Gratitude Worksheet

This is three things you are grateful for today. One entry a day. That's it. The practice is deliberately small, because this one works through repetition rather than depth. The research most people cite is Robert Emmons and Michael McCullough's, published in 2003 while at the University of California, Davis, and the University of Miami. They ran groups writing weekly about things they were grateful for, against groups writing about hassles or neutral events. The gratitude groups reported better wellbeing, more optimism, and in one study, more exercise. Later work has found modest effects rather than dramatic ones, which is worth knowing before you expect too much of it. The useful version is specific and recent. 'My family', every day for a month, stops registering. 'The fact that Tom rang when he did not have to' does something, because you have to look at your day to find it. Some days you will write three small things. Coffee, a seat on the train, the rain stopping. Small is fine. The exercise is the looking, not the size of what you find. Build the streak. On the days you least feel like it, the looking is worth more. Ninety seconds. Attach it to something you already do in the evening.