Does Gratitude Journaling Work? An Evidence Based Answer

You’ve probably heard about how gratitude journaling is supposed to be really good for you. It lifts your mood, rewires your brain and improves your life in all sorts of ways; all in just a few minutes a day!

And when you see claims like that, you’re naturally skeptical. Is any of this really true or is it just a social media fad?

TL;DR: gratitude journaling is well studied, but many trials are short-term. It produces modest positive effects that hold as long as people keep practicing regularly. It’s effective, but it is not a miracle cure or clinical treatment.

Let’s take a closer look at some specific studies and what they show about gratitude practice.

Daily Gratitude List

A 2019 study by Cunha et al. was done on what most people mean by gratitude journaling.

A group of adults were recruited online and randomly assigned to one of three conditions for 14 days:

1. The first group listed five things they were grateful for each day, looking back over the previous day.
2. The second group listed neutral events. Just a list of things that happened.
3. The third group made a list of hassles and annoyances. The anti-gratitude group, if you will.

What the Study Found

Immediately after the two weeks, the gratitude group reported higher positive affect than both other groups. At the 14-day follow-up, they were still higher than the hassles group, but no longer distinguishable from the neutral-events group. This is something we’ll get back to in a moment, because it’s really fascinating.

But first, let’s clearly define what the researchers mean by “positive affect”: this is at term used in psychology to describe feeling good, basically. Increased positive affect is when you feel joyful, upbeat, calm, happy more often than not. And negative affect would be feeling anxious, sad, numb, distressed etc.

So that’s a really promising finding, right out of the gate. People who wrote down things they’re grateful for felt measurably better, not only while they were writing what they were grateful for but also in general.

Now, let’s look at some of the other interesting findings from this study, that are usually overlooked.

Most People Quit

There are some other interesting findings from this study, starting with this detail: in total, 1,337 people joined the study but only 410 of them were included in the final analysis.

What happened?

Simple: 927 of the participants stopped making their daily list before the 2 weeks were up. Although the practice is simple, they didn’t stick to it.

This is one of the key issues with gratitude journaling: although the practice is simple, quick and leads to positive outcomes, most people don’t stick with it (and it’s why we built the Grateful App to make it easy, fun and - dare we say it - addictive to stick with the practice).

The Harmless Problem

Remember this detail from the follow up: 2 weeks after the study concluded, the gratitude group AND the list-neutral-events group both showed higher positive affect than the list-annoyances group.

Isn’t that odd?

At first glance, this might suggest that it’s not gratitude itself that led to the positive outcomes. Just making a list makes you feel better, as long as you’re not listing grievances?

But on closer inspection, we see something else: the people who were instructed to make a list of neutral events had a tendency to list positive things anyway. So when you tell someone: make a list of things that happened, they might end up doing something close to gratitude journaling, by default.

What this really means is that the “neutral” group wasn’t truly neutral. And what the study clearly shows is that spending a few minutes a day reflecting on things you’re grateful for has a significant, measurable positive effect, whereas listing grievances does not.

What Happens When 24,804 People Practice Gratitude?

Next, let’s look at one of the largest meta-reviews of gratitude studies. This 2025 review by Choi et al. analyzed 145 studies across 28 different countries.

The researchers’ goal was to find out: how robust are the positive effects of gratitude practice? Do they hold up across all these different studies and over 24,000 people with different cultural backgrounds?

The short answer is: yes. The review finds a small but significant effect which is described as an “increase in overall well-being”.

Two Hints & a Mystery

There are more interesting findings coming out of this study, a few of which we want to highlight here:

• Studies that measure positive affect showed a greater effect. Meaning: gratitude seems to most strongly affect your positive emotional state.
• Studies that combined more than one kind of gratitude exercise showed a greater effect. Meaning: doing one kind of gratitude exercise is good, mixing it up is better (this is why the Grateful App comes with built-in variety).
• There were differences in effect based on the participants’ country/cultural background. Unfortunately, the researchers couldn’t pin-point exactly what accounted for those differences. For now, this remains a mystery.

Effects Beyond Mood

Let’s turn to another systematic meta-review conducted in 2023 by Diniz et al. This one examined 64 different studies on the topic of gratitude.

What’s interesting about this one is the researchers focused more on potential clinical benefits of gratitude practice.

Here’s a summary directly from the paper:

…patients who underwent gratitude interventions experienced greater feelings of gratitude, better mental health, and fewer symptoms of anxiety and depression. Moreover, they experienced other benefits such as a more positive mood and emotions.

Notice how the “positive mood and emotions” (a.k.a. positive affect) are almost treated as a side effect here?

Surprisingly, what this meta review found is that gratitude practice is effective even beyond just making you feel better. It seems to have a measurable effect on mental health and may even be complimentary to some therapeutic approaches.

Note however, that none of this means that gratitude practice replaces therapy for mental health conditions.

Is Weekly Better than Daily?

One idea you might come across is that practicing gratitude only once a week is better than a daily practice. This is based on one study that indeed showed such an effect when comparing once a week vs. three times a week.

There are plenty of other studies that found daily practice to be effective as well and the overall conclusion seems to be that frequency doesn’t matter so much. We’ve covered this in detail in our post about the optimal frequency for gratitude journaling.

Asking “how often?” might be a distraction from a more important question: “how engaged?”

If all you do is write down a few vague statements like “I’m grateful for my health” or you treat gratitude as a chore to get checked off your to-do list, you can expect minimal effects. Why? Because writing the same few short phrases on repeat doesn’t actually engage your brain. And it also doesn’t produce any real, felt sense of gratitude.

But if you take even just a few minutes to write down a few things you’re genuinely grateful for each day, the effects can be profound (see Martin Seligman’s “three good things” practice).

The Conclusion

Does gratitude journaling work? Yes, but only if you do it right.

An examination of the body of research on this topic shows that two things are true at the same time:

1. Gratitude journaling can be highly effective at altering your mood and happiness level. In fact, even a “small dose” of it can have surprisingly long lasting effects.
2. It depends a lot on how exactly you do the gratitude journaling. It’s possible to do something that looks like gratitude journaling but produces none of the desired effects.

We created the Grateful App to help you do the right kind of gratitude journaling without having to know all the research. The app always nudges you towards the optimal approach and the whole thing feels fun and easy, so you’ll have a breeze making this a sustainable and effective habit for yourself.