also include emotions, ideas/insights etc… too. And this is how the daily practice began. Eventually, I also ended up adding a physical journal with short summaries of each day too.

Of course, I had to make adjustments. Contrary to what some people on social media, in Hollywood movies and in some New Age media might tell you, having a “100% perfect” life is a myth. Likewise, trying to “be 100% happy 100% of the time” is not only dangerous but also exhausting and impossible too. Bad emotions are a natural part of life and, if nothing else, they make the good emotions feel better by contrast.

As such, if I was going to do this every day and actually be honest about it, I needed a grading system. One where I could honestly acknowledge “bad” days, but point out to myself that there was still some good in them. As such, within about a month or so, I initially came up with four categories (From worst to best: “Semi-magical”, “Magical”, “Especially Magical” and “Heavenly”). Of course, these categories ended up evolving and changing a lot over the past year – but the basic idea worked well for me.

Here’s an example from my physical journal, albeit with some brand names redacted here, showing the “Especially magical” day that I had on Halloween last year 🙂 Yes, I put a bit more effort into actively celebrating the day and finding horror media to enjoy – such as re-watching “Suspiria” (1977) again and playing the free 2021 demo version of “Greek Tragedy” – but this is the point of all of this! Finding good things that are already there, or even trying to actively add more good things to your day. And, yes, “Especially magical” is one of the few older categories that I’ve still kept. It’s just a cool thing to write.

It isn’t really an exact science, but more a tool that I can use to evaluate the day and express what I felt about it. Sometimes, a day’s category will be there for a specific pre-defined reason (For example, I later introduced the “Artistic” category – which specifically refers to days where I had a lot of creative inspiration, enjoyed high-quality films/games/books or where the day itself seemed like something from a novel).

Sometimes, it will be more of a relative thing – if I’ve had a run of mediocre days, even a moderately better day might get a high category. Sometimes though, I’ll categorise by “feel”. For example, if a day reminds me of the first “Magical Day” I had in October 2021, it’ll get that category regardless of how good or bad it was. It isn’t an objective scientific measurement, but a subjective emotional tool.

But, again, this is just how I did it. If you want to make this a long-running part of your life, you need to find what actually works for you. It might be completely different to what I did or it might be vaguely similar. Whatever it is, make sure that it actually works for YOU. This isn’t a competition! This is something you are literally doing for yourself in order to feel better about your life. So, go for what actually works for you rather than what other people tell you that you “should” be doing.

But, does it actually work? In my experience, the answer is YES!

The improvement, like any skill, will be the sort of gradual thing that you might not even notice until you eventually look back weeks or months later. My life right now, whilst not “100% perfect”, feels noticeably better in emotional terms than it did a year ago. My mind also feels like a slightly more peaceful and fun place too. Again, I still have “bad” emotions – like any human being does – but they usually don’t last as long, and I’m better at handling them than I used to be too.

Again, I still had some “bad” days – but getting better at looking for the good in them not only gave me a mild mood boost but – more importantly – it made me want to make the next day better. To actively take steps to find good things, to do introspection (sudden “Aha!” moments feel awesome), to actually process the bad emotions, to calmly tell myself “It’s a new day, it could be better” and be a bit more optimistic.

If you do this sort of journalling on a regular basis, whether daily or weekly, it takes on its own momentum after a while. It becomes an ordinary part of your routine. More than that, it’s also a bit like a much healthier version of social media. You’ll have the instinct to “show off” fun, cool and happy stuff… but to yourself. Not as a competition with random strangers on the internet for “likes”, but for your own satisfaction. If you’re honest with yourself, every fun or cool thing you read in your gratitude journal will be something you’ve directly experienced.

More than that, another – often overlooked – use for all of this stuff is as a “pick me up” on more miserable days. If you’ve been doing it for a while, then you’ll probably have a stack of entries that you can look back on. Solid proof that you can have good days, that you can actively improve the mood of any given day. Again, don’t go for “100%” perfect – it is unreachable! But if you managed to turn a “40% good” day into a “60% good” one in the past, then you can do it again.

Most of all though, just have fun with this stuff and remember to do your own thing with it 🙂

————————

Anyway, I hope that this was useful 🙂