Keep Your Pen Moving: 6 Science-Backed Benefits of Gratitude

You’ve just had a crummy day, and you wish you hadn’t. Your first instinct is to pick up the phone, call your best friend, and complain.

But you also know deep down that you want to be more positive. You know that complaining emphasizes the negative in your life, and you’d like to create a shift for yourself.

You recall that you started a gratitude journal, and when you use it, you find you really enjoy noticing the good things more than the bad.

Writing three good things each day can help you feel more grateful.

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Yet your bad day keeps replaying in your head. This makes you feel reluctant, defeated, and unmotivated. In fact, it makes you want to ditch the gratitude practice altogether.

What should you do?

Current science says that while it’s fine to call your friend for support, if you only harp on the negatives, failing to rethink your own cognitive distortions, you’ll probably just continue to feel bad.

Though a great friend can help you co-regulate, and you’ll feel better after gaining perspective and support, if you’re not met with the compassion you desire, you might end up dysregulated instead, which means you'll feel worse. Your mind can also become more focused on the flaws of your day, and what's worse, your life.

That said, the better approach is one that includes becoming a personal scientist, doing experiments, and finding out what works best for your positivity.

Additionally, doing your research might help you decide that one habit you really want to consider is keeping up with your gratitude journaling.

Gratitude journaling isn’t a substitute for disputing and changing your irrational beliefs, going through cognitive-behavioral therapy, or engaging in other therapeutic healing work. But it's a way of consistently noticing what is working well that can help you improve your outlook and overall resilience, leading you to engage in more positive action steps toward your goals.

Here are six science-backed benefits every gratitude journaler should know to help them stay motivated and consistent:

1. Counting your blessings helps your outlook. A study by Emmons and McCullough (2003) had subjects journal about either their daily hassles or their daily blessings. They concluded, “Relative to the hassles and life events groups, participants in the gratitude condition felt better about their lives as a whole, and were more optimistic regarding their expectations for the upcoming week.”
2. Various gratitude practices may lessen depression. The practice of finding ways to reorient your thinking toward the positive can lessen the gloomier orientation toward the self, others, and life. In a metanalysis by Iodice et al. (2021), the researchers concluded that “the significant association between gratitude and depression found in the present meta-analysis, together with previous research focusing on the effect gratitude interventions have on lessening depression, suggests that more research is appropriate to determine the causal relationship between gratitude and depression.”
3. Consistent practice for as little as six weeks may have enduring benefits on your perspective. Bohlmeijer et al. (2021) showed that even a six-week gratitude intervention could enhance mental well-being, with sustained effects that lasted at the six-month follow-up. Their findings may “…suggest that it is possible to promote a lasting appreciative perspective on life.”
4. Your relationships tend to improve as you positively reinforce what's good. As long as you see the recipient in a respectful, egalitarian fashion, gratitude can feel loving and bonding. According to Jans-Beken et al. (2019), “gratitude is beneficially, although modestly, linked to social well-being, emotional well-being and to a lesser extent psychological well-being.”
5. You might feel physically better and exercise more. According to Emmons, relative to the hassles group, the gratitude group “reported fewer physical complaints and reported spending significantly more time exercising.” One caution: Don’t count on gratitude alone to improve your physical health or eradicate a mental illness. Jans-Beken et al. (2019) noted, “Studies focusing on physical health and psychopathology do not consistently point to a unique role of gratitude in these domains.”
6. You might feel better about your life as a whole and become more optimistic. According to Emmons (2019), “Relative to the hassles and life events groups, participants in the gratitude condition felt better about their lives as a whole, and were more optimistic regarding their expectations for the upcoming week.”

As you remember the benefits of gratitude journaling, realize that positive psychology has emphasized that the most important aspect of gratitude journaling is savoring (Garcy, 2021). Getting creative and finding ways to mindfully focus upon what is going well, the good things in life, and how fortunate you are can help you contradict a predisposition for complaining or a negativity bias.

As you journal about the good things that you're thankful for in your day, you begin to see your day from a more optimistic vantage point. You smile to yourself and think, "Maybe I'll keep this new practice around!"