Towards the end of October 2024, as the US presidential election was becoming uncomfortably close and I began feeling more and more on edge, I decided to make two changes. One was to ramp up my meditation practice, which had slipped over the summer. The other was the start a gratitude journal.
I already have a regular gratitude and forgiveness practice, which I do in my head each night, but I wanted to add something more formal, something to orient me towards the good in my life. I needed to balance out that pervasive sense of being on the cataclysmic edge of catastrophe. I needed to water the seeds of groundedness and enoughness in my store consciousness (to borrow a phrase from Thich Naht Hanh), not just the seeds of worry and fear.
I looked for a gratitude journal to buy and couldn’t find one I liked. They were too big, too small, too corny. They crammed in too many things — habit-tracking and intention-setting and appointments. They asked me to rate my days, as if the course of emotions in any one day could ever be assigned a single word or number. They were too goal oriented, too judgy.
Instructions for Making Your Own Gratitude Journal
So I made up my own. I bought an A5 notebook — not too big, not too small (this one, if you’d like to know).
At the top of each page, I write the date and the words “Top Three Things” on the top line. I then write a numbered list of my top three things from the day. Could be moments, actions, feelings, sights, meals, anything.
Next I write the words “Things I’m Grateful For,” and then I make a list until I reach the bottom of the page.
That’s it. Simple, quick, straightforward.
How Keeping a Gratitude Journal Helps
This practice helps me see that even when things are awful, things are also okay, even good, sometimes wonderful.
They might just be moments — little glimmers of marvel or ease — but moments count too. They make perfect Top Three Things. It’s actually quite remarkable how much weight moments can have, especially when you are measuring real, lived experiences from your day — a hug, a laugh, a warm ray of sun on a cool gray day — against things that are happening far away from you. Material experiences have a heft that mediated experiences don’t. When you pause to recall them and note them down, the balance between horrible and happy shifts, sometimes quite a bit. Despair loosens its grip.
When keeping the journal becomes a regular practice, you start noticing the good moments more as they happen. There is a thought: “I think this is something I’ll write down tonight.” You also begin to spot patterns and themes — the kinds of things that make you feel good, and the things in your life that you may take for granted. Hot water. Enough food. A warm house. There are so many things we can forget to be grateful for. Writing a list of them every night helps us see them. It can also help us seek them out.
Touching base with these things just before bed allows you to end the day on an up note. It’s so much more pleasant to turn off the light thinking about what you are grateful for than it is to go to sleep ruminating about all you feel powerless to change. It’s not just pleasant — it is healthy and skilful. It helps you sleep better. We all need and deserve rest.
One last note: For this to work really well, your phone will not be on your bedside table, begging for one last check. I urge you, buy yourself an alarm clock. Then your gratitude journal can really be the very last thing you do before you go to sleep. Your phone will be there in the morning.