How to Start a Gratitude Journal: A Beginner’s Guide

Perhaps you’ve heard about how surprisingly effective gratitude journaling is at improving mood and well-being. Maybe you’re also aware that gratitude journaling works, but only if you do it right.

And maybe you’ve tried it and found yourself staring at a blank page, unsure about what exactly to write, or how much or for how long..?

So, let’s break it down: here are the simplest rules to follow (based on the evidence) to get started with a gratitude journaling practice that actually works.

TL;DR: a gratitude journal is most effective when you write down specific, unique moments you’re grateful for and take a moment to savor the actual feeling of gratitude. The prompt “what are three specific things from the last 24 hours that I’m grateful for?” is a good way to do the right kind of gratitude writing while avoiding pitfalls.

What to Use as Your Gratitude Journal

A gratitude journal is simply a place you’ve dedicated to writing down things you’re grateful for, on a regular basis. What should you use for this?

Full disclosure: we’ve built an app for this called Grateful. We obviously think it’s the very best tool to use for gratitude writing, but let’s be real: you do not need an app for this.

Any notebook will do. If you already use an app for your general note taking (Notion, Obsidian, Google Docs… whatever you already default to), then that can serve as your gratitude journal as well.

The only thing that isn’t recommended is using a random scrap of paper. Why? Because gratitude journaling is especially beneficial when you make it a habit and stick with it in the long run.

This means having one specific notebook or app that you can come back to each day is ideal.

The Gratitude Power Prompt

We’ve poured through tons of research on gratitude journaling, so you don’t have to. Instead, just use this prompt:

“What are three specific things from the last 24 hours that you’re grateful for?”

This may seem simple, but it’s a carefully crafted prompt that has many gratitude best practices baked in.

Here’s how it breaks down:

Avoiding Vague Gratitude Statements

The prompt asks you to write down specific things that happened rather than general things you’re grateful for.

This is to eliminate the first common gratitude pitfall: making vague, short, repetitive statements.

“I’m grateful for my friends” or “I’m grateful I have a roof over my head” may be genuine expressions of gratitude, but there are a few problems with this kind of general statement:

• It takes only a few seconds to think of and write each one
• It quickly becomes repetitive if you practice daily
• Vague statements are not evocative - you’re unlikely to see a clear picture of what you’re grateful for or feel a deep emotional resonance

All this means: you could be gratitude journaling every day for months, on autopilot, without getting any of the real benefits.

Why These Rules?

Specific means one identifiable thing, not a category. Not “I’m grateful for my friends” but “I’m grateful for the late night phone call I had with my friend yesterday.”

Happened means an event, not a standing fact about your life. “My health” is not something that happened. “My knee didn’t hurt on the stairs this morning” is.

In the last 24 hours is an addition that makes the prompt even better. First, because it shrinks the search, so to speak. You are not scanning your entire life for things worth being grateful for, which could be a little overwhelming. You are scanning yesterday afternoon and this morning. That also makes it much easier to remember the specifics of whatever you pick.

The prompt is specific and narrow and that is exactly what beat the blank page problem. “What am I grateful for?” is much too broad of a question. “What happened yesterday that I’m glad about?” helps you get to the point.

Internal Moments Count

It’s worth noting that the specific moment you are grateful for doesn’t have to be one that happened “out there”. A creative idea that hit you while you were in the shower, the moment you finally made a decision you’d been postponing or noticing that your mood lifted for no apparent reason; these are all specific moments to be grateful for, even if an outside observer couldn’t point at them.

Train Your Brain Radar

The power prompt is also designed to create a very specific long-term effect on anyone who does the practice regularly. After a while, you get used to the fact that every day, you’ll be tasked with writing down three new, specific things to be grateful for and you know that they need to be unique and recent.

Which means that as you go through your day, you are subconsciously already “scanning” for things to be grateful for.

Gratitude is no different from anything else: you get better at it with practice. You are essentially training your brain to notice good things.

What About Writing More Than Three Things?

Three is admittedly a mostly arbitrary number. Writing about three good things was popularized by Martin Seligman, who is widely credited with starting the positive psychology movement.

One advantage of writing down three things is that the practice is not too short, but also not too long.

But there’s no hard scientific evidence that says three is the “right” number.

Studies on gratitude writing typically ask participants to write somewhere between three and ten items, so three sits at the easy end of the normal range.

But to be clear: if more things come to mind, write them down! My personal approach is that I try to aim for at least three every day. Sometimes, on particularly good days, my list grows to 5 or more items and that’s lovely.

And let’s also talk about writing down fewer than three items. My belief is that there is value in keeping the practice going. So if all you can get yourself to do on a bad day is write one or two short entries, that’s still a win.

What’s the Best Time of Day for Gratitude Writing?

This one’s really easy: the best time is whenever you’ll actually do it.

The standard advice is “first thing in the morning” or “last thing at night,” usually with a confident-sounding rationale attached. Feel free to ignore it.

The real question is: what fits your schedule and what feels good to you? Maybe it’s in the morning, with your first morning coffee (that’s my favorite time slot). Maybe it’s at night, before you go to bed (studies have shown this is good for your sleep quality). Or maybe it’s during your lunch break. Whatever helps you do the practice consistently.

Because the instruction covers the last 24 hours rather than “today,” the time of day genuinely doesn’t matter. Yesterday evening is still in the window at nine the next morning.

What to Write When You Can’t Think of Anything

What if you had a completely unremarkable day? Or you had a bad day and you really struggle to think of anything to write down?

First of all, this is normal. Especially if you’re new to the practice, you will sometimes just draw a blank.

When you feel stuck, it’s often because you are searching at the wrong “resolution”. What I mean by this is that you’re looking for big things to be grateful for and missing out on potentially countless little things.

Try this: replay your day in your mind and tune into the physicality and emotionality of it. Where were you? What did you touch, see, taste, hear? Things that surface at that resolution:

• The kitchen smelled like rain through the open window.
• The evening sun cast long shadows across the streets.
• The hot water lasted the whole shower.
• A smell briefly triggered nostalgic memories.
• You reread a sentence in a book twice because you liked it.

There’s not much spectacle here, but these are all details you can feel genuine gratitude for. The practice is not about finding remarkable things, it is about noticing ordinary ones, and how rich and important they actually are (think of it like the inverse of social media).

Also, check out this list of 133 things to be grateful for to get some inspiration.

The First Two Weeks of Gratitude Practice

Week one can be both easy and awkward. Easy because the practice feels new and exciting. And awkward because it’s still unfamiliar and you haven’t trained your brain radar yet.

Week two is where many people quit. This is where the practice usually goes stale if you aren’t using the power prompt: all the obvious things to be grateful for have been mined at this point and the list gets repetitive.

But we don’t have to worry about that, because you’re now already equipped with the prompt that solves this problem.

Still, the risk of falling off the habit is real. Life gets in the way. We get distracted.

For me, knowing about the science behind gratitude practice really helps. I know that it’s a practice worth keeping up and I know that the benefits are real and well worth it.

And because it’s been such a life changing practice for me, I created the Grateful App as a way to make it easier, more fun and more engaging.

Start Today, Start Small

You’ve now got a pretty comprehensive overview of how to start gratitude journaling, and more importantly, how to do it right.

But also don’t worry too much about the system. Keep it simple. Get any notebook, or the notes app already on your phone, and write one specific thing that happened in the last 24 hours. Then, if a second and a third come, write those too. Tomorrow, do it again at roughly the same moment.

That is the entire practice. Everything else — the because, the deeper reflection, the variations you’ll want around week three — is built on top of that, and none of it matters until you’ve gotten down the basics.

Grateful is the app we built around exactly this instruction, with no streaks and nothing to keep up with, if you’d rather not use a notebook.