Do Gratitude Journals Really Work?

 I was in a funk. 

There wasn’t anything particularly wrong, per se. I just wasn’t feeling any of it. The world was grey-blah and so was my mood. Staying curled up in bed sounded reasonable.

Although I assumed that it wasn’t clinical depression and anxiety – which runs in my family – I knew that something was slightly off for me.

So I gave it a try. I started a gratitude journal.

Day by day I found one thing to name as good-enough-to-be-grateful-for. Day after day I struggled. I stretched. Sometimes I named the most absurd things. (A piece of paper?!) But I did it.

And somehow, somewhere along the way, something shifted. It wasn’t noticeable, really. It was gradual. It wasn’t even linear. There were still blah days. But they were less severely blah.

And in between the less-blah days, non-blah days started showing up. Days with smells and sounds, with tastes and touches, with colors and contours that were pleasurable.

Was it the gratitude journal that caused the shift? Who’s to say? What I do know is that my gratitude is connected to our Unitarian Universalist values – but that’s a story for another day.

This makes me curious: Have you ever intentionally nurtured gratitude in your life? If so, what’s your story?

Growing in Faith,